- GREAT GABLE -
Photo by Charlie Hardy
BIO
What a day, what a time, what a life.
Perth four piece Great Gable present their latest offering, the radiant celebration that is On The Wall In The Morning Light, released on 8th July 2022. Following on from their 2020 debut Tracing Faces, the band return with a sound simultaneously more refined and unshackled, uplifted and introspective, deftly considered and spontaneously energetic.
Hyped and home after completing recording for Tracing Faces at the end of 2019, Great Gable held onto the high of the making of their first record and immediately jumped into writing new material, continuing virtually non-stop until it came time to record in July of 2021, in a totally different world.
The band - comprising Alex Whiteman (vocals), Matt Preen (guitar), Callum Guy (drums) and Christopher Bye (bass) - worked separately during lockdown and together in between, and arrived at Matt Corby’s newly minted Rainbow Valley Studios with some thirty songs in the bank. With Corby and Alex Henriksson in the producer’s chairs there was a welcome familiarity to the process and with Corby very literally in his element and the band living and working on site for close to a month, the process of recording was fluid. Recording the new material from scratch, the band aimed to retain an elegant simplicity to the more direct and potent batch of songs, with guitars purposely brought to the fore.
What emerged in the shape of On The Wall In The Morning Light is a record brimming with youthful exuberance balanced by a confidence that comes with experience, a new level of sophistication not at the expense of f.u.n. - it’s Great Gable’s propulsively rhythmic, evocative guitar-driven rock’n’roll enriched with experience.
Opening stanza Dancing Shoes sets the pace at a hot simmer, a dependable drum and bass foundation keeping things on track and allowing the pot to overflow with abandon every time the chorus hits. Another Day is a boisterous slow dance of disillusion, a sunbaked groove to shake off the naysayer in the noggin, while Sidewalk offers possible solutions in the shape of a more quietly confident, delicately dynamic loud and quiet combination bolstered by subtle synthesizer and a bare breakdown. Our Love feels lived in, like a relationship that’s been around the block but has survived and is strong, it’s gently chiming, weaving guitar lines a metaphor for the comfortable ease and loving rapport that comes with contentment. On Hazy they channel early 2000s skinny tie New York but with an optimism far too earnest for those times, before When I Grow Up starts slowly before taking off in the direction of modern psych’s most free and frivolous.
Album closer Do You Belong is the closest Great Gable come to a slacker-style epic send off, laconically posing the question “where do I belong?” Having set out to make a record with no expectations and coming back with On The Wall In The Morning Light, something they couldn’t be happier with, Great Gable may have found their place.
ON THE WALL IN THE MORNING LIGHT IS OUT NOW