In what is likely their most varied album to date, Mikelangelo & The Black Sea Gentlemen take us on a journey to 1950s' rural Australia.
The album, ‘After The Flood’, uncovers the real-life stories of 100,000 men and women who immigrated from Europe to be a part of the Snowy Mountain Scheme. Though both the band and Mikelangelo released EPs last year, the album is the band’s first in three years and the enthusiasm and energy really shows with all five members laying down vocals for the first time.
Crooner, troubadour and raconteur, Mikelangelo kindly took the time to elucidate a few things for us, ahead of the album’s release. “You’d never say that it's fusion or something like that. Like it just isn't.
"Everything is quite specific within [the album], but I think it's somehow brought together by how we all share an ethos, which is a great thing to have in a band, and that's why the band has continued for 15 years and I don't see any reason why we have to stop. It's good having a name like The Black Sea Gentlemen because there's absolutely no reason why you can't be doing it when you're 90 as well.
“I don't think it's a retrograde thing, even though all of us love a lot of other eras. We've all had a past playing rock or what you would broadly call contemporary music and I think what we do, in our own way, fits within that. But I think we pick up all different things that we like regardless of the era, but to some degree there would be an ethos where it's predominantly acoustic instrumentation.
"So you know, occasionally an electric guitar sneaks in there or there's some drums on a track or so forth. But I mean for the most part we've decided that the way we put those sounds out is with a certain set of instrumentation and even though that's a really broad power it generally stops short of heavy-electric instrumentation, which is a kind of fun way to support the lyrics. And I think in a way the stories are the instruments. I think it's something we've never really talked about, but if someone came in with a kick drum it'd be a bit confusing.”
After 15 years together on both sides of the equator, the group have a fair amount of experience examining different cultures. “When we played in Europe, we used to, for years, keep up the ruse that we were European.
“I think I was about halfway through this interview, this was ten years ago with the Sydney Morning Herald, and [the journalist] was getting really confused [Mikelangelo was interviewing as his stage persona] because in journalism sometimes people can worry about what the real story is with bands, when people are already fabricating stories in much more important spheres like, you know, war and world politics.”
While combining elements of comedy, romance and tragedy, the album’s content also draws from a personal attachment to the Snowy Mountain Scheme. “To go back a little further, my dad worked on the Snowy Scheme, he's a Croatian guy, this massive personality. The Gentlemen all love him, he's quite an inspiration to us. I've been writing songs for years and some of them had this other thread of these slightly Euro tunes and I didn’t quite know where they came from.”
‘After The Flood’ is available now. Mikelangelo and The Black Sea Gentlemen play The Polish Club (Canberra) 10 June and Peak Festival (Perisher) 11-12 June.
