Dunedin band Ash and the Matadors spent a week in a freezing-cold hall on Otago Peninsula to craft their new album An Evening Echo, writes Shane Gilchrist.
Talk about holidays with a difference.
The last break taken by Dunedin band Ash and the Matadors involved hunkering down in an old hall at Hoopers Inlet, on Otago Peninsula.
As snow and freezing winds rattled the windows in August, singer-songwriter Ash Officer and bandmates Spencer Morgan (bass guitar), Jared Smith (lead guitar and backing vocals) and Glen Kellett (drums) battled the cold, power vagaries and weird radio interference for a week.
The result: their debut album, An Evening Echo.
Now, the quartet have booked some more time off, a fortnight in fact, as they prepare to celebrate their album launch with a 12-date South Island tour that begins in Invercargill this weekend, sweeps up the West Coast to Nelson and winds up at Dunedin venue XII Below on Saturday, November 19.
"We've managed to get a people-mover and will take a couple of friends with us," Officer explains. "It's a pretty small posse of six."
Ash and the Matadors formed about two years ago, though the connections go back further.
Having met at high school in Invercargill, Officer and Morgan played together in various bands before Officer headed overseas. On his return to Dunedin, he resumed his musical connection with Morgan, who had also found another musical friend in Smith. Kellett is the latest addition to the line-up, joining the band earlier this year.
"Our tastes in music are quite varied," Officer says. "I write the songs and I like a lot of British music, but our stuff has a bit of Southern rock, some of that Creedence, Lynyrd Skynyrd stuff ... it's all based on good melodies and good lyrics."
Though some bands have the luxury of spending months or years on albums, this wasn't the case for Ash and the Matadors' self-released debut.
"From the moment we started recording in mid-August, when that brutal storm hit the whole country, until we release it this week, it has only been a couple of months; it's been quite an intense period," Officer says of An Evening Echo, which was recorded by Mike Holland and mixed and mastered by Dale Cotton.
"We did percussion and guitar overdubs at Jarred and Glen's house and I did vocals at Albany St, but the skeleton of the album was done in that eventful week at Hoopers Inlet," Officers says.
"We are pretty happy with the sound we got from that hall. When we first got out there it was super-echoey, but we took some mattresses and managed to get a few things to soak up the sound.
"This album is like a time capsule. There is an acoustic song, a couple of love ballads, a 10-minute thing with a big instrumental section ... it's a good representation of what we do."
See, hear them
Ash and the Matadors An Evening Echo is out now.
• The band plays the following dates in the South:
• Brifest, Invercargill, tonight
• Blue Duck, Milford Sound, Monday, November 7
• Redcliffe Cafe, Te Anau, Tuesday, November 8
• Red Rock Cafe, Queenstown, Wednesday, November 9
• Opium, Wanaka, Thursday, November 10
• XII Below, Dunedin, Saturday, November 19
