'Sideways to New Italy': Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever craft a piece of home on their latest record
Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever has crafted a little piece of home to carry with them on their second record, the cheerfully summery 'Sideways to New Italy'. It's no secret that the grueling touring schedules bands often embark on can take a serious toll on both their physical and emotional health. For Rolling Blackouts, their time spent away from home while they were on tour for their critically-acclaimed debut 'Hope Downs' left them grasping for something reliable.
The relentless schedule had them feeling ungrounded, to the point that even the familiar started to seem foreign. Led by singer-songwriter-guitarists Tom Russo, Joe White and Fran Keaney (and rounded out by bassist Joe Russo and drummer Marcel Tussie), the guitar-pop five-piece, upon returning to Melbourne after long stretches looking out at the world through the windows of airplanes and tour vans, felt an intense sense of dislocation, something they describe as "being like the knot in the middle of a game of tug-o-war."
"I felt completely rudderless on tour," Keaney says. "It's fun but you get to a point where you’re like, Who am I anymore? You feel like you’re everywhere and nowhere at the same time. And no one in particular." Russo adds, "We saw a lot of the world, which was such a privilege, but it was kind of like looking through the window at other people's lives, and then also reflecting on our own."
But rather than dwell in the displacement, Keaney was determined to channel how he was feeling into something optimistic. "I wanted to write songs that I could use as some sort of bedrock of hopefulness to stand on, something to be proud of. A lot of the songs on the new record are reaching forward and trying to imagine an idyll of home and love." And out of this creative space comes Rolling Blackouts' second record that sees the band interrogate their individual pasts and the places that inform them. In clicking the scattered pieces back into place, they crafted for themselves a new totem of home to carry with them no matter where they end up.
Home, for Russo, manifests in different ways: there's Melbourne, where he and brother Joe grew up, but also Southern Italy where the forebears of their family originated. The eponymous New Italy is a village near New South Wales’s Northern Rivers — the area Tussie is from. A blink-and-you'll-miss-it pit-stop of a place with fewer than 200 residents, it was founded by Venetian immigrants in the late-1800s and now serves as something of a living monument to Italians' contribution to Australia, with replica Roman statues dotted like souvenirs on the otherwise rural landscape.
As members of the band individually visited the Mediterranean and returned home to Melbourne's inner-north, where waves of European migrants forged a sense of home since the 1950s, they realized the emotional distance between the two was minuscule. The prominent and romantic Greco-Roman statues that sit outside tidy brick homes in Brunswick represent, for Russo, an attempt to "build a utopia of where your heart’s from."
The parallel between these remnants of home and the band's own attempts to maintain connections and create familiarity during their disorienting time on the road was not lost on Russo. "These are the expressions of people trying to find home somewhere alien; trying to create utopia in a turbulent and imperfect world."
This emotion is the underlying theme on 'Sideways to New Italy', which essentially is the band's attempt to reconcile the physical feeling of home with the emotional experience of home being 'wherever you lay your hat'. And in keeping with the emotional crux of the album, White’s early attempts at writing big, high-concept songs were abandoned in favor of love songs like 'She's There' and 'The Only One'. Additionally, the band wove in bits of their personal lives into the songs with familiar voices and characters filtering in and out, allowing the record to serve as the anchor that grounds the band's members.
On 'Second of the First' the voice of a close friend joins White's partner in delivering a spoken word passage. The chorus from 'Cool Change' began its life in a song the trio played in an early band, over a decade ago. The chords from 'Cameo' were once in an eventually abandoned song called 'Hope Downs'. And an early version of 'Falling Thunder' featured a reference that only the trio's friends would recognize. "We tried to make these little nods to our friends and loved ones, to stay loyal to our old selves," Russo explains. "I think we were trying to recapture some of the innocent weirdness of our very first recordings," Keaney adds of the 'Cool Change' chorus.
The inclusion of such personal notes hidden within the cheerfully melodic and uplifting pop/rock melodies on 'Sideways to New Italy' serves as a totem of sorts, something the band can take with them on the road, something they can seek solace and comfort in as they find themselves buffeted from stage to stage around the world. They'll be taking the voices of their loved ones with them, following cues from their neighbors and ancestors and anyone else who responded to their newfound displacement by crafting a utopia in their own backyard.
And in their highly personal and comforting record, listeners may also find a piece of home to carry with them amidst these disorienting times. Follow Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Spotify, or Bandcamp, or via RollingBlackoutsBand.com or SubPop.com for more.