Hands Like Houses Are Pumped For Froth & Fury

‘It doesn’t matter if you play to one person or a million people, every show matters and every single performance matters because you don’t know the reasons as to why that person is there or whatever it is, it might just tick something over where they express themselves in a way that they might not have even been aware of.’

Josh Raven, the freshly unwrapped from the packaging singer in Hands Like Houses tells me while regaling us with a story about what Adelaide means to him. For his new band will be here at Froth & Fury Festival next month and anchoring us is original member and bassist Joel Tyrrell who tells us his favorite Adelaide memory.

Josh: ‘Somewhere around 2014, 15 maybe, we were playing in Adelaide at, I’m pretty sure it was called Enigma Bar. It was upstairs, it was dark and I remember we played this show, it was a sold out show, kind of had all the classic features of a sweaty kind of upstairs dark, dingy kind of venue. We got maybe, 10 songs through the set, all of a sudden the entire crowd has just moved from the venue onto the stage and it was mayhem. We’re not a punk or hardcore band, usually everything’s relatively contained in the mosh pit. Everyone jumps around, does their thing, has fun, goes back to it. This was just a show where I couldn’t reach my pedals. People were literally standing on my pedal and the only thing I could do was just back up to the drum kit and stand there and play with whatever was going on. There were just people everywhere. It must’ve sounded so bad that it was at the point where no one would’ve cared because the whole vibe was just that everyone was losing their mind. I didn’t even know if I was playing anything. I was probably in the wrong tuning, who knows what was going on. I just remember playing there and being like, whoa, Adelaide’s always going to have a special place.’

So, lets back up, Hands Like Houses have been around for more than decade, released multiple albums then a year ago change their singer bringing in Raven from West Australian band The Faim. In ten months the band have dropped ten songs – with another teasingly ready to drop – in what seems a selection of EP’s building towards a greater concept yet bizarrely only played eight shows. Froth & Fury will put it to nine. Raven wasn’t the only singer either. It’s been a whirlwind year.

Josh: ‘I guess the crux behind a lot of it is that obviously the first song being ‘Heaven’ was that there wasn’t necessarily a thought or intention of me joining the band straight away. It was like the concept for the album was quite different. It was like you have different artists to bring their art form into something, and the guys of Hands Like Houses bring their obviously crazy good instrumentation and writing capabilities into these songs and that’s why there’s quite a few features on what we’re doing. The best thing about it is that once we started writing, especially ‘Heaven’, was this actually feels really good. This actually feels like something that’s super positive, super empowering for everyone to get their own vision across as a band. It is a bit different coming into it from an outside perspective of what we’re doing, but really being friends and just being creatives, trying to create something that we love doing and we enjoy, it all just felt really good. That’s been the main thing amongst all of this is that we love it, we enjoy it. As the development of these songs get released and as we announce further things that come along, it’s the progression of really us as a group, as a band and as people, as we tour.’

Joel: ‘I guess just looping back onto what Josh said is something we haven’t actually spoke about a lot which is that there was a lot of these features at the start because we didn’t actually have intentions of having a singer. The four of us in the band made this decision of we just want to keep writing music. It’s been part of our lives for so long and we didn’t want to lose what we had been creating together. So our original intention was actually just let’s write music with anyone that wants to make music with us. Let’s write with friends, let’s reach out to people, let’s just see what happens when we kind of expanded and I guess the original concept was like maybe we don’t have a singer, maybe we just write music and that’s how we go. We written these songs with Matt Wright from The Getaway Plan, Aaron Gillespie from Underoath and Emmy Mack from RedHook and we’d been building momentum in that section. When we wrote ‘Heaven’ with Josh, we all just knew at the time wow, this is definitely a different experience. Very quickly we knew this just sounds and feels good.’

Hurts Like Hell recently dropped featuring Swedes Normandie however for anyone who seen the band, their live show has always been vibrant, with Froth & Fury next in line now a short stint in Asia has been completed.

Josh: ‘What we want is people to leave the show being like, you know what? We had fun. We felt a part of something that was great and a community. We love music for our own individual reasons and all these sorts of things, for what makes music something that surpasses music. We do it because the people that we meet and the people that connect with our music make it bigger than us and make it something that’s so beautiful and so tangible.’

Something special and unique is brewing in the Hands Like Houses camp with what we’ve been served so far nothing more than appetisers, however the guys pay their cards close to their chest.

Joel: ‘Pretty soon we’ll be able to announce what we have been working on, where all these songs are leading, how they all make sense together and how to package that in a way that makes sense for us. As soon as we kick into the start of next year, we’re doing a twenty five date regional run with the Butterfly Effect. That’s our moment to go we have a body of work, we’re playing a lot of shows. We have been writing more music in the last year or so with Josh than we’ve written in the last seven or eight years collectively. So there’s a lot of music and there’s a lot of ideas, but it could go anywhere, it could go heavier, it could go lighter, it could go weirder, it could go strange. There’s so many different directions of what is coming out of all of us in these writing spaces.’

And one last word for the poetic Josh about his Adelaide experiences as it’s the bands net stop.

Josh: ‘People bring themselves and want to be a part of every experience. That was Adelaide for us, we saw people bring themselves which is beautiful. Really beautiful.’

Interview By Iain McCallum

Catch Hands Like Houses at Froth & Fury Festival at Harts Mill, Port Adelaide on Saturday November 9. Tickets from MoshTix…