The World Can Wait
67 Special
With so much musical product being released every year, it takes something special to stand out. The World Can Wait by the Australian band 67 Special is just such a work. Its combination of assured song-writing, earthy delivery and impassioned studio craft makes it a work to relish and one that has been finding its way unto my stereo with increased regularity. I had the chance to talk to bassist Ben Dexter and get some comments on this new work.
Congratulations on a great rock record, I like how it opens with an instrumental, it reminded me of the old road warriors that had the house band warm up the crowd before they hit stage. Did you always intend to open the album with an instrumental?
“We talked about it for months when we were doing pre-production and we actually played an instrumental opener live for some time so it seemed an obvious choice.”
I like how the entire band is credited with song writing, how do the songs usually come together?
“Usually it’s left to one person to bring in a riff and then we bring it into the rehearsal room and then give it over to the band to work on.”
You’ve succeeded in giving the songs a very organic feel.
“Thanks, we didn’t want a massive production album or anything like that with lots of trickery. We wanted the songs themselves to stand out.”
Throughout the album I get a real time-warp vibe, with its long instrumental passages, traditional opener and reliance on song writing, was this a conscious decision?
“Absolutely, that was a conscious decision, that’s pretty much how we’ve always written anyway. We started out a very much a jam-out band in cafes around Melbourne. That environment lent itself to improvisation and that’s where we grew as musicians. For us to have jam-out sections in our songs in a song writing choice and comes natural to us.”
The songs also sound road tested, have they been part of the live set?
“We’ve been playing about eighty percent of the songs from the album live for about four or five months before the album came out so we’re pretty well versed in playing them. We like to road test our songs.”
The album is very diverse, so I figure the band members’ personal album collections would be very eclectic, was there any album or albums that had an effect on the making of the new work?
“In terms of production no, that was the massive problem, we all came in with these sets of eclectic songs that we wanted to use. One of the concepts behind the album was to find a way to join these songs together in a decent manner, so the track listing was very important to us. So we used the song order and production techniques to give it a cohesive feel.”
The band has the ability to change things up and still have a clearly defined band sound.
“Because we’ve been playing together quite a while now, each individual has their own style and knows how to integrate that into a band sound. We also keep the production level to the point of giving each band member a clearly defined sound.”
Lead vocalist Ash has a number of distinctly different vocal styles throughout the album.
“He’s a pretty dynamic vocalist with everything from a nasal scream to a croony low voice.”
You mean he has his lounge lizard suit packed away?
“Yeah, I think you can hear that on Blood Red Night.”
The band has a down-to-earth feel to its song writing and performing and it stands out against today’s radio fodder, does the band have an agenda in that respect?
“Keeping very true to our writing style is very important. Which way we go with that in the future is going to be interesting as we are still defining our style, I guess and it doesn’t even need to be too defined yet. We are writing the next album as we speak so that style will become more apparent the longer we are around.”
Thanks Ben.
In a sea of plastic, handmade stands out more now than ever and The World Can Wait with its personal nature and hand tooled sound is a welcome contrast to a lot of what’s out there.
Rob Hudson

www.67special.com