“I think the bass guitar is the perfect instrument, personally.”
The debut record from Gut Health, STILETTO, is out today. On the back of international touring and appearances all over Australia, the album has been highly anticipated. We were lucky enough to speak to Dom from the band about their approach to touring nationally and internationally, and how this has influenced the gear they use for both recording and for live.
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Gut Health initially toured Europe in May of this year, followed by another Europe tour in July.
“In May I did this whole different synth setup, I kinda condensed my pedalboard to fit it all in this—hot tip for people to get Pelican [style] cases from Super Cheap Tyre and Auto, cause they’re very cheap.” he explains, referring to his minimal rig for their May tour. “So yeah, having a different synth and all that was a nice challenge, but we were kinda missing some of the stuff that’d become a bit of a Gut Health sound.”
Dom gets into the details here, stating that he had bought a Moog Grandmother, specifically with the goal in mind of having a mono synth that has that Devo, 80s kinda sound.
“Joining this band, I took on the challenge of ‘Okay cool, how can I build my gear to be evoking a lot of those things?’”
Beyond synths, Dom got an MXR Distortion +, for “the Gang of Four thing”.
On the second tour in July, Gut Health did away with the condensed rigs and took everything they usually perform with, Dom jesting that they’d just deal with the extra bits of equipment including road cases, cabling, power—the works!
“The way Europe is built, it suits being in a band. Being in a van and driving around.”
We pause for a moment to laugh about the reality of touring in Australia, where you’ll travel eight or nine hours minimum between shows. Europe is very different, with beautiful countryside and different countries, regions, music scenes and therefore venues, just hours apart.
STILETTO
The new record is the first full-length that Dom has been on, explaining that he’s worked on other people’s records before, but never something he’d helped write, compose and produce.
The Gut Health writing process is evolving, but Dom explains that it’s exciting to see what ways songs will come about, in his words, the “genesis of pieces of music.”
“Traditionally for us, songs start with a bass line, and then a song only really gets to that stage of finishing if a strong vocal line comes into it. So there’s some songs on the album where we built this song, we’re really into it, then kinda put it away for year.”
From here, songs would be revisited from time to time, hoping to bring key elements together into something that’d have legs. Starting with a bass line is an interesting approach, and I press Dom on this. Is this active and intentional?
“It’s a good question,” Dom begins, staring at the ceiling as he thinks about, possibly for the time, the reason the bass seems to work for Gut Health.
“Maybe there’s no thought at all, it just works,” I add. “And that’s an answer in and of itself.”
“A lot of the stuff we started getting influenced by, the Rough Trade-era kinda sound, early post-punk of the late 70s and things like that,” Dom muses. “It’s this chicken and egg thing, is it a bass focused-song or did they just mix the guitars really low, y’know?”
“There’s definitely this idea of building these songs around a bass part most of the time, and everything else is supporting that thing. We do mix our songs with the bass a lot louder than other kinds of music would do. We really make it a protagonist. I could get romantic about it [the bass guitar], being the hybrid of rhythm and melody. I think the bass is the perfect instrument, personally.”
“Traditionally in popular music it’s holding the counter melody responsibility, and yeah, the sort of music we’ve gravitated towards just really has that plucky, kind of harsh, scratchy bass sound.”
STILETTO was the first album for most of the band, at least in a band setting, and Gut Health set out to record as much of it live as they could.
“We quickly learned, when we started doing that, that we hadn’t really put in the level of preparation that was required for that, I think,” Dome says with a smile. “And so I think the album shifted towards being a bit more of an overdubbed record. We still tracked the bass and drums, some of the guitars in a studio, and over the next year we pieced everything else together at our houses and the rehearsal space and stuff like that.”
Dom speaks further to their writing and recording process, acknowledging there’s songs that hit a ceiling for how playable they are. He explains that Gut Health is made up of 12 hands, with six members, and so they’d let themselves have as many layers as they could do with 12 hands playing instruments, melodies and countermelodies.
“We’ve always been a live band first, that’s the kind of energy that we’re trying to get in the recordings. We finish songs on the stage, I would say, and [that] has been a big part of our process.”
“But there’s definitely songs that I had in my head a very specific, layered idea, or broke some of the aesthetic rules of an analog focus. There’s one song on the record, Memory Foam, where Eloise and I did this whole overdub session at their house and didn’t really get anything out it, out of those four hours. They took that home and ended up stretching it out in Ableton and pitching it around and layering it, reversing it and making these bell-like ambient bits that then really set that song in an atmosphere.”
Listen to the atmosphere of STILETTO here, or keep up with Gut Health for gigs, touring and more, here.
