Frenzal Rhomb. Australian punk rock.

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Dal talks about his early days in punk rock, his first band Local Resident Failure and how meeting a punk rock legend didn't go exactly as he'd imagined it would.

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168: Jay Whalley of Frenzal Rhomb talks to us about the Australian TV Show RAGE, Building An Audience And The Intricacies Of A Band Message, Living By Example Compared To Blatant Activism, On The Road To Fat Wreck Chords And The Sarcastically Awesome Decision To Sign To Sony Records, Playing At The Edge Of Your Ability, Recording At The Blasting Room, The Complexity of Community plus much rhombally rumbling with frenzally rambling more.

Some quotes from the podcast:

Why they use E flat tuning

I think you do tune. Like we always play in like E flat, I guess, but then you're one of those guys. Yeah. Cowards. Cowardly singers. Yeah. I think I lost my voice in, um, some show in like 1998. And to get through the show, we tuned down and we never tuned back up.

Songs spreadsheet

Well, the thing about this band is that we, we had like, so we had 60, 60 demos for this album. And so there's like, we'll sort of just write any, anything, like any song to within each of us life and give it its best chance ever, even if, you know, when you're writing, you're like, no, I don't know about this. Why am I even singing this? I don't care about it, you know, whatever. And then it's still just give it the best, give it its best chance. You know, so you do all the harmonies, record all the drum parts, guitars, make sure, you know, everything's like exactly how it should be in that song, and then put it in the bin. So when we come to choosing songs for the record, we basically have this spreadsheet where everyone in the band and our manager gets like an equal vote, and you better try and pick your best like 20 songs or whatever. And if that's not enough music to make up half an hour's worth of music or whatever, then everyone gets a wild card. And so people start lobbying, you know, like, I'll vote for your bullshit dumb song. If you like pick this one, because I'm a genius or whatever. And so that's, and that's the record. So everyone's sort of generally not completely unhappy when it comes like all democracies, you know, everyone's pretty sort of slightly invested in it. And everyone's had their say and stuff. And it means that really that any kind of thematic idea just goes completely out the window. And so whatever lyrics are on there is sort of just, you know, because the song could be great, aside from the lyrics, and the lyrics are just decent enough that the song still sounds great. And then there might be other songs where the lyrics were fantastic, but the song was a fucking dump. And so those lyrics will never be heard. So it's sort of a slightly strange way of going about it. But so I don't really, I don't, I guess what I'm saying is I don't really kind of labor over whether what I'm saying is important enough because I can't make it interesting melodically or something like that.

Pigworm story

So basically I had this seizure out of the blue, never happened before, woke up in hospital at RPA in Sydney where they basically said, yeah, you've got this lesion on your brain. It's a tumor of some sort, like a guy presenting your age with nothing else really wrong with him. It's always a melanoma, white guy in Australia. It's always a melanoma. We just haven't found it yet, but it's probably that. And it was what we think it is, aggressive five months to live, perhaps. Wow. Yeah. And so three weeks before they could, they said, we won't know what it is, whether it's benign or malignant until we take it out and they took it out and yeah, woke up and they're like, it's not a tumor. It's like some weird infection. And I'm like, what the fuck? And like, yeah, they're like, yeah, it's some, it's a neurocystic erosus, I think is the name, which is like a parasite that lives in pig flesh. And it's like pretty common in a lot of areas around the world, a lot of places that we'd been to. But you know, having the fact that there's a pig worm in your brain as the good news is a fucking weird day.

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Listen to ABS Take 5 Podcast

There are some quotes from it

The Cup of Pestilence.

But what does that word pestilence actually mean?

I always say it was from a song that never made the album, but the actual idea of The Cup of Pestilence kind of goes back a little further, doesn't it? It does. It was an awful night. At year 2000, New Year's Eve, I think we played Falls Festival and our manager, and I think maybe our drummer was there. Various people. Old guitarist was there. And at some point in the evening, there was basically all the leftover alcohol in the building was put into one ornate vessel that was then named The Cup of Pestilence and passed around with predictable results.

Anyway, and I think at one point it might have gone off a balcony and nearly killed someone. Anyway, that's another story we're going to get into that. At some point when it came to naming the record, I wanted to call the record Escape from the Vegetable Cult, which is what I've been trying to do in my vegetable co-op in the inner west of Sydney. However, I was voted down and The Cup of Pestilence...

I Think My Neighbour Is Planning To Kill Me

That was a song that was like two albums old and Jason used to play it acoustically. We played acoustically together but could never make it work on the album. And then I had this idea of like, when we play it acoustically, it kind of goes in all these different tempos and changes and stuff. So I kind of combined that and added it to the fast version of the song. And it's got like, there's like three or four key changes and tempo changes. Like that is, in Frenzal Rhomb standards, that is an epic prog-rock song that goes for two and a half minutes.

Dog Tranquilizer

You know, on this record, we've got something like Dog Tranquiliser, for example. One of my neighbours gets all his valium from his vet. He's got a pretty big dog, so it's all about the dose sort of ratio.

Laneway Dave

Laneway Dave is a real person. Beautiful man.

Horse Meat

It is about a tour manager. A man of extremes who went from being very vegan, and when he broke edge, we were in Japan and he decided to eat raw horse meat with a raw quail egg cracked on top.

How To Make A Gravox?

I'll just say that this is one of those songs where the title comes and I would even say the t-shirt design comes and is locked away before the actual song is written. And we do a few of those where sometimes it doesn't quite make it to the song stage, but this one thankfully did make it to the song stage.

And you can hear at the start of Gravox, Jason trying to work out the riffs.

Writing concept

Once you come up with the concept, then hopefully it's easy enough to make it into a song. But as we were saying before, we wrote 60 demos and a lot of them were good lyric ideas with unrealised songs or vice versa. Yeah. There's nothing harder than trying to cram a half-decent lyric idea into sort of an existing rhythm. We do it occasionally, but generally it's like we write... So the songs on the album that I've written are pretty much just I wrote them and made Jason sing them. And for the ones that he wrote, he pretty much wrote all of the bits, even like the guitar solo generally, he just said, play with this, but play it better.

Deathbed Darren

But for, like, there's this beautiful song, Death Bed Darren. And it's a guy that we weren't really friends with and he kind of was not like, he wasn't in the community but then he got really sick and Jason became one of the sort of best friends with him. In fact, maybe like he's one of his only friends towards the end of his life. Yeah.

And it's a pretty beautiful song. And I was like at the time going, really? Okay. Oh, wow. And I was like, oh, turns out Jason's quite nice.

Drum covers page was added.

Guitar lessons page was updated with the entire The Cup Of Pestilence album from the Lindsay's facebook stream.

Videos page was updated with "Billy Bob's Frenzal Rhomb interview with Lindsay McDougall".

Are you ready to rock out to some new punk rock tunes? Look no further than Frenzal Rhomb's latest album, The Cup Of Pestilence!

This Australian punk rock band is back and better than ever with their tenth studio album, set to release on April 7th. With catchy riffs, fast-paced drums, and raw, energetic vocals, The Cup Of Pestilence is sure to get your blood pumping and your head banging.

Featuring 19 new tracks, Frenzal Rhomb delivers a punk rock sound that's both classic and fresh.

Whether you're a die-hard fan or a newcomer to the punk rock scene, The Cup Of Pestilence is an album you won't want to miss. So mark your calendars and get ready to rock out with Frenzal Rhomb!

Pre-order here

Here if you're not in Australia

Videos page was updated with 720p music videos. Disappointment, Mum Changed The Locks, I Miss My Lung, Go Frenzal Go!, Never Had So Much Fun, Coming Home, Bucket Bong, Ballchef.
Also check the limited edition bonus VHS tape that came with "A Man's Not a Camel" in 1999.

Band page was updated

The Frenzal Rhomb J Files

Dive into their career on The Frenzal Rhomb J Files.