COG
SPACE TRAVELLERS
by Rob Lyon

Cog has made a grand return with their brand new album Sharing Space, which will no doubt redefine the rock‘n’roll landscape in Australia. Although it has pushes their sound forward and acts as an awesome follow-up to their 2005 debut The New Normal, the band’s second album wasn’t without its fair share of dramas. Drummer Lucius Borich speaks to Rip It Up during the final preparations for Cog’s upcoming national tour about the acclaim Sharing Space has already received.
“We’re definitely getting a lot of good praise from people,” Lucius opens. “It definitely makes you feel happy because we feel happy with the results ourselves. When you get your peers and other bands that you tour with, friends, family, fans and the like, saying that it’s a real plus.”
Recorded in Weed, California, with The New Normal producer Sylvia Massy, the band experienced numerous challenges during the creation of Sharing Space.
“On a musical level I would say that our music is always challenging because it is hard getting comfortable playing the songs, especially in a live environment. When we write the songs we usually put them away and not look at them for a while until we start touring. So you need to get your chops back up and remember what you played. A lot of rehearsing is involved and everyone has their own little things they have to do like change pedals, sing and play guitar whereas I play drums, do samplers and sing. Luke [Gower, bassist] has much the same thing and there are a lot of bases to cover – overall it’s always challenging.”
Did you ever anticipate that the timeframe for making the album would blow out by as much as it did?
“We thought five months max. There are a lot of factors as to why it took such a long time. At the end of the day we couldn’t believe it took 10 months. It wasn’t like we were relaxing everyday and we were working our guts out six days a week doing 12 hour days sometimes. We needed to make sure we completed everything that needed to be done.”
The bio sent out to media with this album says that the band felt compromised – is that a fair take on the situation?
“Well, you have to be tough on yourself. If you’ve felt that you’ve produced good musical statements in the past and that you want to equal, if not better, them our goals need to be set pretty high. The songs need to be A1. It definitely can add that pressure and trying to find your own musical statement is quite hard as well because a lot of things have been done, a lot of music has been played, a lot of notes have been played and a lot of beats have been played. It is very hard to carve that ground that is your own and at least have something that is completely original that comes from your heart and is a true expression of yourself as a musician. That’s why we want to get it right before anyone else hears it.”
Did the recording process go without a hitch?
“We had a lot of challenges,” Lucius admits. “If it wasn’t dealing with equipment that wasn’t working right and taking up a lot of time trying to fix it there were personal issues going on and we had record label issues going on. We had a deal that ended up folding, which would have seen us releasing our record in America on Sylvia Massy’s label. The pin was pulled on that one because her infrastructure wasn’t up to scratch and the way she wanted to work it. Everyday you could say there was something hindering the process whether it was big or small, there was always something. It was quite strange with the hurdles we had to jump but having said that there was a lot of fun and joyous times making this album, which definitely can’t be swept aside. It is unfortunate there is a perception that this album was a real drag to make, but we need to tell people that we had some unbelievable fun times.”
Do you think the American experience, especially in a place like Weed, added some flavour to final result?
“It definitely added flavour in terms of the environment we were in. We were secluded up in the mountains away from anyone and away from friends and family for 10 months. We were confined to writing songs everyday and recording in the studio. There were only 2000 people in this town and I have to say that isolation can rub off on you in a way that you really focus on what you’re doing. For my money that really gave us good results and because we recorded the last album there we knew what we were getting in to and it wasn’t too much of a freak out. We slotted right in because we knew what we were getting in to.”
How do you compare the two albums?
“I think we’ve definitely added a different flavour. On this album we have experimented a lot more with instruments we’ve never had at our disposal before. We went for a different slant dynamically as well making sure the songs had a contrast going from quite heavy to quite ambient, textural or whatever you want to call it. The dynamics was the most important part and lyrically we wanted to make sure we weren’t so abstract or metaphorical. We wanted lyrical statements that people could really grasp on to and make a stand. There’s no point making lyrics that were hard to understand or decipher. At the end of the day we wanted to album to be different and not another version of The New Normal.”
Cog play the Governor Hindmarsh with Sleep Parade on Thu Jun 12 (all-ages) and Fri Jun 13 (over 18s). Sharing Space is out now through Dfrnt/MGM.

www.cog.com.au