Semantics - I Feel It All At Once (Track By Track)

You've sat with the songs since release day, now take a deeper look inside the mind of Australian alternative punks Semantics with their latest release I Feel It All At Once.

From the strong introduction on 'Last Amour' to the closing bars of 'Irresolution', the band dive deep behind the music and showcases the messaging and recording processes of their new material - which should make you listen on a different level than before...

LAST AMOUR

This song was written pretty late into the piece. This album was attempt #4 at writing and recording this album. This one came pretty late into the process but once we’d culled a few other tracks that weren’t doing it for us…Zachy actually wrote all the guitar riffs for this one and laid out the arrangement. I wrote words over it, I had to write the chorus 15 times because they all were sounding really cheesy! The writing process happened pretty late and took a fair bit of work but when we heard it back when it was done, we were like, “That’s a sick opener.”

Subject matter wise, it’s about the self-destructive feeling you have when you’ve separated from someone and you’re trying to move on and forget them; but they’re in the back of your mind. In a self-destructive way, you feed and lean into that misery. No one can deny that they do that sometimes. Sometimes you like to wallow in your misery a little bit. It makes you feel alive because at least at that point in time, you are full of emotions — whether or not they’re good, bad, conflicting or otherwise. There’s a lot of feeling there. It’s about that. It’s about missing someone; not wanting to miss them, but secretly wanting to.

You might try to bring them back into your life in some way, but it turns out not to be good for you, but you do it anyway. It’s ambiguous, it’s hard to explain, but I hope the lyrics make sense.

LOVE LANGUAGE

Some of the songs on the album are like lightning strikes. Other songs take a while to write. ‘Love Language’ is one of the lightning strikes. It wrote itself in a day. Songs like that are funny; the intention I had for it when I was demo-ing it wasn’t necessarily for the album, for anything. It was just one of those days where I was like, “I’m gonna write a song today and I’ll put it to the band, see if they like it and go from there.” I made a dorky, dad-rock song with the narcissistic lyrics and the attitude, the glam guitar solos…but then made it a Semantics song. That was the mission. That was a one day process; I grabbed a guitar, played a pretty simple ‘80s style chord progression. Put a couple of cliches in there and tried to be a bit more poetic with the lyrics, less on the nose than some of the ‘80s ones were. It was a really quick process. It’s so funny, whenever I write a pop song, it does happy very quickly.

CALICO

This one has the same type of vibe. Instead of thinking about ‘80s style dad-rock, it was ‘90s dad-rock like Dinosaur Jr. and Teenage Fanclub. That type of country-inspired riff, but it’s still loud and grungy. That was the basis of the music, with the mid tempo ‘90s vibe. Again, it was a snapshot of when I was living in a share house, so I spoke very literally about that; the names of my roommates, what video game they were playing. What the cat looks like…it’s just fun. I like abstract, but I also like literal lyrics; I do both, pick a song and decide if I’m gonna be abstract or literal. ‘Love Language’ is pretty abstract, even though it sounds literal. ‘Calico’ is completely literal.

I think it works because there is that fusion, there’s no exclusion of lyrical writing style. I haven’t pigeonholed the lyrics’ style into any particular format. It means that with Semantics, I can write any kind of lyrics and find them a home.

SALINE

I was hitting a few walls with guitar parts and we were lucky that Zachy is just a god on guitar. He has great ideas and his style is completely different to my type of guitar playing. We learn a lot together and we found that a lot with this album, writing music together, our guitar disciplines are very different. Putting them together is a lot of fun, it’s creatively stimulating. It’s a big thing that is going to make the album different to what we’ve done in the past. This is his first record with us.

Musically, that’s the vibe. I dug deep into the drums with Mitch and made sure that we wrote really powerful drum parts, just so it was full of energy; heaps of dynamics, heaps of movement. Highs and lows all over the place.

The song is about death, which was inevitable. Someone we care about, at least one person dies every year; it always ends up in the songwriting process. This one is about our bassist Matty, his mother passed away. It’s about the experience; she had a terminal cancer that we all had to wait for, we knew it was a ticking time bomb. It was just a matter of time. The song explores the feelings around what that is like, not being ready for someone to leave. It’s a sad one, but there’s a lot of catharsis in it. I think that’s what we use to cope. We use catharsis to get us through grief as a group and as individuals, that’s how we deal with it. We wanted to channel that into a song.

BROWN SNAKE BLUES / STEPPING STONES

They weren’t written back to back, but I think the reason they were put together in the track list is mainly because they’re in the same key. It’s nice for flow. When were were tossing up the track listing for the album, we were very conscious of mood and genre realm, and also their key. You do get a flow where it feels that the two of them are the one song. Conveniently I just really like to write in A, it’s my favourite key to write in. They weren’t necessarily written together, but it was a happy accident where they both had a similar mood, same key; genre-wise, they’re very different but they started to introduce the more shoegaze-y, slower elements that come into the rest of the album. It was a happy accident with the track listing. For us, it felt very natural to start going that way.

I listen to so much music! It’s probably pretty evident on the album: the pop songs have all got Menzingers beard-punk energy, mixed with Def Leppard, Van Halen, ‘80s cock-rock. The heavy, grunge moments which are very punk-inspired, they have Billy Corgan-inspired riffs and then there’s a lot of J Mascis-style riffs too. Then in the shoegaze-y realm, there’s a lot of modern and contemporary bands like Nothing, they’re a great band. It’s all about texture and reverbs creating these ethereal landscapes, then blending it in with this heavy music. Even though it’s super heavy, it’s calming. It feels like a warm hug; like the walls of distortion are caressing you or something. I love it. I’ve always had a soft spot for shoegaze. Even doom and stoner metal as well; there’s a similar vibe, that downtempo sort of thing. It’s a very cathartic sound. I listen to a lot of anything and everything; I still listen to the same death metal I was listening to when I was a teenager, and the same country music that my parents raised me on. The Manchester music I was growing up with as well. We all listen to a lot of it while we are writing.

IT’S A LOT

‘It’s A Lot’ is a love song for my wife. It shares some narrative with ‘Brown Snake Blues’. I was really struggling with living in Brisbane, I was having conflicts with people that made me want to pack up and leave. I have UK citizenship and we’re married, so we could elope. We could just move to the UK and reset our social circles and start new experiences, live abroad.

‘Brown Snake Blues’ is me expressing my frustration with the circumstances of where I’m living and what was going on in my life at that moment, how much nicer it would be to start new somewhere else. ‘It’s A Lot’ is an affirmation that whatever we do together, we can manage as long as we’re doing it together. I was putting the idea forward; we were both on the fence about it, but it was definitely something I was leaning into and was quite serious about. She was supportive of the idea. Obviously, we’ve put it on hold to give the band another chance and give our lives in Brisbane another chance — try to find a balance and happiness here, because our families are here too. There’s a lot more to factor in. It’s a thanks and an affirmation to my other half.

PORT ALLAN

Port Allan is a fictitious place. The song is about Mitch’s good friend, who is a Sea Shepherd activist. His name is Allan, he’s this life-long friend of our drummer Mitch. Mitch admires him so much that sometimes Mitch looks at his own life and thinks he’s a bit of a loser. When they reconnect, he remembers that it’s not something to be jealous of, it’s something to celebrate. Allan celebrates Mitch and his accomplishments, right back at him. Every time they reconnect, they’ve got this real steadfast, long term friendship. It doesn’t get hindered by any life changes; no one is bigger than the other. This is Mitch’s love letter to his incredible friend, who is literally fighting pirates out in the ocean. We called it ‘Port Allan’ because with the regard Mitch holds him in, he deserves to have his own port! There should be one named after him. We’re just imagining that there is one named after him, because he’s a legend.

ELEUTHERIA

I love this one so much. It’s one of my favourites. I love that Zachy sings the first half of the song; this is his first appearance where he’s really taking the lead, apart from the chorus of ‘Saline’. This is him singing about his experiences and his feelings — it’s his snapshot of life. I like that he gets to express that.

I like that this is our attempt at the most ignorant, loud guitars; just bashing, open chords with as much fuzz as possible, then just jumping into this beautiful shoegaze riff. It’s complemented by a borderline disco beat! It’s got a bit of a Parquet Courts type vibe with the mopey progression and the chords; then it hits the full Pumpkins-style wall of fuzz. Musically, it was just an experiment to see how loud and quiet we could go in one song, in three minutes. Lyrically, it’s Zachy talking about the end of a relationship, whether it’s romantic or platonic — it’s not really implied. It’s about his liberation from that, the closure and being okay with that relationship ending; him finding his own feet and going to the beat of his own drum.

It’s funny, it’s hard to write lyrics through people sometimes but with the stuff that the guys gave me and with ‘Port Allan’ and ‘Eleutheria’ in particular, it was like I was just paraphrasing and turning their poetry into musical words and lyrics. The writing process was really fun, because it was really collaborative; I was more of a proof reader than an actual songwriter. They’d tell me the story, they’d tell me some lines they had and then I’d reword it, sing it to them and see if it still meant the same thing to them. If it did, then we’d go ahead with it.

LAKE ARRAGAN

This is a me song. This one is similar to ‘Love Language’, it was written around the same time. We were going to put it earlier in the track listing but we decided to put it in at the end because the music does get slow and heavy at this part of the album; we wanted to have a little pop song at the end, just to tie you back into the start. Remind you what the journey has been, musically.

The song is literally just about camping at our favourite spot at Lake Arragan. It’s a song about camping!

IRRESOLUTION

My favourite thing about this song as a closer, is that the final lyric is the name of the album. As far as concept stuff goes, I like the idea of listening to the album and knowing it’s called I Feel It All At Once; you’ll be waiting for a reference to the album title at some point in it. You don’t get it until the very last lyric, and it’s me just yelling as loud as I can!

It felt really conclusive, everything on the album summed up. It’s a showcase, musically, of the whole album process as well. So much focus on a really cool drum beat; a really cool riff that Zachy wrote; this glam guitar part where we don’t sing at all, we just riff. We just wanna talk about guitar at that point! Then it goes back to the lyrical parts, where it’s another love letter to my wife in an abstract way. She’s my rock and I need her because I have vices. I’m not going to pretend that they don’t exist either. This is a roundabout conclusive vibe. The lyrics were kind of written in the studio with a bit of that intention as well. We had some lyrics and then we didn’t finish writing them until we were finished working on the track. We knew it would be the closer when we finished recording.

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Get the album I Feel It All At Once here

Semantics - I Feel It All At Once tracklisting

1. Last Amour
2. Love Language
3. Calico
4. Saline
5. Brown Snake Blues
6. Stepping Stones
7. It’s A Lot
8. Port Allan
9. Eleutheria
10. Lake Arragan
11. Irresolution