CHANCES are you’re feeling the heat right now.
Summer hits hard here, and sweltering days punctuated by burnt lawns, thongs and singlets and the incessant chirp of crickets brings its own pang of nostalgia.
It’s also a big part of living in suburban Australia, which is where Jake Webb – the man behind the brunt of Methyl Ethel – takes a lot of his inspiration.
Rogues, a single from the band’s critically lauded debut record Oh Inhuman Spectacle, was even born from the heat.
“The guitar hook just seemed to fit the song and my housemate at the time remarked how that was what he had also been hearing in his head,” Webb says. “It was very, very hot in that house.”
Webb and his co-conspirators Thom Stewart and Chris Wright has since crafted a woozy, immediate album that feels at once nostalgic and current, having enough solid musicianship behind it to drive its simple, catchy shoegaze flow.
It’s also gone gangbusters: Rolling Stone listed them as one of the 10 Artists You Need to Know in 2015; they’ve racked up positive reviews from the full range of music intelligentsia, as well. All for an album that Webb wrote, in almost complete isolation, in a doorless ex-shopfront in Fremantle over one summer. “I don’t really enjoy having a lot of people around me when I work; I need space to breathe,” Webb says on the environment that progenated Oh Inhuman Spectacle.
“I like to have my own space when I work to let all these ideas, which may be strange at first, to run free.”
For Webb – who has worked countless hours with a rotating roster of WA and Australian musicians, building up a bankable reputation as a tour musician – knuckling down and producing a full body of work for his own project, which had coasted on live shows and word-of-mouth, excepting a few EPs, for years, was a step in making Methyl Ethel into something that properly encompassed his experimentation.
“I think there’s a point in the process where the project goes from just a constant sort of scrapbooking of ideas and themes to something solid, in and of itself,” Webb says.
“There’s a point where that happens, and I kind of stopped myself at that point and said, ‘There’s a record there’.
“From then, when [record label] Remote Control said they were keen to release it, I eventually got to the stage where I was holding the wax in my hand. That was a pretty nice moment, really one of those times where you see the difference between the whole time you’ve put in to make it, and then it’s just here.
“And I just went, ‘woah’.”
The result of that has been, as mentioned, a whole lot of positivity. Methyl Ethel managed to take out the Best Pop Act and Best Single (for Twilight Driving) at the just-gone West Australian Music Awards.
Two big prizes, but caught up in the action that goes along with being a talked-about band, the boys missed out on the ceremony. It comes recommended.
“To be honest, we’d just gotten back from New York the day before, so we were all pretty tired and didn’t actually make it to the awards,” Webb says.
“It was actually very relaxing. It’s a great way to receive awards, lying in bed.”
The awards capture the keen interest that’s being paid forward to the band at the moment, as their ability to chop and change between distinctive styles yet maintain a core groove has piqued interest – however not without the usual comparisons.
The ever-apparent Tame Impala association lives on with yet another WA rock act, but Webb isn’t too concerned with any link there.
“You know, they’re everywhere you go, everyone knows them,” Webb says when asked if the reference is help or hindrance.
“There’s not really too much you can do. They’re a great band, but I don’t think it’s like stepping out of their shadow or anything. You’ve just got to do what you do and hope that people get that.”
Methyl Ethel perform at Disconnect Festival at Fairbridge Village, December 11-13.
