On paper, you’d have to wonder how Trial Kennedy are even still a band.
Two years ago, the Melbourne rock outfit were perched at the edge of something big. After two killer EPs (2004’s Present for a Day and 2005’s Picture Frame), their Nick DiDia-produced debut album, New Manic Art, was garnering the sort of critical acclaim every band aspires to. Songs such as Neighbours and Colour Day Tours became instant Triple J anthems. The band toured hard, earning a burgeoning Australian fan base to go with their stellar live rep, and coveted support spots with the likes of Fall Out Boy and Birds Of Tokyo. Their star was rising.
And then… well, then a whole lot of bad mojo went down.
Their original bass player, Aaron Malcolmson, left. Business arrangements were tested. Resulting in band and management parting ways. Frontman Tim Morrison had a heart operation. Then he fell off a ladder, cracked his skull open and wound up with 30 staples in his head. Meanwhile, the daily struggle of balancing day jobs and personal relationships with artistic careers ground onwards. Girlfriends became casualties to the hard slog of the road. And finally the band parted ways with their label. You name it, the band went through it.
A string of luck like that would have spelt death for lesser bands. But not Trial Kennedy. Stoic as ever, they channelled everything into the music and prepared for that all-important second album. Songs written, honed and arranged, they hired out Sing Sing and tracked ten songs in nine days for what would become the new album.
When it came to the mixing, the band sought the help of friend and engineer extraordinaire Haydn Buxton – brother of their new bassist, Richie.
“Haydn did an amazing job,” says Morrison, “After all the shit we’ve been through, in the end, we came out with a rocking record!”
Rocking is putting it mildly. Just like its predecessor, Living Undesigned wields as much grunt and guts as it does gravitas. A bare-boned rock record, but one with soul and heart. And also a significant step up for the band.
Powerhouse opener Sally, Morrison’s paean to the pitfalls of revisiting a past love affair, kicks proceedings off with a sinuous, driving riff and a jagged patter of drums before exploding into a veritable wall of noise. “It’s a complete fiction, a story of saying to an old flame, ‘Do you seriously want to go through this again?’”
Stacey Gray’s incendiary guitar work defines the stadium-sized first single Strange Behaviour, a song that tackles the bizarre business dealings and legal wrangles the band have inadvertently found themselves in. But the beautifully lush title track, Living Undesigned, sees a musical shift for the band, and comes with its own ambiguities and multiplicity of meaning. Taken on its own, the phrase suggests a free-thinking, unencumbered approach to life and creativity, which any artist can relate to. But literally, “Living Undesigned refers to the chemical oxytocin that’s produced organically in the human brain when listening to music,” explains Morrison. “So we figured that’s a damn good name for a song and an album, right there.”
Propelled by Shaun Gionis’ pumping drums, Exology, with its skittering, fuzzed-up riffs, and hiccups, gallops and tricky guitar patterns, is the album’s barnstormer and cements Gray as one of the most underrated Australian guitarists going around. “It’s about Stacey’s break-up with his long-time girlfriend,” explains Morrison. “But musically, it defines the record for me. It’s got everything about the new Trial Kennedy – grit and darkness, but it’s also up-tempo with an almost dancefloor vibe. It’s exciting.”
Best of Tomorrow is all ballsy, bendy riffs and gutsy vocals, while the swaying, acoustic-driven groove of My Own is melancholic but sonically rich, shaded by sanguine piano and white-noise sounds capes. Then, tucked up the back of the album as a hidden gem, sits the thrumming Cold War, boasting the kind of chorus that comes like a rock thrown through a stained glass window, with sweeping, light-filled melody and emotive power – a song that showcases Trial Kennedy’s uncanny talent in shifting from dark to light, despair to joy, anger to jubilance, all within one song and without ever jarring.
But perhaps one of the album’s most powerful and moving moments is Arrest Room, a broken-hearted ballad for the ages. “It was an old song I wrote acoustically years ago, but it made the record for me,” says Morrison. “It basically tells the true story of a man sent to prison for 20 years for a crime he didn’t commit.” With a slow acoustic shuffle, a string section and bruised harmonies, Arrest Room has the sort of spine tingling refrain that stays with you long after the last sad notes have died away.
Overall, every song on Living Undesigned explores a variety of hues, colours and dynamics, but stays loyal to the simple beauty of pop structure. For all their musical chops, as songwriters, Trial Kennedy have that rare economy of craft, a skilled grasp of dynamic and light ’n’ shade, and never get bogged down in self-indulgence.
Morrison’s stratospheric range, gritty power, uncanny phrasing, and melodic sensibility remains the calling card of Trial Kennedy – the way he moves seamlessly from full-tilt rock scream to delicate falsetto and every velocity in between is simply jaw-dropping. And just as Gray’s ever-intuitive and signature guitar work crafts a veritable sound scape of texture and colour, so too does new recruit Richie Buxton’s inspired bass work give the band a whole new dimension of musical muscle. “Richie’s brought with him a new direction – a new maturity,” enthuses Morrison. “It still sounds like us, but we’ve moved away from a rock-pop vibe into something darker, dirtier, with more edge. Richie actually writes jingles for TV commercials, so he’s very much a songwriter with a lot of great creative ideas. Plus, he’s a musical genius. From both a technical and song writing perspective, he’s an amazing bass player.”
The band is also revelling in their newfound liberation in being independent again. “This time around, every decision – from the single, the artwork, the arrangements – has been completely ours,” says Morrison.
They say behind every great album there’s an equally compelling story. And in the case of Trial Kennedy, they’ve traversed a world of shit to come out clutching a diamond. Living Undesigned is not just the album Trial Kennedy fans have been waiting for – it’s the album that will blow anyone else away who missed them first time around. And this time, the band are doing things their way. The hard way. The real way.
Living undesigned, indeed.
NICK SNELLING
