MIDNIGHT JUGGERNAUTS - MIDNIGHT SPINS ON THE AXIS
Published: Music Australia Guide #77, June 2010.

Spanning two years and countless settings, the making of Midnight Juggernauts’ The Crystal Axis was a genuine meeting of minds. MAG’s Dan Rule joins the forum. 

Despite the endless international tours, rapturous acclaim and their standing at the head of “indie-dance”, Midnight Juggernauts were never about to rest on their laurels.

Three years on from unleashing their genre-defining 2007 debut Dystopia on an unsuspecting international music community, the Melbourne trio have consciously and unapologetically changed their stripes.

“We’re not at all sure how people are going to take this record,” says drummer Daniel Stricker of divergent new record The Crystal Axis. “It might polarise some of our fans,” he pauses, pushing a stray lock from his face. “But I don’t think that’s a bad thing at all.”

The sentiment speaks volumes about the band’s outlook. Chatting over a beer or two at Melbourne venue the East Brunswick Club, the trio are nothing if not creatively ambitious. Indeed, if there’s one theme that emerges when broaching The Crystal Axis, it’s that the band were unafraid to challenge both themselves and their listeners.   

“Whether people like it or not, I guess this new album established the fact that we’re a band who are going to make the records we want to make,” urges guitarist Andy Szekeres. “I know we all have this idea in our minds that we’d like to make lots of albums and really different albums over a number of years.”

Adds vocalist Vincent Vendetta: “It’s too easy to just keep doing these songs that rely on a four/four beat.”

In many ways, the group’s line of creative enquiry comes as little of a surprise. Despite having only graced the stage for half a decade, the trio have amassed a career’s worth of international touring experience, hype and hyperbole. Put simply, they’ve had to grow up fast.

Founded by old school friends Szekeres and Vendetta in 2004, Stricker joined then duo the following year, before they dropped a pair of EPs – 2005’s self-titled debut and 2006’s Secrets of the Universe – on Cut Copy’s in-house imprint Cutters. It wasn’t long before the trio’s star was on the rise with the tracks like the ripplingg, synth-washed groove of Shadows becoming an underground club hit. Remix work for the likes of The Presets, Dragonette and Detroit disco-garage sextet Electric Six followed and by the time they’d come to record brilliant 2007 debut album Dystopia, the group’s mash of brooding prog-infused cinematics, spacious Bowie-esque pop and raw, bass-driven dance music had seen them anointed the kings of a new, press-coined sub-genre dubbed “indie-dance”.

Released via their own label Siberia Records, the album saw them become take the Australian live scene by storm and by the time the trio re-released the record overseas in 2008, they were already fixtures of the international touring circuit. The played festival shows at Coachella, Fuji Rock, Glastonbury, Montreaux Jazz Festival and Big Day Out and earned plaudits from the likes of French electro kings Justice and Sebastian Tellier among others.

When they finally found themselves back on home shores in early 2009, Vendetta, Szekeres and Stricker were all but spent. “We toured Dystopia for such a long time that we just needed a break from each other,” says Stricker. “I think we felt a little dislocated.”

It wasn’t long until the creative fire returned. They loaded up the van with gear and decamped to an old holiday house on north coast of New South Wales, where they began to piece together the ideas for The Crystal Axis.

As Szekeres explains, playing live together for such a period time added a new dynamic to the sessions. “A lot of what ended up on the record it is just us in a room, jamming and playing things out, which really reflected the process,” he says. “The drums and guitars, they were all really long takes and not really edited down. So it was very much a performance in that sense, with more imperfections and kind of happy accidents.”

It’s a quality that permeates the finished record. Where Dystopia pulsed with dance floor energy, The Crystal Axis flourishes with loose, band dynamics and a vastly more organic pop timbre. While still brimming with electronic nuances and the band’s trademark synth-heavy sound, cuts like Lara Versus The Savage Pack and the swirling obscura of Virago veer so far as gritty, psych-drenched soul. For Midnight Juggernauts, the record’s diversity is a source of pride. 

“You kind of forget how once you release music it just spreads out there and takes on this life of its own and enters people’s lives,” says Vendetta. “You really want to make sure that you’re proud of what you put out there.”

“Like, we were online a while ago and realised this guy had tattooed the lyrics to one of our songs on his arm, so from that point on I kind of realised how seriously you have to take it,” he laughs

Indeed, for Midnight Juggernauts, The Crystal Axis represents more than just another record. Rather, it’s a meeting of the minds.

“There are songs that have origins in the south of France, origins in Japan and origins at this holiday house, but they’re all kind of filtered through the three of us to create the record,” says Vendetta.

“It was three people coming together and crystallise what our sound will be for the next however many years.”

The Crystal Axis is out via Siberia/Inertia

Visit: midnightjuggernauts.com

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