'Once Again the Present Becomes the Past'/ Interview with Alien Nosejob
Alien Nosejob reawakens catastrophe, front punches tyranny and leaves in all the mistakes in his latest album ‘Once Again The Present Becomes The Past’.
‘Are we really just doomed?’, is the undying question that lurks within the ol’ punk-bent etches of Alien Nosejob’s newest release Once Again The Present Becomes The Past . Harshly combative through and through, the Naarm-based artist prepares to rattle, reprimand and re-evaluate the present. Including YOU!
Alien Nosejob is the solo project of Clunes-based artist Jake Robertson. His third album, Once Again The Present Becomes The Past is officially out through ANTI FADE.
Photo Credit by Carolyn Hawkins
BIG LOVE for the new album Jake! ‘Once Again the Present Becomes The Past’ is feeling way more guttural and roughed-up than previous releases. Wondering what’s prompted this more annalistic shift in tone?
Cheers Lakshmi! When I was a teenager, I’d always crack the shits when the bands I liked started out so raw and then just got wussier and wussier with each release - I used to want to avoid that. But now, honestly, I just want to avoid any genre restrictions. The next LP might be Country and Western. Who knows and who cares? I was listening to lots of Japanese, UK and European hardcore when writing this LP. Releases from bands like Mob 47 / Gas / Sacrilege were at the forefront. These bands all seem to have apocalyptic themes (Kärnvapen Attack / No More Hiroshima etc.) but like all of the stuff I write, all the influences creep in, include elements of The Fall, Dead Kennedys, The Kinks and whatever else is on constant rotation. Living in so called ‘Australia’ is kind of an influence in itself too. While I was writing and recording this, the 2019-2020 Bushfires were in full effect. It was a really horrible time, which was only shadowed by another horrible time a month or two later, so who knows what will come next? I’m not really looking forward to global warming but wouldn’t mind seeing the collapse of Capitalism.
This LP was initially rooted in unpacking the devastating 1942 Bombing of Darwin. What pulled you into focusing on this particular event in ‘Australian’ warfare?
I’m not really 100% sure but both of my Grandfather’s were Naval Officers in 1942, so I’ve grown up with many of their stories (some of which cropped up lyrically throughout this album). I felt like my knowledge of the Bombing of Darwin wasn’t strong enough to write an entire album about. I was conscious of this album coming across as both a disaster ‘competition’ (considering many of my influences were Japanese bands singing of the horrific Hiroshima attack) or a Nationalist glorification of war, which is the opposite of what I intended so I changed the main focus of the album to be about repetition. You know, following the rule of the Three R’s. Bad shit happens, we get cranky, we learn to live with it. Repeat.
On that, I’ve read that one of Norm Macdonald’s books helped you pull the tone of the LP together. Can you tell us more? Wondering what elements of the release have been influenced by him?
Just the title because I can’t really remember the exact context he used it in but I think he was having a morphine induced dream. When I read that chapter, I was half asleep and also in the middle of writing lyrics for this album, so I had my thieving ears on. Literally everything I listened to, read or watched was put into the context of this album. His book was great and I think he’s a funny comedian but there’s been a couple of things he has said in the past that seem to have ruffled feathers, which I’m not gonna defend. I don’t really know much about him, even after reading his ‘autobiographical’ book, each new sentence seems to contradict the last.
Very curious as to how the gruff-y and urgent exteriors of punk and garage can help process and belt out this heavily DOOMED idea that “history is forever repeating itself”?
I guess this is a theme that’s been explored many times before. I wanted this to be a hardcore record with elements of crust and punk. Growing up a garage turkey, there’s always going to be a touch of that thrown into everything I touch. There are lots of little nods to various rock songs in this record. One of the solo’s was inspired by Creedence Clearwater Revival’s ‘Effigy’ and there’s a pretty obvious KISS lift in there as well as some accidental AC/DC stuff. I wanted this album to be frantic but also have a melancholy feel, as if you were remembering the time before catastrophe.
I’m still admiring the VERY frictional explosive fever that you bring to every release! Can you talk us through the hyper-layered compositions and production behind the LP?
I’m getting more and more used to the recording process and I’m streamlining it a little with each time I press record. The process is a little tedious, it often involves me writing and demoing two complete albums before I record the final tracklist. But I guess if it were a ‘proper’ band, it would be months of rehearsing, so it’s kind of the same shit. I do as little overdubs as possible, so usually there will just be 5 or 6 tracks to mix. The hardest part is remembering the structure enough to do the drums and bass to no backing track. As far as mistakes go, they’re all over the record it’s not something that has ever bothered me.
Love the jab at muggy lyrics in ‘Airborne Toxic Event’, “Every time I take a breath it brings me closer to my death/Oxygen looks like smoke/Water looks like diet coke”. They’ve really stuck with me. Wondering how you’ve created this balance of sweaty adrenalin and stringent depletion that oscillates between the tone and lyrics throughout this LP? It’s just such fantastic foreplay!
‘Airborne Toxic Event’ was written six weeks or so after the other songs, on January 22nd, which was the day that the rain turned brown in Melbourne. That’s where those lines originated. The title of this song was taken from a scene in the fantastic Don DeLillo book ‘White Noise’ .
You’ve injected these sonically obscured interludes and tracks like ‘The Day After’ and ‘Dead Pelican’ that feel very ‘aftermath’ and ‘dead energy’ like. Are these meant to be affecting in that way?
Yeah, that’s it really! Like many of the other themes, it was inspired by GAS. They released a flexi-disc named ‘The Day After’ in 1984, which had a very short piano part before deafening feedback and a blisteringly fast count in to a one minute hardcore song. I named my interlude after their EP. ‘Dead Pelican’ was a nod to the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern characters in Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’. When I had to study it (along with the Tom Stoppard’s play ‘Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead’) in high school. I found it funny how these two characters were so prominent in the first scene, then just completely forgotten about until, of course, the final scene where all the main characters were killed. While you’re still soaking up the tragedy, a henchmen comes in to alert the King that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were found dead. Kinda like - Oi! These people that you forgot about are important too! ‘Dead Pelican’ is a sombre piano melody, intended to conjure up an image of a survivor walking along a desolate beach, so used to seeing horrific imagery but being kinda grossed out by seeing a dead bird. Not only humans are affected by our actions!
Before we wrap up, it feels like you’ve rummaged through tons of historical research and landed on this unending philosophical bent, in piecing together this album. Any noteworthy or poignant bits of history still sticking with you? Or anything you’d like to share to preface the album?
Honestly, if anything, this album has made me realise that I don’t know shit and I have to learn more. I did rummage through lots of historical research and I re-read my Pop’s accounts of his time in the Navy but this album is more about the never ending ‘bag of shit’ that the human race continues to throw at the world and its inhabitants. I just use war as a character because it is an easy target, it’s a thing every human would be against. 2020 has made me think of wars in a different way, more than this research has! Ten years ago I would make jokes about all sorts of inappropriate shit because I thought I was so far removed from living in so called ‘Australia’ in the 2000’s (and I’m not defending any of my nonsense in the past) but 1939 wasn’t that long ago, a bunch of horrible shit has happened since then and right-wing nationalist types still run rampant. A friend said to me recently “Imagine if you could go back to yourself 10 years ago and tell yourself that in 10 years, middle class soccer mums would be posting anti-government-tyranny videos in response to having to wear a protective mask during a global pandemic.” The present is terrifying and it’s really scary to think of what the future will bring.
Stay updated with Alien Nosejob here . Stream/buy ‘Once Again the Present Becomes the Past’ via ANTI FADE here.
Words by Jake Robertson. Interview by Lakshmi Krishnan.
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