While a macabre phenomenon by today’s standards, the introduction of photography in the 1850s brought with it a trend by Victorian families to have pictures taken of their deceased loved ones dressed in their Sunday best. Dead children were photographed with their pets, stately gents were propped up in their favourite chairs and portraits were shot with families flanking lifeless relations. Promoting their second album The Horse, The Rat And The Swan, Western Australian act Snowman appear to have inadvertently revived the spooky genre for a photo shoot.
“It wasn’t meant to, but somebody mentioned that while we were taking those photos,” Snowman guitarist and vocalist Joe McKee begins. “We didn’t mind, but it was more to do with the fact that we’re asleep and those blurs over the top are our imagination dreaming and coming out the top.”
Straddling both the deranged and sublime, Joe admits that the manic sounds of Snowman are driven by their subconscious.
“Absolutely. Dreams are the most primal creative thing that every one has. During the making of this record I’d have recurring dreams about the Apocalypse. The end of the world would happen in a few different ways and I got quite used to it. If I was tuning into the media too much it would be caused by tsunamis, then for a period I was having dreams about Perth being destroyed by nuclear weapons. That’s not natural, is it? It’s inevitable that some of these ideas are going to slip out in your dreams.”
Although their live show traverses a dark and erratic path that separates Snowman from most Aussie indie scenesters in the business, Snowman’s homelife is comparatively normal. Sharing a house with bassist Olga Hermanniusson, multi-instrumentalist Andy Citawarman and drummer Ross Di Blasio, Joe states that their happy family is removed from the live mindset.
“If we were like that every day we’d be dead. How the fuck would we survive? It’s not a realistic mindset to be in constantly and it’s part of a mind crevasse you explore for the purpose of creating art. It’s almost like exorcising that dark part of your mind and getting rid of those demons rather than holding on to them.”
During the creation of The Horse, The Rat And The Swan, Joe began to question his own mental health.
“For a while there these fears and paranoias were consuming me and I felt that the Apocalypse was inevitable. I think I’m healthier in the head now and at the end of that period I was putting a lot of pressures on myself and that’s how the album was born. You’ve got to sacrifice to make good art and I think that was important to let myself go down that path, but now I feel a bit healthier. I’ll just have to find another path to throw myself down.”
It wasn’t just Joe who experienced health troubles during the creation of The Horse, The Rat And The Swan. Ross smashed his shoulder after falling from a motorbike.
“He’s half man half machine now,” Joe chuckles. “He’s got a big metal plate in his arm. It’s in his shoulder and I think he gets it out before we go to England, but he’s recovered okay. He was riding a motorcycle while really drunk, blacked out and hit an island in the middle of the road.
“They took his breath test and it was on the hospital forms, but no [police charges] sort of amounted from it. I don’t know if it takes a while to process that sort of thing or if he got off Scot-free. Either that or the police thought he’d been punished enough because he was pretty fucked up.”
With portions of The Horse, The Rat And The Swan evoking a film returning to pivotal locations later in the plot, Joe suggests that movies are a strong influence on the band.
“Fuck, I watch a lot of movies and I really do like film. I was thinking about this recently and I suppose the album has a beginning, a middle and an end like the trajectory a film follows. It’s not just pop song, pop song, pop song – it flows in some way. We want it to feel like it’s a journey and it’s not just a fucking collection of songs.
“It’s almost a synesthesia thing, where you get colours or textures from songs and if they didn’t fit together it wouldn’t work as an album. Music has textures and colours and flavours and smells, to a degree. They all have colours and it’s usually during the writing process when the romance is still strong that you can really sense those things. I’ve got colours and textures which I can’t put into words, which is why I put them into music.”
Following their impending Australian tour, Snowman are packing their bags and indefinitely heading to London.
“We’ve got a one way ticket and we’re moving over there. We don’t want to bore Australia too much – we need to move on, get out of our comfort zone and challenge ourselves. At times we feel bullet proof about the move and then other times we’re teetering on the precipice, so we’ll see what happens – it could be the breaking point! We’ll see.
“We’ve got to work out whether we are going to play old stuff on this tour or just play this album and challenge people even more – we don’t want them expecting anything or to assume anything about what we do live. Playing live is a strange thing and you do forget immediately once you get offstage what happened on stage. It’s like you’re possessed or it’s an out of body experience.
“It’s a strange thing – that’s why music is such a beautiful temptress.”
Snowman play Jive on Wed Jul 9 with Baseball. The Horse, The Rat And The Swan is out now through Dot Dash.