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BUTTERFLY EFFECT |
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 On this page:
*Butterfly Effect interview
*Butterfly Effect Discography (all available on Whammo)
*Butterfly Effect Australian Tour dates
BUTTERFLY EFFECT- THE WHAMMO INTERVIEW - AUGUST 8, 2003
I don't know...kids these days. They're so 'together', professional and focused. Take The Butterfly Effect for instance. They've master-minded a grand plan for success that displays a presence of mind I certainly never posessed when I first began a career in music. With the money the Brisbane hard rockers saved by recording at their manager's studio, they were able to afford the necessary tweaks by US legend Tim Palmer. The results are impressive; a sound to rival the crisp and dynamic sounds of peers like Deftones and Tool. Did I say peers? Yes I did and if you think that terminology is unjustified, tell that to the 10,000 punters who have copy of the debut LP Begins Here and consistently pack themselves, like sardines, into any venue The Butterfly Effect care to invade. The industry and media are feeding music fans a raw deal at the moment. It's all about garage rock, whatever that is, and bands that do a great job of recycling old-world ideals and ancient sounds. Meanwhile bands like the Butterfly Effect, Cog, Sunk Loto and Blindspott are doing very nicely - thanks very much - with only a fraction of media attention. Clint Boge (vocals) and Ben Hall (drums) dragged me down to 'the local' for a laid-back chat and a few liquid refreshments (I swear I didn't want to go!)...
Whammo: So are you guys still big fans of the superstars of hard rock/new metal or are you branching out to draw from other influences?
Ben: As you get older you don’t tend to listen to a lot of heavy metal music.
Clint: That’s a good point because we’re playing a heavier style of music but none of us are really listening to heavier styles of music. We’re playing it and we’re so engrossed in it that you have to remove yourself from it. You have to give yourself some air and be able to look at it objectively.
Whammo: It’s interesting how you chose to record Begins Here. It’s a very homegrown sort of effort. You recorded it at your manager’s studio. He’s got the gear, obviously.
Ben: Comfort was a big thing. There was no rush. Tracking, obviously, is a very important part of the music process. We could get some very solid sounds there and spend more money on the mixing and mastering. I think it really paid off and you can’t tell that it wasn’t tracked in a world-class studio.
Whammo: I totally agree. The mandatory thing now is to travel to L.A. and get your mixing done. It may be a bit of a cliché but it works.
Clint: Another reason why bands are doing it is because in the international market, if you have your album mixed and mastered by a name, then it has a more reputable feel to it and they feel like they can promote it. It’s that whole unfortunate commercial vibe: ‘here’s our product and it was manufactured by…’.
Ben: Previous to having the album mixed, that was very much my thoughts on it. We were having the album mixed because Tim Palmer’s done Tool’s album. You get the album back and say ‘f**k, this guy’s a genius’. You really don’t understand what he does until you get the album back and put your headphones on and think ‘this dude, literally, is an artist’. Now, by listening to that, I can listen to every other album mixed by him or Andy Wallace, whatever, and you go ‘f**k, that’s his style of mixing’.
Whammo: I notice, with most Australian releases, that everyone wants to produce or co-produce and they don’t even have the benefit of sending the music overseas to give it a whole new edge.
Clint: Isn’t that the whole point? You’ve made the art, now let it go. It’s the same with reviews. Once it’s critiqued, you’ve really got to separate yourself from that. It’s a person’s opinion of the art you’ve made. The thing is, it started pure, in its original form. These people gloss over it but that’s okay: the original is still there. That’s why I try to take constructive points from the criticism.
Whammo: I guess that’s why it’s become a done thing for visual artists when they’re asked about their opinion on a piece, to say ‘what do you think it’s about- you’re the one who's looking at it’.
Clint: It used to bother me. I remember when Paul Dempsey from Something For Kate was interviewed on Triple J and they said ‘can you tell us what this song is about’ and he said ‘what do you think it’s about?’ I was like: ‘yeah, but you’re being asked’. He avoided the question all the way through the interview and I thought ‘I never want to be like that.’ I want to be open and I want the meanings to be tangible to everybody.
Whammo: Yeah, I slammed the album in my review.
Ben: (laughs)
Whammo: Na, I dug it. My interpretation was ‘folk music, coming out of Brisbane?’
Clint: Loud, new wave, we’re out there man.
Whammo: You’re post-folk.
Ben: Neo-folk.
Whammo: What was the main thrust of getting the band together?
Ben: Kurt and I, I guess you could say, were the founding members. From the end of high school we were just fucking about for a couple of years. The Butterfly effect had a different bass player and singer at a point. We were literally just playing what we listened to because that’s how you get better.
Clint: That’s how you have a yard-stick to measure it by.
Ben: When we had started to write some of the better songs we did a show in Brisbane and I actually got a lift to the show with our original singer. He decided to f**k off early and he left almost directly after the show and the only car that I could fit in was Clint’s. He was a mutual friend of the other band we played with that night. We used to share a rehearsal room with the other band and Kim, the other band’s singer, had given Clint a demo. I jumped into Clint’s car and he said ‘I hope you don’t mind but Kim gave me this tape the other day and I just wanted to show you some shit’. He whacked it in and it was a riff from Sweet and Low. He’s gone through the whole thing, then got to the chorus and I went ‘F**k!’. I’m thinking ‘we’ve got a singer, what are we going to do?’. I mentioned it to Kurt and he’s really loyal so he’s said ‘we’ve got a singer, so I don’t give a f**k’. I’ve gone ‘you don’t get it!’. I ended up saying to Clint ‘we should do this’ It ended up that the old singer’s interest waned a little bit. He got a bit lazy, so we went to his place one day to give him the final talk: ‘are you gonna get your shit together?’ We kind of lost our nerve because we were in his house, surrounded by his girlfriend and his mates. He ended up saying ‘well, if you think you can get a better singer, go ahead and do it’. Four weeks later when we’d already booked a show with Clint, he calls up and says: ‘you guys never told me the band was over, you’re dogs!’ The point is, when Clint joined the band he was from left field in regards to what he was doing. What he was bringing to the band was not what any of us were listening to. He’s come into it with, literally, a fresh perspective on everything. He just laid those vocals down straight away and instantly from the first show we ever did, without a word of a lie, everyone came up and said ‘f**k, that was really special’.
Whammo: So when you’re massive and you’re playing in Brisbane at some huge venue, there’s going to be one dude, between songs, yelling: ‘You’re f**ked!!’.
Clint: Actually, in Melbourne we played the Corner Hotel with Pacifier and speaking about hecklers, this guy was yelling out ‘Australian Deftones Show!’ and in the middle of Take It Away, I swung around and I said ‘I just want to say something to the guy that’s been heckling me all night- you wear your influences on your sleeve- you influence me, my Dad influences me- Mike Paton and Chino influence me’. I laid down all these influences.
Ben: He went through all of them - Frank Sinatra, Tori Amos, Bjork – and literally he’s gone on for about 4 minutes.
Clint: People influence me and I said ‘if that comes through in my performance then you should be the happier because you’ve got something to hook into’. He didn’t heckle me after that.
Whammo: But you know that’s going to be the biggest battle.
Clint: It’s genre-casting. People hear a distorted guitar with a floating vocal-line and they immediately think ‘Deftones’ or they’ll hear a guitar with a DJ and they’ll go ‘Limp Biskit’. It doesn’t matter how you class music because everybody’s going to put it in a box.
Ben: We do it.
Whammo: Most people with a bit of know-how understand that sounds are often compared because they’re played with the same instruments. People who listen to pop aren’t used to The Butterfly Effect, so they’re going to reach for the first mainstream act they can find in order to make a comparison.
Clint: I think that if people compare you to another act, it means they’ve had an instant affinity with your music. Even if they’re rejecting it, they’ve still had that affinity.
Whammo: I can remember saying to a friend over and over: ‘System Of A Down sucks’. Finally I said to him ‘no, I like it now’. He asked: ‘what changed your mind?’ I said: ‘oh, I listened to it’.
Ben: It’s hard, when you’ve got everyone around you saying ‘this is the best thing’. You feel like you’re being told to like it.
Whammo: Jet, The D4, Casanovas…this whole garage rock thing.
Clint: Oh man.
Whammo: I don’t see how someone can be putting you down and comparing your sound when those bands exist. Even they admit that their sound is derivative.
Clint: Those guys are going to get ripped to shreds because of the public backlash. When the public hears that this much money has been spent on making a band, they’ll immediately go: ‘they’re f**ked’. Tall poppies. Band’s like Midnight Oil became big because they toured their asses off. People don’t realize it but no one works harder than Australian touring bands.
Whammo: There’s band’s like Cog and Antiskeptic. They all wear their influences on their sleeves a bit. It doesn’t mean that they’re not Antiskeptic or not Cog. They’ve still got their own thing going on. Obviously the penny’s starting to drop because they’re doing really well. It must make it easier for you to see those bands get some recognition.
Ben: I can see the next load of hard-working bands coming through. These bands are eventually going to land on people’s doorsteps. There’s a scene building. There’s a song on our album that we do with Flynn, so people say who’s Flynn?
Whammo: Why wait until later on to do a Maynard/Deftones style collaboration?
Clint: That’s what I thought. There was one song and it really needed this piece in it. I thought ‘if I do it, it’s going to look like I’m ripping off Flynn’ so I thought ‘how am I going to get around it- f**k it, I’ll get Flynn to sing it’. It’s also the bringing together of two bands that love each other’s music and it’s a good chance to show the Australian underground public that we’re mates and we do love each other’s music.
Whammo: Camaraderie.
Clint: People might think ‘wouldn’t it be great if The Butterfly Effect, Cog and Sunk Loto toured together?’ and maybe that’ll happen.
Whammo: I’m pissed off with Sunk Loto. Those crazy kids drank my rider.
Clint: Or was it the other way around G, eh?
Whammo: Mm… |
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BEGINS HERE (STANDARD VERSION)
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 THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT
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The Butterfly Effect are making all the right moves in Australia. The building blocks for a long and fruitful career are evident. Firstly, the Brisbane 4-piece are recognising the rights of passage associated with playing hard rock/new metal including a healthy respect for their fans, an emphasis on live performance and 'walk before you crawl' attitude toward their career. The live following is steadily building and interest in their previous singles has been solid. Now for the main course: the album Begins Here. The riffs are tasty, the production is crisp and Clint sounds as powerful as any of his vocal heroes. Sure, they wear their influences on their collective sleeve but there's plenty of originality to suggest the evolution of an individual style and their first LP suggest that the evolution is well under way. Vocally, diversity is finally creeping into the repertoire; musically, riffs are more stylized to forge a new path; rhythmically, the bass punches harder and melds perfectly with drums, forming one instrument. Production-wise, the obligatory trip to Hollywood to work with Tim Palmer (U2, Pearl Jam, Ozzy Osbourne) has paid dividends; God knows the man is 'all class'. In terms of hard rock, Begins Here will be remembered as an outstanding Australasian hard rock debut; the best since Blindspott topped NZ charts last year.
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 THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT
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There's a difference between this hard-working bunch of youngsters and the many derivitive Korn-Clones on the market. The Butterfly Effect's sound seems to stem from the chunky riffs of the early 90s when playing heavy rock didn't depend on the amount of make-up you could put on. Their previous releases have peeked into the charts and live crowds are building due to busy touring schedules. With a little less drama in their video-clip performances these guys will surely be credible stars of the future. They have a strong voice in the form of Clint and the music couldn't possibly be tighter. A clear case of 'watch this space'.
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BUTTERFLY EFFECT E.P, THE
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THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT
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It’s tough to play this music in Australia; hard chunky riffs and melodic vocals. Many are trying to climb on board the hard-rock bandwagon and most don’t deserve to be there. The Butterfly Effect are touted as the next challengers and on the first listen I wasn’t convinced but my mind has changed after a study on the Whammo headphones. Clint has the potential to be a future vocal superstar and the precision of the band is unquestionable; a return to Helmet-style tight riffing is a relief amid the onslaught of Korn-wannabees. The real winning characteristic is The Butterfly Effect’s ability to craft a song and build a composition, including some powerful bridge sections. This self-titled EP is a definite grower and I’m intending to fertilize my ears with this disc until the walkman's batteries run out.
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BUTTERFLY EFFECT: ON TOUR
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May
13....Prince of Wales, Bunbury WA
14....Heat, Perth WA
15....Settlers Tavern, Margaret River WA
16....Newport Hotel, Fremantle WA |
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