Yukon Era frontman Christian Dimick gives us a track-by-track look into the Auckland band’s new EP, Consume and Scratch.
Photo: Supplied
This is part of a regular series called Verse Chorus Verse which sees local artists break down the stories behind their music. For more, click here.
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High Handed
We wanted to start the EP off with something loud and in your face, so we thought that out of all the songs we had for the EP High Handed did it the best. It's about watching people manipulate others while not actually realising they are doing it, or the person who is being manipulated doesn't realise they are being manipulated, if that makes any sense.
Interlude
I had this little one minute instrumental guitar song that I thought sounded kind of cool and I showed it to all the boys before we went into the studio and we just decided to record it. We fleshed it out a bit by adding some grand piano which we were really psyched on when we recorded it. We added it in second on the tracklist because we thought it would be interesting and maybe a little unexpected.
Consume and Scratch
We all honestly thought this song was about four minutes long until we recorded it and were told by Olly that it was almost seven minutes long. It's really interesting to watch people grow and develop their views on the world as they get older (myself included).
Consume And Scratch is about how I think some people in particular look at life. I think the lyrics could be taken a bunch of different ways as they are pretty broad, but that might be a good thing because I hope some people might be able to paste their own feelings or situations into the song – that would be really cool.
Echoes
We have been playing this song live for a while now, so it feels good to able to finally release a studio version. When we recorded this one, I really wanted to capture the live energy of the song and I think we did that. The song is mainly about being able to get up and move on after something bad happens, I guess.
Senile
This song is pretty personal and specifically about someone who I used to know, so I don't want to go too in depth. I can just say that it is about someone who I was friends with as a child and my view on their life. We thought it was a cool way to end the EP because the music calms down a bit but then at the end there is a big kind of noisy explosion. We also did some additional instrumentation on this song adding violin, piano and glockenspiel which was a bonus as we had some leftover time in the studio.
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