With a string of EPs under his belt, Adelaide’s homegrown rocker Max Savage and his band The False Idols are ready to release their first, full-length studio album.
After releasing the nostalgic lead single ‘True Believers’ (also the album title) last month, Max and the band have set April dates for their upcoming south-eastern Australian tour.
Written under the stars at his sister’s farm in the Central Desert, the single references past governments, in particular how Max’s youthful eyes saw them, and reminisces about the feelings associated with perception changes. "'True Believers’ is a song about Mark Latham, because I can remember the 2004 election campaign really, really clearly.
"It was the first election campaign that I was really conscious of. It felt like something momentous was about to happen. Here was this chaotic, bold, unpredictable firecracker of a man, who was announcing these crazy policies left, right and centre and then he sort of imploded,” Max explains.
“The political process in Australia went from this amazing, broad consensus to the backbiting and backstabbing that we see today. At the same time that that process went, Mark Latham went from being this incredibly promising and super-smart intellectual of the Labor movement to being an angry, discredited man, who no one had an interest in. I think it feels a lot like that: going from being in high school to going into adulthood. There's a lot of things that seem incredible, that gradually lose their shine.”
Since stepping away from their Americana style, the band have channelled the best of ’80s and ‘90s Aussie rock into their new release. Though the album itself wasn’t written with the intention to tell a single story, it's obvious that, as chief songwriter, Max’s talents for storytelling have been well influenced, with some of the greatest singer-songwriters in the business such as Paul Kelly and The Go-Betweens. “[The album] is written much more as a collection of gut feelings, more than anything else,” Max explains.
The entire album embraces the hard-hitting vocals and chorus of guitar players well-known during that era, which Max says ignites the power of familiarity and memories that really connects audiences to music. “The power of association is incredibly strong. Like the cassette tape in your first crap car when you're 16… or the CD that your dad bought in a bargain bin for $7… That kind of stuff has an amazingly strong pull on our hearts and our minds.
“‘True Believers’ is about nostalgia and the past, it's about people hanging on. It's about your backyard and people you know. It's textures and sounds that are familiar but uncertain; it's the long drone of AM radio, dry, brown grass and white bread and fritz,” Max says.
This new record has been the work of Max and the band for well over two years, and the team are keen to get back on the road and share it with Australia. With full intentions to put on a “hell of a live show”, the charismatic frontman is confident their music will blow you away.
“[Touring] is a totally different art to recording it and that's really exciting… This is a group of musicians that do what they do better than just about anyone else out there. It just leads to an experience that is overwhelmingly good.”
Max Savage And The False Idols Tour Dates
Fri 8 Apr - Dogs Bar (Melbourne)Sat 9 Apr - The Catfish (Melbourne)
Sun 24 Apr - Jive (Adelaide)
