Bluebottle Kiss Announce The Vinyl Reissue Of Their Classic 2002 Album ‘Revenge Is Slow’
In 2002, Sydney band Bluebottle Kiss released their fourth album, Revenge Is Slow, containing 50 minutes of expansive indie and experimental art rock. A kind of melodic, baroque psychedelic pop that captured the musical ambition and songwriting craft of the band at the height of their success.
“It was an album that was colourful and imaginative, but somehow accessible too,” reflects singer, guitarist, and songwriter Jamie Hutchings.
The album’s trio of singles – Gangsterland, Ounce of Your Cruelty, and Father’s Hands – received widespread airplay on triple j, spearheading highly successful regional and suburban gigs across the country, with bands such as Sounds Like Sunset, Faker, The Panics, and Speedstar, and an appearance at Homebake the same year.
Now, 24 years later, the album receives its first release on vinyl, in limited edition, 2LP, green and black variants, courtesy of Australian indie label Love As Fiction Records.
Spread across three sides to ensure the highest quality listening experience, the songs were prepared from the original tapes by Chris Colquhoun in Sydney before being remastered and cut to a master lacquer at Telegraph in SF, USA, by Adam Gonsalves.
Side four adds an additional five bonus tracks. Freeway Made Of Ice and Dear Road were extra tracks on the Ounce of Your Cruelty CD single, while Your Snow, Goodnight Believer, and Pruning the Friend Tree appeared on the bonus disc accompanying the following album, Come Across.
To celebrate the announcement of the reissue, the band release the new remastered version of their hugely popular single Gangsterland (#23 on the ARIA Alternative Singles Chart in 2002) b/w a live version of Rust and the Time, recorded at Northcote Social Club in 2024, plus a superb new video clip by Ben deHoedt, director of the Glide documentary Disappear Here.
The song, with Richard Coneliano’s iconic propellant drumming, and its dark guitar twang, is a character study of bad tidings and things gone wrong. Julie, Jimmy, and Johnny are in a bad situation.
In the three years between the album Patient and the release of Revenge Is Slow, Bluebottle Kiss relocated to America for three months, before returning to Australia and, in a significant move, expanded to a quartet, with the addition of Ben Grounds on bass and Ben Fletcher shifting from bass to guitar—alongside Hutchings, and drummer Richard Coneliano.
Hutchings and Fletcher’s musical relationship is an intuitive one and so when Fletcher started playing guitar, it was immediately understood that it wouldn’t be a compensatory approach, whereby he just doubled and thickened things, but a textural one.
“Fletch was and is musically astute; he would sometimes not play at all, leaving space for dynamics to build, and then weave his sweet and cloudy atmosphere around my often more ragged playing,” explains Hutchings. “I purposefully thinned out my guitar sound a little as it was paramount that the two separate musical approaches be heard. In many ways, our guitar chemistry was similar to our vocal chemistry, a bit of sweet and sour, sugar and snot.”
During this period, Hutchings began to further explore the possibilities of his craft as a songwriter, leaning further into poetic eloquence and wide-ranging musical vistas. “There was a desire to go beyond being an indie rock band and instead to be something a little more expansive—musically and lyrically,” he reveals. “I do think my writing grew in sophistication; I got more and more into open tunings, and I think that on this album my lyrics felt much more complete. Some kind of dance goes on between the abstruse and the literal on this that really works, I think.”
During our time in the States in 2000, a number of albums were being released that had a more ‘widescreen’ approach. It’d be a lie to say they didn’t rub off on us. I’m thinking of albums like The Soft Bulletin by The Flaming Lips or And Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out by Yo La Tengo,” says Hutchings. “Many of these albums seemed to have been born from older touchstones that were important to us. Albums like Pet Sounds by The Beach Boys, Third Sister Lovers by Big Star, and Astral Weeks by Van Morrison.”
When it came time to record the album, rather than go to a lavish studio, the band prioritised recording in a situation where they would have more time to embellish the songs without stressing over the clock. “We took over a large room at a rehearsal studio in Kogarah for two weeks, hired a two-inch tape machine and some extra outboard gear, which David Trumpmanis commandeered with extreme skill. David was extremely enthusiastic about the project and was an invaluable asset to the whole experience, as was Tim Whitten, who mixed the album.”
GANGSTERLAND IS OUT NOW VIA LOVE AS FICTION RECORDS,
ON BANDCAMP, STREAMING SERVICES, AND AMRAP
