Silent Feature Era
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Silent Feature Era

Brisbane, Queensland, Australia | INDIE

Brisbane, Queensland, Australia | INDIE
Band Rock Folk

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"Junior Online"

Upwards of 20 musicians are reported to have played on This Old Leather Heart, the first album from enigmatic locals Silent Feature Era (featuring at least two former members of Speedstar), and even that number doesn’t sound high enough.

The galloping percussion, triumphant mariachi horns, brooding synths and mournful strings of ‘The Horsebreaker’ probably represent the apex of the album’s lush instrumental flourishes, but This Old Leather Heart is packed with them (harmonium and theramin, anyone?), all adding to the LP’s appropriately cinematic sweep.

Thankfully, these songs don’t really need that treatment – core duo Greg Cathcart and Adrian Mauro write solid, unimpeachable tunes with killer lyrics (‘all his friends were just acquaintances and his family had passed away / enough of his identity belonged to a girl I cannot name’, Cathcart spits on the haunting ‘Oliver’, a virtual Morricone theme with words).

These tracks would hold up just as well in a stripped-back acoustic setting, but good on them for dressing them up to the nines.

4/5 - Junior Online


"Courier Mail Album Review 4/5"

This is an exciting debut from a Brisbane band that evolved out of a recording project by Songwriters Greg Cathcart and Adrian Mauro. A different kind of project, it turns out, recording to tape in the (now) old fashioned way, with an attention to sonic detail that makes the collection so distinctive. There are elements of acoustic folk pop but this band always find angles to make their songs leave an imprint. It's not often that a record comes along that has the folk pop thing but also works as a headphone record that can take the listener on an interesting trip. For example, The Only Rose starts with deft finger-picked guitar and harmonica and adds country fiddle, but at the 2:20 mark explodes into a stunning rock outro with seething guitars, pounding drums and a wall of voices. Something For The Quiet Life starts as a sweet country Waltz (musically, If not lyrically) but soon incorporates fairground noises and eerie synths. The Horsebreaker features a string section and brass with a Mariachi flavour contrasting with its bitter edge, as Cathcart sings "I sit attending to my wounded throat and you're off reciting Ginsberg to the wild vultures". They can rock too (see All The Kings Men) and push their songs right to the edge (see the powerful brooding title track). Perhaps the best is left to last with the quiet agonies of Blue Ribbon Man (I'll be your devil when you need love/ I'll be your mortal when you thirst for Blood), but from 1 to 11, it's an adventure of high quality that will surely win them friends both here and overseas.

Noel Mengel 4/5 - The Courier Mail


"Time Off Live Review"

HALFWAY, KNIEVEL, TIM AND SKYE, SILENT FEATURE ERA
THE ZOO: 02.04.11
There’s nothing of Supernova’s fanaticism inside, tonight; The Zoo’s a wasteland. But that stops the fantastic Silent Feature Era not, who kick their set off with All The King’s Men – a dark and brooding wolf-hulk of a track that sounds like the drunk vaudevillian years of Tom Waits meets a proggier, math-rock version of The National. Much like the latter band, SFE have that ineffable intuition for melody and melancholy, too – infusing their tracks with an unpredictability that bleeds mystery and pathos, creating an atmosphere drenched in narrative.
Vocalists Tim and Skye from local indie-pop band We All Want To salve SFE’s scorch next with a relatively meek, and subdued offering of acoustic tracks. Their short set sees the twee duo nonetheless hold their own sans the usual line-up, padding through their warm melodies with Steward’s Jebadiah-like vocals always as the centrepiece, and Skye’s talents as a flautist lending a decidedly folky texture to their normally pop-punky songs.
Knievel, next, though they come with esteem and great history, still can’t draw people away from pretend sword-fights, (and probably most the weather, at this point.) There’s still a count-it-on-one-hand crowd as the sage indie-rockers strike up the fuzzy opening chords of the plaintive Catch My Drift Pt. 1, which smooths and lounges its rich sound around The Zoo’s woefully empty cave. With a sound bolstered by both genders of vocalist, Knievel strike a lackadaisical stride through an assortment of emotions all filtered through their very particular, and low-key aesthetic. New single Mirrored Hall shimmers its cool-apathy through to the jangle-styled glacials of They Listen Out before the warm, flighty reprieve of Something Good Must Come ebbs into the quiet insistence of Thoughts In A Pattern.
Big-band octet Halfway seem poised to pick up the tatters of the evening’s slack, if not double the crowd with their own numbers alone. Their latest album – the Robert Forster-produced An Outpost Of Promise – was a real hit last year, and, playing highlights from that, the band showcase exactly why. They’re a strange, and subdued beast, these guys – they’ve a sound that doesn’t seem overwhelmed by their numbers at all. Their compositions aren’t remotely crowded, nor even as eclectic as one would expect. Instead, they chug through a loose and roots-y indie rock, hinged on a melodic sensibility that recalls the sweetness of a smaller, country-focussed act; their greatest achievement perhaps in their meshing such a seamless whole from their many parts. At times a little like The Format – see Tell Them I Called - and more than ever like The Go-Betweens – Sweetheart Please Don’t Start – they tonight, as always, sound like old and new; wise and fresh.
SAM HOBSON - Time Off


"Time Off Album Review"

Silent Feature Era is the project of Greg Cathcart and Adrian Mauro who made purpose-built studio the ARK in order to craft their ambitious debut album. This Old Broken Heart is proudly Brisbane at its core, drawing on over 20 of the city’s finest instrumentalists and vocalists, though it manages to capture a sound far broader than its geographical bounds. Musically fulfilling the key criteria of Australian folk rock, it transcends this tag with its use of modern flourishes, most appropriately within Supersomeone. Moving from a softly sung introduction embellished with the sweet tinkles of a music box, the opening song pre-empts the complexity and richness of the album at large as it introduces midway the horn section, a choir and clangy guitar, fitting effortlessly with the simple beauty of its lullaby-like introduction.
The Horsebreaker heralds the soundtrack imaginings of the pair with old world trumpets giving way to a gallop-mimicking guitar, amongst licks of western-drenched slide so vivid that dust is almost tasted. Spreading such memorable moments throughout This Old Broken Heart serves to make the album indeed feel like the soundscape of a silent feature, a feel made even stronger with the care taken in the arrangements. Recurring lyrical themes lend a further amount of continuity; Cathcart is a compelling lyricist, brimming with solid yet whimsically told tales captured in full glory amidst comprehensive liner notes.
Recalling at times the driving flow of a good, rowdy rollick from The Gin Club (outside of keyman Dan Mansfield’s contribution) and the guitar deluge of The Drones, Cathcart’s vocal can feel as foreboding as The National’s Matt Berninger. All elements combined, This Old Broken Heart is a thoroughly intelligent and sure-footed debut album.
Tyler McLoughlan 4/5 - Time Off


"Silent Feature Era - Int"

CHAD PARKHILL sits down with GREG CATHCART and ADRIAN MAURO of SILENT FEATURE ERA to discuss the question of influence and how the band works as a live unit.
Silent Feature Era’s album, This Old Leather Heart, is interesting for a multitude of reasons, not least of which is the vast constellation of influences from which it draws. Traditional folk song structures with a particularly Australian bent – think early Paul Kelly – are enveloped in warm analogue tones, twinkling glockenspiels, and mariachi trumpets worthy of an Ennio Morricone score. When I meet with band leaders Greg Cathcart and Adrian Mauro in a café on Brisbane’s south side, it’s a topic that they discuss with gusto.
“There’s two types of influences, I guess,” Mauro says. “There’s sonic influences and then there’s songwriting influences.” Cathcart agrees. “We should probably start with the songwriting,” Cathcart says. “It’s funny that you mentioned Paul Kelly, because towards the end of the writing process of the record, I probably was listening to a bit of Paul Kelly. Not by choice – I mean, I do really like him, but my partner’s really into him, so there’s always a lot of Paul Kelly on. In terms of traditional influences: the Dylans of the world, and any folk artist who can pull a song off with a single acoustic guitar and words.”
“The aesthetic side of it can almost be separated from that,” Mauro says. “We really love a lot of that riff-based, British invasion-style style sixties music, The Beatles and The Stones.” This obsession with classic rock encouraged Cathcart and Mauro to build their own studio (named The Ark because it contains “two of everything”) in order to better capture a classic analogue sound. “The whole idea was to collect a bunch of gear over several years that was old and interesting, something that would give us our own sound as opposed to simply going with those classic bits of gear that every studio has,” Cathcart says.
This doesn’t mean that the band has a vintage gear obsession à la Toe Rag Studios, which is 100% analogue and has no equipment manufactured after 1963. “We’re pretty open-minded, it’s the best of both worlds in terms of media,” Mauro says. “We might track the guts of the band on tape then dump it to Pro Tools and then we can edit from there. Aesthetically, even though we have folk and organic-sounding roots, my main listening interests are Aphex Twin and Autechre, so sonically we’re pretty open-minded.”
Translating all of the disparate elements of Silent Feature Era’s recorded sounds to the live setting is a bit of a challenge, as Cathcart admits: “Generally speaking the approach for what we’ve been doing live is a smidge rockier, it’s got a bit of an edge,” he says. Mauro elaborates: “We’ve replaced mariachi trumpets with electric guitars on The Horsebreaker, which is the second track on the record, and the single.” Brisbane fans who venture out this Friday, however, are in for a treat. “For certain gigs, we’re going to have a brass section,” Cathcart explains. “The record was driven by the two of us, and then we got people in to help out, and ended up with about twenty people, which we can’t fit on stage. But for special gigs we will have the mariachi section, and sometimes we have a cellist and a violinist to play the string parts. - Rave Magazine


"New sounds: The silent treatment"

ONE of the most dynamic bands to emerge in Brisbane in the past few years has been the Black Alles band, which plays behind songwriter Jackie Marshall.

That's them all over her excellent Ladies' Luck album. A couple of members of the band run the Ark studio in Brisbane, where that album was recorded.

That's Greg Cathcart, who played keys for Brisbane band Speedstar for a time, and Adrian Mauro, and together they've been quietly assembling the songs for their own band, Silent Feature Era.

Yes, they are addicted to films, and that other rapidly disappearing survivor from the last century, tape.

All of Silent Feature Era's impressive debut album, This Old Leather Heart, was recorded on that format. If it was good enough for most of the classic recordings made in the rock 'n' roll era, they reasoned, it was good enough for Silent Feature Era.



They like the physical aspects of tape, for much the same reason that Cathcart enjoys writing his lyrics on a typewriter. There is an energy there, a feeling of connection, that can't be replicated by clicking a mouse.

"One of the things we were looking for was spontaneity," Cathcart says.

"Some of the music we had been involved in was a bit more number-crunched and formulaic, driven by outsiders telling people what music should be, what makes hit songs and all that kind of crap.

"We ended up with a bunch of recording gear and we said, 'Let's have fun and do the things we think are right'. We wanted to enjoy doing it and then see if other people enjoyed it too."

Which meant no formulas. If they wanted mariachi horns, or to play a song straight to tape with no overdubs or sweeteners, they just did it.

"We didn't want to do the obvious and make something like music that already exists. We did what we wanted and no one got in our way."

The results are striking, a dark and feverish kind of folk-pop seasoned with creaking old synthesisers, backwards tapes, brass or whatever else they could get their hands on.

In other hands The Only Rose might have been given a standard folk-rock treatment. It starts that way, with nimble finger-picked guitar and harmonica, but somewhere after the two-minute mark it explodes into intense rock 'n' roll colour and a spooky choir of voices.

Which is exactly the point, where a commercial record producer might have cautioned them not to scare the horses. The album is full of sonic surprises -- the pounding drum breakdown on Oliver or the sublime brass arrangement on the title tune.

Something for the Quiet Life, one of the first songs the band recorded for the album, is an otherwise gentle country waltz until the arrival of For the Benefit of Mr Kite-style fairground and synth noises.

More than 20 musicians were involved in the album, although Cathcart and Mauro play most of the instruments on some tracks. The recording project has since evolved into a five-piece band for live work.

"We knew we were on the right track when we sent it off to Oscar Gaona for mastering at the 301 Studios in Sydney," Mauro says. "He sits there mastering stuff all day and his comment was that he found our music interesting to hear. We knew we must have been doing something right."
- The Courier Mail


"Album Of The Week"

Sepia-toned Australiana with a darkly experimental twist
Local duo Greg Cathcart and Adrian Mauro have made a form of music that immediately brings forth mental images of corrugated iron roofs and old cinemas, songs strongly influenced by Australian folk traditions but blended with a textured technological approach. The art-rock of acts like Elbow and Sweet Billy Pilgrim occasionally comes to mind – and the combination works so well, it’s amazing no one has thought of it before. “Where all the rose gardens had died and the marching band begins to slow, he would sit reciting all the words to Sweet Joan”, they sing in the gothically brooding title track, while there’s a dusty rockabilly stomp to chilling murder ballad Oliver. Luckily, the duo’s approach to Australian-themed songsmanship surpasses the hoary clichés, while still being perfect music to pour dirt out of your work boots to. That they blend it with squiggly synth in Something For The Quiet Life and noirish garage rock in All The Kings Men makes the album all the more rich and unpredictable. Don’t get me wrong, in many ways Silent Feature Era remain traditional balladeers, but their inclusion of crunching electric guitar, psychedelic-flavoured electronics and ambient noise (seemingly created by a rusty, hand-operated crank) makes the music all the more effective.
**** 4/5
MATT THROWER - Rave Magazine


Discography

Album - This Old Leather Heart - Silent Feature Era
March 2011

Photos

Bio

In a quiet, quiet street, there was a quiet, quiet house. And in that quiet, quiet house there was a quiet, quiet den. And in that quiet, quiet den lived the Silent Feature Era.

A sepia-hued behemoth built of bones and Bakelite-era radio phonic apparatus, the Silent Feature Era recorded songs in the den. For an age it bunkered down and made sound of all that it imagined of the great, vivid world. Bush Noir odes to promise and deceit amid gums and grey mares, vaudevillian pugilists swinging amid a boozy kaleidoscope of mariachi horns, sine wave synthesizers and crooked, cooked guitars the shrill, righteous damnation of a fiddle and the half-arsed redemption of an asthmatic harmonium, these were singularly unique reckonings of song.

Now, in a fashion wholly consistent with their antiquated sensibility, the Silent Feature Era offer their debut recording in album format – an immovable, unshuffleable, preselected collection of songs.

A folky rock version of VAST mixed with a bit of The Bad Seeds maybe, what began as a couple of friends writing songs and playing them to each other in the dark, has slowly evolved into an extremely bold and confident debut and a growing reputation as a tight live ensemble.

A Bakelite bastard born to a restless iWorld, This Old Leather Heart is available through Shock Records as a physical (yes they still exist) and digital release in March 2011.