Thinking & Making by Great Earthquake
Melbourne's maestro of the loop pedal Great Earthquake returns with his third album Thinking & Making.
Like the album’s first single ‘Learn to Love the Ordinary’, Thinking & Making is unhurried and meditative and further investigates Great Earthquake's (AKA Noah Symons, drummer with Last Leaves) recent dalliances with lyric repetition as an added texture in his layered, largely instrumental post-rock.
Written and recorded spontaneously when time would allow whilst raising young children, Thinking & Making was a largely solitary affair, Noah making good use of an old stables next-door to his home in the inner-northern suburb of Carlton to track drums, bass, guitars, melodica and glockenspiel.
The raw, unfettered approach to composition and recording lends a dreamy ebb and flow to the album; Weirdo Wasteland’s Doug Wallen recently described Great Earthquake as “a mercurial one-man-band, wrangling miniature whirlwinds of itchy indie pop before letting them dissolve back into the ether”.
Lyrically, Thinking & Making tackles the trials of everyday life, from words of encouragement to a friend struggling with depression (‘Talk About’) to Noah’s own human frailties owing to leaving his youth behind and feeling less than equipped in entering parenthood (‘I Wasn’t Made to be Robust’).
‘Neko & Noah Jam’ meanwhile centres around a sample of the artist’s two-year-old daughter’s emphatic voice (“Jump, jump, jump – we’re making music!”), immersing it in jazzy drums and Sea & Cake-esque guitar lines.
The eight-minute instrumental workout ‘The Sound of the City’ is Noah’s response to moving to the big smoke and becoming sonically engulfed, having lived outside the city his whole life. “The city sounds were heightened and all around me. The rhythm and the feeling.”
Thinking & Making is a collection of tactile, immediate and unpolished odes to keeping it real. As Noah sings – “Learn to love the ordinary, engage the senses, enjoy the feeling”.
Tracklist
| 1. | State I'm In | 3:14 |
| 2. | Learn to Love the Ordinary | 3:48 |
| 3. | I Wasn't Made to Be Robust | 4:29 |
| 4. | The Sound of the City | 8:05 |
| 5. | Talk About | 4:29 |
| 6. | Neko and Noah Jam | 2:01 |
| 7. | The Sound of Moving | 4:33 |
| 8. | You Are Not Alone | 4:15 |
Credits
Played, recorded and mixed by Noah Symons in Melbourne, Australia. Mastered by Mikey Young.
