Now Matt, seeing as I get to talk to you, I can ask you about your experiences in theband personally… All of us had played together in different formations of bands, but it was about three years ago now that Peter kind of started writing these folk songs in his bedroom and he got three or four together, then called us all up individually. When Pete started Dry the River, he wanted to found it in more traditional kind of folk influenced songs, like a bit more like Leonard Cohen, and have a bit less shouting in, so yeah, we recorded and they sounded much more restrained and folky, then over the years as we’ve played more and more shows, it’s got a bit louder and more epic and the old influences of each of us has sort of come back through.
E
With Peter being the lyricist, is it your job, Matt, to interpret the emotion of the lyrics into the playing, and how do you do that? Yeah, totally; Peter writes the lyrics completely separately actually. He’ll come to me with the chords, or just humming a melody and we’ll sit and arrange the structure of the song and what we think the backing vocals will do, and so on, then he writes the lyrics completely separately once we’ve put the music to it. I guess I’m just a melancholy guy at the heart of it, so that’s how it ends up sounding that way.
voking the majesty of religious imagery, with a nod towards the soulfulness of Americana, all filtered through five guys who came by this sweet and
soaring sound by way of their own flirtations with an emo and grungey background, Dry the River is godsend. Having released their tragic and emotional debut Shallow Bed recently, this summer is bound to cement their place as your new favourite British band…
How are you doing Matt? Yeah, really, really good; we’re just on our way to Manchester for the show tonight. It’s part of like a two-week tour and we’ve just started it; we’ve just got back from America as well, and we did four and a half weeks there. We had one day off in London, then we we’re back on the road again.
I say day off, but we spent it in the Visa office from like 8 in the morning, so I don’t know if that counts as a day off or not. We don’t really have time to get tired, because we’ve been going solidly for two years now, so I hope we don’t just peter out. We’ll just eat lots of fruit and peanut butter – that’s what I’d do.
Te album’s been out a short while now – have you noticed a shift in momentum since its release? Has there been more interest, or is it the live circuit that builds up your fan base? Just coming back now, and starting to play the UK this week feels a little different ‘cause the crowds all know the songs now and it’s amazing, like the first night in Nottingham, there were two full-on sing-alongs while we were playing, and that’s never happened before. To finally have a record out for people to know the songs is just absolutely brilliant. It covers up our bad singing as well!
Emma Garwood
wombatwombat present Dry the River at the Norwich Arts Centre on May 12th. For tickets go to
www.norwichartscentre.co.uk. Read the full interview at
Outlineonline.co.uk
16 /May 2012/
outlineonline.co.uk
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