CSS

Mon 31st Jan, 2011 in Features

As FL’s review of CSS’ Big Day Out sideshow in Sydney breathlessly reported “CSS are an exceptional band to see live. You cannot help but get caught up in the endearing, hyperactive presence of Lovefoxx that is only helped by her hilarious banter (which is itself obviously helped by a few wines). Don’t take them too seriously and you can’t be disappointed. It may have been a Monday, but as soon as Lovefoxxx appeared, a sea of gold and sequins (her first of many costume changes), yelling ‘Let’s start this motherfucking thing’, the modestly-sized venue felt like a packed out stadium.”

Pausing for a moment from starting the party in the Bolier room on the BDO tour, the band told us about the new album and their teenage diaries.

So you guys are back in Australia with a new album under your belt, but nobody knows what it’s like yet! What can you tell us about it?
We have loads of songs for it. Well, maybe not ‘loads’. I don’t know. I think it’s loads! [laughs] We have around 15 new songs that we’ve already done for the next album. But this month we’ve decided to do a little reworking of those songs and trying to do some new ones as well. We’re working a lot on it…we’ve probably been recording for the whole year now.

Okay, so how far away do you think the next album is from being 100% finished?
You know it’s been such a long time since we’ve released [an album] that we just want to make the perfect record. We want to kick ass with the new record! We were kinda finishing it a month ago but now we decided to do some reworking of it and it sounds so much better. We all agree that we need to polish, polish, polish until it’s like a perfect ball. What I can tell you is that it’s different from both albums. We’re not thinking about how we’re going to play live… we’re just going really crazy in the studio. Some of the songs we’re doing don’t even have guitars, there are a lot more keyboards and the lyrics are very bad-ass! They are some seriously bad-ass lyrics, I mean it.

Bad arse? That sounds cool.
Yeah, I was really thinking about teenage-hood. I’ve had a lot of time to really think about my life, you know, because we’ve been resting for a really long time, and I was listening to a lot of Prince and I really like how his lyrics are kind of intense and, how do you say, honest and, yeah, intense like a teenager! You just don’t think of consequences when you are young, it’s just stupid moments where we suffer for love and whatever. I really went back to that – I read all of my old diaries that I wrote when I was younger and I think that really inspired on some of the songs. Kind of like in a modern fairytale way.

That would be really weird for me. I’d probably get really embarrassed reading stuff I wrote when I was 14. Was it like that for you?
No! It was awesome! I used to suffer so much and now I’m a great person. I think it’s very nice for a song to sound very immature and very primal with your feelings and not having second thoughts about anything. This is how I wrote. And this time I tried to write things that I didn’t feel. You know, in the past if I needed to write a song about being in love I would need to be in love at that exact moment or I needed to be angry to write something that was full of hate, but now it’s just like I have a picture on my mind and I can explore lyrics around that.

Were there particular things on your old albums that you could see and you decided that you wanted to do differently this time around?
Yeah, of course, we never want to do the same thing twice. But I think that our first record and then on Donkey ... they were everything that we could do at that moment, you know? I think it is the same for this record; what you write is a reflection of what is going on. I was happy when the first records came out… but I’m feeling happier about this one! I think that all the rest and the one year holiday we had will have something to do with it. I think we’re all feeling pretty great now, but we just want everything to be finished so that it can come out.