Biography
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Nothing On TV
Cassette Kids have been busy. Since the frenetic and aggressively energetic debut We Are was released in 2008, the band have spent a year riding their self-created turbulence. This is a band who has endured countless hours working on their craft in an insatiable drive to create different and exciting music, and have earned their stripes on tour with some of the biggest acts in the business. Now ready to take on the world, the Kids step up to deliver their coming-of-age full length album Nothing On TV. With typically indie rock influences that include The Rapture, Klaxons, Yeah Yeah Yeahs and No Doubt, Cassette Kids craft a grinding, colourful version of the genre which is as catchy as it is innovative. The quartet, which features singer Katrina Noorbergen, guitarist Dan Schober, bassist Dan Deitz and drummer Jake Read-Harber, came together from four distinct corners of the indie scene. "We're all from completely different musical backgrounds," Noorbergen explains. "It's amazing how much we love the music we're making because it's such a strange fusion of what we're all into, but for some reason it just works!" After forming three years ago in a flourishing Sydney live scene, the band have enjoyed a rapid rise in popularity earned by their ability to make the tamest dance floors gleam with sweat. The tracks from their mini-album We Are, including the crowd favourite You Take It, demanded just as much attention on record as Noorbergen demanded on stage. Word spread fast, and soon Lily Allen requested they join her 2009 Australian tour. This topped off an already impressive twenty-four months of touring for the band which saw them play alongside The Music, The Ting Tings, Crystal Castles, and a sold-out tour with multi ARIA award winners The Presets, not to mention Big Day Out 2008. Following the creative storm of We Are, the band set to work determined to create the very best album they could produce, refining their talent during a six month process of experimentation with songwriting and instrumentation. They later joined forces with Michael DiFrancesco, producer and member of Sydney outfit Van She, and engineer Richard Wilkinson (Hot Chip, The Magic Numbers) who continued to push the band's innovation whilst in the studio. Noorbergen describes the process, "We're always trying to play around and experiment with sounds. Sometimes instead of starting with the concept of writing a song we just start off with sounds and what sounds do we like and does that sound like anything we've heard before? Instead of building around riffs we're about how something sounds first and foremost and then we build around that. That?s the reason we got Mikey and Rich involved with the album, because we knew they'd try to push those boundaries and bring along a whole array of synths, drum machines and other toys we could play around with to come up with some really interesting music." Along with their passion for sonic experimentation, the album is inspired by some strong themes centred around taking action, and the motivation to get up and take charge of life, themes which ignite Noorbergen. "The reason why we're in a band and we're being creative is because we want to be proactive, do what we want, to be part of and to create pop culture rather than just passively consuming it,? she says. "It's so much more satisfying running amuck and being part of it. For us that's what encapsulates the title of Nothing On TV on so many levels." The resulting record is a big step forward for the band. Noorbergen's delivery is musically more assured and confident, her use of melody now more dynamic with the greater use of tone in her voice, particularly in tracks such as Game Player and Lying Around. Schober and Deitz's screaming, squelching guitar and bass continues to stretch sonic boundaries with their complicated network of effects pedals. Freakie Sweetie and Hey Baby showcase Schober's guitar stepping up a notch with his unique and catchy lead hooks while Read-Harber sets the temperature gauge on the skins. The album displays a decidedly more pop-styled direction while maintaining that unique Cassette Kids grit. As their profile gains heat and their musicianship matures, Cassette Kids have an exciting future ahead of them. And with a lot of positive chatter buzzing through the international industry, this is an album which a lot of eyes are watching closely. Nothing On TV heralds the arrival of one of Australia's most entertaining young bands. They could not be more ready for the challenge. Katrina Noorbergen ? Vocals Dan Schober ? Guitar Dan Deitz ? Bass Jake Read-Harber ? Drums Nothing On TV :: Track By Track Insomnia Katrina: We worked on Insomnia with Paul Mac. It was a stepping stone for us, the song has so many layers musically including about eight guitar lines in the outro. It's just soaring and beautiful. It's about letting go, but more immediately it's about those amazing nights we've experienced as a band where we just can't go to sleep because we don't want the day to end! Dan Schober: Insomnia is one of my favourites, musically and vocally it just takes me on a journey and everytime a new verse or a new chorus hits it just packs a punch. It's one of the most beautiful songs on the album. Spin Katrina: Spin is our big fun dance pop anthem, one of those songs that we just had to put on the record and that we hope people take a shine to at parties and clubs. It doesn't have the most profound message, but its purpose is to be a really fun song that gets people moving! On another level it?s about escapism through music. We get so much bad news?.and even if the world about to end we want to forget about it and party through the night. It was actually one of the hardest songs to write, and it took a million different variations to get the lyrics to sound that simple and immediate! Lying Around Katrina: Lying Around is the first single which was co-written with Mikey from Van She. I really like the energy of the song and it has quite a strong message: If you don't get off your arse and go after what you want then you can't expect it to fall in your lap. It's a big message for Gen Y. On a more personal level, it?s about having people in your life that drag you into the mud with negativity. You want to scrape them off and tell them to get over it. Coming Back Katrina: Coming Back is about missing someone and knowing that the only way you're going to feel better is to come back to them and to be back home where it's comfortable. It's also about being out on your own, making your own experiences but then realising how much you probably took that comfort for granted. It came to me after experiences travelling around the world on my own and with a friend. It was on the whole an amazing and positive experience but there?s always that couple of days when some asshole steals all your money and your passport and your just like, "Fuck I want to go home, I want my boyfriend back, and I want some decent food!? Dan Deitz: It was written around a mad riff which Dan S had come up with, we were jamming on it for a little while but then he just put a reverse effect on it which completely changed the whole song into what it is now. Big Jerk Katrina: This is a song which you might sing to someone you had a falling out with. It's a dance song, crunchy and big, and we hadn't made anything that sounded like that before. Mikey contributed some really cool stuff in the bridge that we liked and it has my favourite breakdown on the whole record. It's kind of like a sexy hate song, like 'I hate you, but I want you,' if you know what I mean. Freaky Sweetie Katrina: Freaky Sweetie is another take on the whole clichéd theme 'I'm going to the club, looking hot, and I want to find a hot babe to get with,' that you can find in a million pop songs. We take that scenario though and put it in a space where you're not looking for that hot sexy person, and you're just looking for the weirdest, freakiest person that you can find because maybe you're a bit different and a bit weird and you're looking for that other person that's a bit different and a bit weird! Game Player Katrina: Game Player is like a Destiny's Child song but done by Cassette Kids! It's an RnB themed track which was really fun to write and to produce. It was different to anything we had done before and we made it cool by adding some great vintage synth sounds. We tried to forget the whole indie cool code on this one. We wanted to create an amazing pop tune and do it our way! You Shot Me Jake: You Shot Me was the last song we wrote for the album and it literally came along about a week before we went into pre-production, purely out of giving it one last shot. I remember coming to rehearsal that day and I told Katrina that I had this beat in my head from the night before and I just started playing it. The vocal even came before the guitar and bass on this one. Katrina: It goes back to the punk/indie thing that we used to play a lot in our earlier days. Fast drums and spikey riffs. It's kind of fun and a bit cheeky and it's about that situation you find yourself in when you get a little bit obsessed with someone and they aren?t reciprocating. I'm sure everyone knows what that feels like... Rejection! Nothing On TV Jake: Nothing on TV was the first song that was written for this album, and we did it in Dan's (Deitz) living room because we didn't have anywhere else to jam at the time. Katrina: When we wrote it we had no money and we couldn't afford to pay for a studio, so we all drove way out to Kurrajong in the Blue Mountains and jammed out in Dan's living room - much to the dismay of his entire family. It's the title track of the album, it's dark, it's weird, there's about thirty tracks of vocals in the chorus, plus vocoders and a lot of experimenting and was lots of fun to create. At the time I was having a couple of issue feeling inspired and motivated. I was bored and this song is about that feeling of looking for inspiration but just getting frustrated with pop culture. We were also all trying to fit writing sessions into our working lives at that time as well. How can you be bored and so so busy at the same time? That?s what this song ended up being about. Wherever You Are Katrina: It's amazing to listen to Wherever You Are now - when we wrote it we had all these synth strings coming in, and when we met up with our producer and engineer they said 'let's do it with real strings!' And we were like 'No, really can we do that?!" And in the end we did it and had a quartet come in! It was very exciting for us to have real live strings on our first album, it felt like a real privilege. I'm also really glad the track made it to the album, it was born out of trying to write a really different song with really different elements, strings, electronica, and rock?.and put it all together. Jake: The song was a pretty emotional moment for us too because recording those strings and mixing them was the end of the production of the album. So it was a really emotional point realising that it was all over. Hey Baby Katrina: Hey Baby is about escaping, as if you're saying 'Let's just get out of this place, let's go and get out of here now!' It's like a jigsaw song because we wrote it, gutted it and rewrote, gutted it and rewrote and there were times we got to the point where we were thinking should we just give up, but we got there in the end and now it's a really driving track. It?s an edgy road trip song. Fatal Attraction Katrina: A dark, sexy track which is one of the only times on the album where things chill out a little bit. It's at the end of the record because we needed to give it some kind of relief - the album's full on and in your face and we needed to give it some space to breathe. We spent a whole day adding heaps of percussion and little weird sounds to it which made it what it is, and I?m really happy with the vibe. Hopefully it leaves the record in a place where we could go any number of directions. |