Why is the Colour of the Sky? Bananagun
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To say that the intervening four years since the arrival of their debut album had been
tumultuous for Melbourne / Naarm’s Bananagun would be an understatement.
Released during the height of lockdown in the summer of 2020, the group were
forcibly ‘scattered’ following the release of ‘The True Story of Bananagun’. Australia’s
ultra-strict lockdown rules - declaring it illegal to travel beyond a 5km radius - made it
nigh on impossible for the band to get together at all, with the only rehearsals
requiring them to sneak past military checkpoints undetected.
Coinciding with this too was a great period of personal change for the band’s guitarist
/ vocalist / flautist and songwriter, Nick van Bakel. “I had a myriad of mountains to be
crossed which was pretty challenging,” he explains. “So I just cocooned into lots of
spiritual side quests and soul seeking. Band members were travelling etc. so it was
ages before we got through the stop-start stop-start phase and regained some band
momentum.”
This climate of upheaval does not go unheard on the band’s long-awaited follow-up,
‘Why is the colour of the Sky?’. While it’s by no means a pessimistic work - far from it
- it’s an album that departs from the ultra-slick bursts of sunshine-pop and afrobeat
that defined ‘The True Story of Bananagun’ and muddies the waters with a heavy
blend of incendiary jazz and freak-beat experimentation. It’s Bananagun alright, but
braver, bolder and more mysterious than ever.
With the only conscious musical dictum being that percussion and groove was
brought ‘to the fore’ - and boy, is this album groovy - the band decamped to Button Pusher studio Preston, Melbourne with equipment on par with any 1960s studio, tracking with minimal takes - ‘warts ‘n’ all’ - battling through the temperaments of analogue mixing equipment late into the night under the assertion that these more traditional methods provided the most, organic pure way to record. Also imperative
was to manipulate the social conditions in which the takes were performed and nail
the ‘vibe’ during recording: “It was all ‘attitude towards life’ and esoteric stuff, natural
law, how energy transfers, sounds, chemistry between people,” explains van Bakel,
“trying to foster an environment together where we can make some magic, capture
the phenomena of energy and soundwaves interacting with each other in the room.
And that was definitely what we wanted it to sound like - pro human.”
In many ways, ‘pro-human’ captures the radical quintessence that ‘Why is the Colour
of the Sky?’ is fulsomely jazz-shuffling towards. For a record that recognises, in its
every breath and sinew, the humbling, restorative and life-affirming power of
collective creative endeavour, it’s also a work that resists an ever more
technologically-driven and isolating world that can feel ever more dehumanising in its
quests for ‘perfection’. A theme directly addressed in ‘Children of the Man’, with its
‘Robo-sapien’ lyric, it’s a thread that runs across the entire record: “I feel like a lot of
human nature and tradition is worth preserving because we’ve probably evolved to
be this way,” notes van Bakel.“[‘Why is the Colour of the Sky?’] is all just about not
losing your head and being over stimulated by the ‘goggle box’; the need for
spirituality and nature; the need to be able to communicate and share ideas and
adapt in a rapidly changing world without being judged and profiled. The preservation
of human needs, so we don’t all get homogenised and isolated and poisoned to
stupidity and obedience.” And what better way is there to feel human than by laying
down a dynamite groove or nine?
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