The Jungle Giants are in the most exciting stage of the album cycle. They’ve written, recorded and released their third record Quiet Ferocity and are about to take their hard work out on the road for a massive national tour. Better still, they will be showing off a brand new live set-up, one that has seen the Brisbane band simplify things and cut loose some of their touring members, leaving the four founding musicians to take full control of proceedings.
“We’re in the middle of rehearsals at the moment, so it’s pretty intense, and hopefully it’s as intense a polished and finished product as we start to go through the tour,” says the band’s lead guitarist Cesira Aitken. “It’s been a while since we played some shows but it’ll be pretty fun; everyone will have a good dance I’m sure.”
It may be their first extended run of the year, but The Jungle Giants had the privilege of playing shows at Melbourne and Taronga Zoos earlier this year alongside good buddies Ball Park Music. It was an experience that Aitken thoroughly enjoyed, and it helped keep the band’s live chops in check. “That was awesome actually,” says Aitken. “It’s nice playing late afternoon sets where the sun is setting and it’s just beautiful. We also got to go through and do Melbourne Zoo as well, which was the first show, and have a look at some of the animals and stuff.”
Putting together a new show with a vastly expanded discography of music to choose from has its challenges too, and it took some time for The Jungle Giants to establish the best way to consolidate their three albums into a single set. “Obviously now with three albums it’s a little bit harder putting a setlist together because you don’t want to play forever,” Aitken chuckles.
“We’ve chosen songs from the previous record that kind of blend into the new record’s sound. We’re trying to give a pretty seamless transition between songs without anything standing out too much as obscure sounding in comparison to something new. We’ve definitely worked out a set that we think and hope is really cool and works, and that everything blends.”
The forthcoming run will see The Jungle Giants play several all ages and under 18s-only gigs, something the band felt they simply had to do. “We totally remember not being able to go to shows when we were a little bit younger, which wasn’t that long ago,” laughs Aitken. “We’re always totally into doing all age shows, and whenever venues can possibly accommodate we’ll always do that or an under 18s show.”
The process of writing and shaping Quiet Ferocity allowed the band to record with less wild abandon and more methodical efficiency, in that way proving a welcome change from their usual haphazard creative schedules. “Yeah we’ve locked in a great process now,” says Aitken. “It’s been awesome. With this record it was a totally different approach to the previous one. We wouldn’t book large blocks of recording time in advance like we used to.
“As the demos came out of [frontman Sam Hales’] writing room we would just book small blocks of studio time with an engineer and do them as they were ready. It was cool because it put less pressure on everyone, especially Sam, to be there and to have to be there every day. We used to find ourselves in situations where we had just record for five weeks to get things right. Now we get together for four days to do two songs and we know how they go; Sam knows how he wants them to sound.”
A lot of that streamlining came about thanks to a decision made by Hales, and more specifically his move towards writing in a way designed not to over-complicate instrumentation. “When Sam brings us the songs now, the production and the instrumentation is already almost 100 per cent locked down,” says Aitken.
“So when we’re recording it’s just all about refining things – and especially with this record we’ve really condensed a lot of elements of the recording process. With other records we thought we needed ten guitars and all these crazy percussive elements, but this time we decided to just find a few really great sounds and just make them sound the best that they can. So it was a very clean way to be recording these sounds and these songs.”
Quiet Ferocity has already been warmly received on radio and by The Jungle Giants’ fan base, and the record also saw the band hit their highest peak on the ARIA Albums Chart, nabbing the number 11 slot. Aitken believes that they’re really only now hitting their stride as a band, and have locked in a sound that will define their music for years to come.
“I think with the last two records we felt great about them as they came to be released, but with Quiet Ferocity it seems like we’re all in for taking this sound we’ve created as far as it can go, and exploring it more,” Aitken says. “Especially with the recording process now it feels like we have a real method that we’ll be using for a while. Our older music may not have sounded over-complicated in the finished product but as we reflected on it during this album it definitely seemed that way to us.”
Quiet Ferocity is out now.
