After a difficult gestation, Outland Brothers are set to release their debut LP ‘God Is Drunk In Charge’.
The story of how the Outland Brothers came to be makes one think fate played a hand in bringing the band together. First meeting in London, frontman Esme MacDonald and fellow bandmates, Matthew Aulich and Paul Shilton, all found themselves with women who shared something in common; they all hailed from Adelaide. And that’s how fate conspired to bring the lads from the other side of the world, to Adelaide.
Chatting to Esme MacDonald about their debut of their first album, ‘God Is Drunk In Charge’, it’s a record that almost never got made. “There have been plenty of times along the way where I felt like giving up on these songs, because it's been a pretty difficult gestation to put it mildly, and I feel like it's a bit of an achievement to actually get them out,” he says.
“Especially because I’ve left South Australia and one of the band members is still there, I suppose I could have given up on it but I haven't… these particular set of songs kept knocking in my brain going, 'no, we need to come out'.”
The first half of the album was recorded in a straw-bale studio down a dusty, South Australian road.
However, life intervened and Esme found himself relocating to Victoria where the second half of the album would eventually get made; this time in a small cottage in the rainforests of the Yarra Valley. “We went from one very dusty place to one very rainy place. I guess while the rainy place for me, coming from Britain, was nice because there was a lot of rain, but it was a fairly depressing time for me, because I moved over to Victoria and I was going through divorce and family break-up, that kind of thing, and basically sitting in this beautiful cottage but in an incredibly rainy dark place, down in the Yarra Valley.”
It was this dark period of Esme’s life that ended up influencing a lot of the songs on the album, as well as the album title. “I guess the idea of ‘God Is Drunk In Charge’, is God's not really doing it the way I want God to do it, if you see what I mean, therefore he must be drunk because I’m not getting what I want,” Esme laughs.
“I always think of that Nick Cave song, with the line about the interventionist God, and sometimes you look at the state of the world and you find it hard to believe that there's anybody intervening, and yet it would seem that if God was in control of things, that he's certainly not in control of it at the moment, and may have had a few ales!”
‘God Is Drunk In Charge’ is released 28 August.
Written by Mardi Reason
Outland Brothers Tour Dates
Fri 28 Aug - The Loft (Gold Coast)Sat 29 Aug - Treehouse On Belongil (Byron Bay)
Sun 30 Aug - The Junk Bar (Brisbane)
Sat 26 Sep - Little Gig In The Hills (Adelaide)
Sun 27 Sep - Grace Emily (Adelaide)
