Pricklier Than Thou

From M3P
Jump to navigation Jump to search

Sunday 26 September 2010 (Wayne Flask - Manic)

Wayne Flask meets Skimmed: mother’s milk is a distant memory.

“This girl who worked with the sound crew came up to me saying, your album is really cool, we’ve been playing it over and over again. I’m going to make copies it for my friends. I went bonkers. Do you know how much money a twenty two year old invests in making a record, I asked her angrily. These people really don’t care about you, they even say it to your face they’re going to copy your work...”

The half smile that had almost appeared on Skimmed’s Alexandra Aquilina’s face gives way to a disdainful grimace, like someone who’s just walked unscathed out of a drunken Montecarlo Tennis Club fete. Of course, you’d wonder whether at their age (Alex is 23, guitarist Daniel Borg a year older) they should still be channelling fury via their music or whether they should be looking at the benefits of a quiet life sat on a couch.

No, not for them: they carry an unequivocal enthusiasm on their sleeve, and if they’re mean onstage they can be equally piercing off it. But, mind you, what would our over friendly, dour coffee table music scene be without someone spilling the pint? More so when a couple of young ‘uns like these two turn up with a determined glimmer in their eye, making it clear they’re not the types you’ll want to bully.

Skimmed’s rapid emergence from the blissful nowhereness of garage days has caught the eye of many, if not the imagination. Their sound is a juvenile strand of the traditional blend of indie and punk that sweeps through you shamelessly fuelled by a block solid rhythm section and Alex’s vocals, which sound impeccably foreign. They don’t depart too much from the confines of their genre yet their songs are blessed, in most cases, with h word – the Hook. There again it’s what indie/punk/garage/callitwhatyouwish music is about – don’t go overboard, avoid people wearing linen, don’t get too friendly with those in flannel shirts, and get it done properly. In a scene where people who write three minute songs often let go of quality control, Skimmed are on the right track.

The band knows its humble beginnings in the school scene, back when Daniel was involved with other musicians in a project named Fade. “I still shudder when I hear that name,” he says half-blushing.

“It was a grungier type of music,” says Alex, who joined through the revolving doors of the band at the age of seventeen. “It was very different. There was no form of songwriting maturity, I was singing songs which Daniel had written for himself to sing, but weren’t really suitable to my voice. Eventually the keyboardist we had at the time quit the band and we started writing in a new way. At the time many people told us we were crap live.” Bassist Federico Cilia is the other mainstay of the band, while drummer auditions must have been frequent with the band claiming a total of 6 drummers in their rosters. “Fede, Daniel and I have very high standards, we are quite demanding of ourselves and of others,” says Alex, whom by now I can identify as the One Who Doesn’t Mince Words. “At one point we had a German drummer who recorded the EP [Your Head is too Big for Your Crown] with us, he was much older than we are. We were relaxed and everything wit him but he had a few issues. Recording with a forty year old who’d end up in tears isn’t really… you know. David [Vella] nursed him quite a bit in the studio and he knew he wouldn’t be around for long.”

Well known among the local gig circuit, they received an unusual if very welcome endorsement from Brikkuni’s singer/lyricist/mouthpiece Mario Vella. A few years back, Skimmed themselves would be seen at gigs of Vella’s previous band, the legendary Lumiere, together with other left of centre favourites such as Totema, BNI, Beangrowers and Dripht.

And while it’s easier to succumb to the temptation of pigeonholing their music, their influences are slightly different to what I first thought. “Well, the first remotely ‘rock’ thing I had ever listened to was Avril Lavigne,” says Alex. I ask her if she got picked on at school for that. “Yes, but that’s because I was the ‘rocker’. Let alone if I had been listening to Nirvana or the Smiths…”

“Fede on the other hand always loved ska and punk, he was into The Police, and then he changed very quickly. He started listening to the Pixies and just went crazy about them. I think he matured musically way before we did,” says Daniel.

There are a few parallels between their music and that of the other enfant terrible of Maltese punk, Areola Treat: the searing pace, their directness, less glitzy perhaps. “I think they’re more aggressive than us,” says Daniel, “in the sense that they have a bigger guitar sound influenced by American bands while we are mostly influenced by British bands. Lisa’s vocals are also more experimental and womanly while Alex’s are more child-like and punky. We have actually been placed in the middle-ground between Beangrowers and The Areola Treat.”

Throughout the album, you’d sense the feeling that David Vella’s Midas touch has had some bearing on the final product. “I think David Vella has given us a lot of things. We’ve introduced the synth,” says Daniel. “He had a clear idea of what he wanted us to sound like, which we hadn’t quite realised when we went into the studio. The first time he came into our rehearsal place he recommended a few bands we had never listened to before, say, the B-52’s. There were quite a few names. He encouraged us to try and sound darker, and our sound slowly began to more mature. He also taught us to be more disciplined with our instruments.”

While it is clear that Alex and Daniel share a huge portion of the songwriting duties, they are adamant that Skimmed is a collective process. “For us, the tune is simply not complete if Fede doesn’t nail a bass line he’s completely happy with. Some bands put songwriting merit on one person and I don’t think it’s fair. We all work together.”

Here perhaps, the “darkness” encouraged by the veteran producer – a mentor for most – should hopefully find a way of seeping into the lyrics, which bear too much on how young the band sounds, confining it to younger audiences by nature of its easy, poppy rhyming. At some point in time, like some of their drummers, they will get tired of writing about drinking or boys who liked crack and see themselves growing ‘older’. Think the Arctic Monkeys’ transformation for their third album, and the future is rosy.

Surely the title to their debut EP, Your Head is Too Big for Your Crown must have some origin worthy of mention. “To tell the truth I don’t remember when we decided on it. But it makes a lot of sense to us. Many people in Malta are bigheads who believe they’re gods or saviours of some sort. They’d be people who will go round making people think they’re someone important without really being the case.

“It’s not politicians I’m referring to here. There are things that are much closer to home that are not working. It happens in local music, some people think they’re doing something great for the scene but a lot of it is happening for the sake of helping friends and so on. If you say a word against that you’ll get hounded. You see a lot of crap on Facebook, as soon as someone raises his voice against something they get attacked. We’ve had our own situations, like others organising gigs on the same date as our EP launch. We’ve been accused of being envious by people who do such things who then go around bragging they’re doing something for Malta’s live scene,” says Alex adamantly.

Opening track Can’t Stop, a quirky ska track that would be comfortable on indie dancefloors around the isle did make it to the radios “by some freak accident” although other submissions weren’t so fortunate. “One particular radio station even congratulated us for our efforts even though they told us they wouldn’t be playing [followup single first song on video] Napoleon. It made us sound like we were trying out some heavy avant-garde stuff,” says Daniel, his chuckle of sarcastic disbelief surfacing once more.

They rue, primarily, a local scene which lacks venues and a general lack of music culture. And… “There are lots of crappy bands who make it to the radio or to Eurovision who do a lot of harm and give the scene a bad reputation because they try to do what they are not capable of doing. There are good bands in Malta... it ticks me off because most people only have a passive interest in music. They don’t go to gigs.”

Quiet life on a couch? No, not yet. They plan to record an album where nobody, really, is expecting them to do much more within a genre that is as catchy as confining. They are, however, a band that has matured through the ages and has an immense potential to keep it going. Don’t count on them running out of steam.