Brisbane four-piece The Jungle Giants have spent a decent chunk of the last year on the road, touring off the back of their second studio albumSpeakerzoid.
They’ve played dates in Australia and overseas, and will wrap it all up this week at Splendour In The Grass – their last show of 2016.
Despite the long haul, the band is far from relieved that the tour is over. Quite the inverse, actually, suggests chief songwriter and lead singer Sam Hales – he feels the indie rockers have really just started to gain momentum. “We just finished the Perth leg of the tour, which was the end show, and the guys were saying that we feel like we’re just warmed up now,” Hales chuckles.
“It’s been such a good year, and last year was really good as well with our touring. It’s good timing for Splendour because we’re hitting our stride, and we’ve been playing a lot of shows, so we’re looking pretty good on the live thing at the moment.”
For anyone who’s seen The Jungle Giants since they released Speakerzoid, don’t be dissuaded from catching the guys at Splendour. “It’s going to be all the songs, but we’ve actually got one thing up our sleeve; it looks pretty cool,” Hales reveals, as he momentarily pretends he’s going to remain tight-lipped on what the secret is.
“There’s this dance warehouse club, this underground thing that’s been happening in Brisbane, and a friend of mine is running it. I went recently and they have this insane lighting guy there, and he uses four projectors at once to project insane moving cube images onto these giant boxes. He puts the boxes everywhere around, and it adds this crazy depth to the stage. Each box has something different going on. I went up to the guy and said, ‘Hey man, I love what you do,’ and we talked for a while, and he’s going to be doing Splendour for us, which is cool. So we have this extra element going on now.”
Putting together the live show for their current tour forced The Jungle Giants to address the fact their catalogue is made up of two albums with quite distinct sounds. For Hales and co., going back and using songs from 2013’s Learn To Exist and 2015’s Speakerzoid to create a coherent live set was a challenge, but it came with its own rewards.
“After the [second] record it was really hard,” Hales says. “We had to get back into rehearsals and re-learn everything. It’s funny, because they’re two very different records, and we started to put sets together and it was a bit of, ‘We can’t put this song next to this song because it’s a completely different vibe.’
“But as we started touring, we realised that it’s more of an energy thing when you’re playing live. While we were doing the record, we were doing all these crazy on-the-spot recordings, and so we took them to the library and tried to work out how we were going to play those extra little bits. So we ended up getting a fifth touring member in for these recent gigs and it’s been going really good. It’s been a new challenge for us, trying to fit in more immersive arrangements, but at the moment we’re just loving it – it’s added an extra depth to the sound and to the live thing. People can get way more into it because there’s more going on at different points in the set, giving it more ebb and flow.”
After successfully releasing their second album last year, some members of the band took time out to focus on their own personal projects. Notably, drummer Keelan Bijker went way off the grid and opened up a café called Two Donkeys in the Brisbane suburb of Spring Hill. It’s a venture that’s taken off as 2016 has gone on, and Hales is one of the many supporters of Bijker’s business.
“Yeah, I’ve been a couple of times. I wouldn’t have picked Keelan to do that, but at the same time it makes sense because he’s really into design and he loves his coffee. He just put together this really epic café, and he got together with this guy called White Stag from a band called Moses Gunn Collective, who did all this cool décor, built all these tables and built a bar out of this rustic old wood. It’s this cool, hip café. It’s awesome, and he’s killing it.”
It’s almost a shock to hear The Jungle Giants have only been on the scene since 2011. They played Splendour In The Grass for the first time in 2013, but this time around will be a far cry from that chill, early afternoon set three years ago.
“I feel like it’s going to be a totally new experience. Last time we played, we played early afternoon – we played at three or something – and now we have a night-time slot,” says Hales.
“It’s like levelling up; it’s a whole different thing. We’ll be able to use lights, which add a whole extra thing to the production. [The] last day feels good after sunset. It’s going to be absolutely nuts, and we’ve always wanted this. I know it seems like a small thing to reach for, playing night-time at Splendour – it’s just a thing that we’ve always wanted to do, and we’re going to do it guns blazing.”
The Jungle Giants play at Splendour In The Grass 2016, North Byron Parklands running Friday July 22 – Sunday July 24; andSpeakerzoid isout now through Amplifire.
