An overview of the new album “Cruel Guards” by Jae Laffer
We started work on the album began over a year ago. After finishing touring our last album, we moved from our hometown of Perth to Melbourne and set up a studio in a house in Collingwood; the idea was to live in a place where we knew few people and just write and record.
We demoed the entire album in Melbourne before heading to BJB Studios in Sydney where we started working on the record with Scott Horsecroft.
‘Cruel Guards’ was produced by The Panics and Scott with additional recordings in New York and Melbourne.
We wanted the songs on this album to be simpler and more direct, and generally more up-beat than our previous records.
Lyrically, I thought it should be simple in its message and not always focused on my own personal experiences, but take on other perspectives and characters with a few common threads throughout the album.
I tried to keep the language and descriptions distinctly Australian; songs tracks like Sundowner , Something in the Garden , and Get Us Home are all set in Australian landscapes and backstreets , mostly drawn from growing up in the outskirts of Perth and road trips when I was younger. Scenes I remember vividly that have always stayed with me. They sum up my feelings of the country. The unused bridge, weatherboard shacks of the orchards, a disused train’s cabin door swinging, fly wire, the distance that plays tricks on the eyes ………………
I wanted to make stories without necessarily focusing on a plot but more on capturing in detail and the atmosphere of a moment or place, visually, or from unique pieces of dialogue.
‘Ruins’ is good example of what we were aiming at with this record. Direct and simple and big on the motown style chords and strings. A song about fear of being left behind, about the familiar not feeling right anymore, but at the same time the song sounds like a giant release. I’m a big ‘blood on the tracks’ fan. That was in my head a bit at the time , I love songs that can sound like heartbreak and a celebration in the same room together.
‘Feeling is Gone’ is along similar lines, a love song given the motown trumpet treatment, again a bittersweet celebration.
‘Cruel Guards’, the title track, is the albums centrepiece. It seems to stand alone in its message and intensity and is probably a good indication of the headspace of the darker lyrics on the album. It’s a song about mixed feelings, through the eyes of anti-depressants and their effect on the mind, and the imagery and paranoias that they bring out in day to day situations.
‘Don’t Fight It’ is something new for the Panics. The song features a hip hop loop and a church organ with a rambling vocal straight out of the notebook. It’s a good example of the more spontaneous way of writing we’ve developed lately, which is more collaborative than ever before.
We mixed the record with Victor Van Vugt in New York. Victor has previously worked with Nick Cave and Beth Orton. Mixing the record in New York City provided great inspiration; on hearing the songs played back so far from home I couldn’t help but wanting to sing a whole bunch of them again.
I sang about five songs again simply because I was excited to be spending my time in Greenwich Village and it was a real buzz to walk around Manhattan and straight into the vocal booth each day and see what was happening. After a month in Sydney tracking and knowing the songs inside out, I’d had enough time to get some perspective on the album and the way it should feel and the heat wave in New York at the time was the perfect tonic for tired ears.
I’ve been lucky enough to sing the songs on our last couple of records at a distance from the subjects of the songs, I’m not sure why but it always seems to offer a clearer perspective of the songs and that in turn brings out the most honest character in my voice, and that’s always top of the list. Getting the right feel and atmosphere is important, if we’re all smiling at the end of a take, then it’s on the record.
| 
