The Mess Hall have kindly chosen ‘Keep Walking’ as the lead single from their new record, Devil’s Elbow. It’s a glorious slice of ragged, dirty blues driven along by a nagging, circular riff beefed up on drums that sound like they were recorded in an aircraft hangar. The vocal refrain (_there are ways/ to keep WALKIN’!_) has a great, Devoesque inflection that works just right. But even better, is that it has the ingredient that makes everything extra awesome just by its mere presence: MORE COWBELL.
‘Keep Walking’ also has a brilliant video. Synchronised break dancers, a spooky kid, a muscle guy skipping rope, a dog. It’s all there and all taking place inside an incredibly opulent 1960s mansion in Rose Bay. It was shot by Jed Kurzel’s brother, who had scouted the location for another project before deciding to shoot the Mess Hall clip there. “Apparently, there was some rumour that Frank Sinatra used to stay there when he came out here,“ frontman Jed explains, much to the great and immediate impression of Brag, as we then imagine every type of hell that must have been raised there. “But it was a deceased estate, and now some people have bought it who are going to gut it.” Oh, dang!
The ghosts of wild men past aside, there is a lot of hell raised on the new Mess Hall record. Or rather perhaps, there had been, and what’s on there is the aftermath. “The songs are in kind of limbo land. There were a lot of things going on at the time. I was living in Kings Cross for that time (writing the album), when we’d just got back from the States. A lot of stuff had happened, a lot of death in my family. So a lot had happened, and I was kind of preoccupied with that.”
The Mess Hall spent a considerable chunk of time touring overseas last year. They were on bills in the UK and on the US leg supported Wolfmother, sometimes going back to the kind of smaller venues like those they tore up here in Australia in the early days, when they’d blow out somewhere like the Hopetoun with their ungodly noise produced by just the two of them – singer/guitarist Jed and his partner in drums, Cec Condon.
The band decided to stay on a few months in New York, living on the Lower East Side and getting immersed in the lifestyle there, exploring dive bars and soaking up the influences which found their way onto Devil’s Elbow. “We had to put down everything we listened to, and not just that one genre (of the blues rock style which informs the Mess Hall sound). And also we were listening to folk songs that take place in another kind of landscape,” Jed says of the listening habits he and Cec were drawn to, travelling and touring and working out where to take their next direction on Devil’s Elbow.
And what exactly is the Devil’s Elbow? A cursory Google search turns up a bunch of insane diamond ski runs in Colorado. “Oh right! Well, It’s a place in the Adelaide Hills,” says Jed. “There was a corner in the road called the Devil’s Elbow and cars were always going off of it. It remember it from childhood, you knew when you were coming up to it. It always felt to me like you were just on the precipice of here or there.”
Here nor there. That must sum up nicely the strangeness of coming home from a big tour? Cec says, “It is good coming home, but you’re definitely home and in that limbo.” So the time came to put all that restless energy in creating something, rather than just hitting bars every night and avoiding real life. But real life has a way of rudely intruding.
“That whole period was just odd, after that (coming home). My dad had passed away while I away, overseas,” Jed reveals matter of factly. “And when I got back it was just that arse fell out of everything for a while. And living in this weird area, it was all (recording Devil’s Elbow) coming out of that.” The result is an extremely cathartic sounding record.
“It wasn’t as considered as a lot of other records are. It was very organic and we didn’t have a label at that time (having since been signed to Ivy League records).” Cec adds, “We were self financed, and managing ourselves at that point. Everything we were doing was off our own bat.”
We ask if it is something wonderful to have a document, finished, at the end of such a difficult time? Like a datestamp marking the end of a shit storm in your life that you managed to survive. But then, that the challenge of touring songs wedded to such a difficult time in your life must be immense.
Jed is enthused about the idea: “That’s the beauty of it. We were very proud of it at the end of it. There was a lot of love going into it. The songs feel lived with, to play.”
Like they’ve always been there? “Yeah, in a way. I think that every album should be different, and a snapshot of that time. We’ve created another bridge to whatever we do the next time.”
