BANANAGUN 'Why Is The Colour Of The Sky?' LP

Naarm-based Bananagun's highly anticipated follow up to debut album The True Story of Bananagun with "Why is the Colour of the Sky?" via Anti-Fade Records.

An album that departs from the ultra-slick bursts of sunshine-pop and afrobeat that defined ‘True Story… ‘, and muddies the waters with a heavy blend of incendiary jazz and freak-beat experimentation. It’s Bananagun alright, but braver, bolder and more mysterious than ever…

For one, the band’s creative process has been completely overhauled. On True Story…, all the songs and their constituent parts had been plotted individually by van Bakel, dished out among the band members individually, rigorously road-tested live for months, and then brought to the studio more or less fully formed. On Why is the Colour of the Sky?, that rigid process was forcibly ripped from its shackles. Songs were jammed out, written, then recorded in batches of two a week across the space of a month. It was a case of: learn the song on monday, record on Wednesday; rinse, and repeat. So, when the needle drops, and that scorching hot freak-beat bustle of opener, ‘Brave Child of New World” whips straight into top gear, what you’re hearing is that lighter-spark moment of a song coming to life for the very first time before the players’ very minds, energised by all the bleeds, blemishes and imperfections of a collective playing, and moving together as one soul.

And while those most schooled in the esoterica of the 60s could list of any number of psych-garage obscurities to which Bananagun might be indebted, and while van Bakel at least admits the growing influence of “Spiritual Jazz” on this record - heard especially on the cosmic voyages of ‘Feeding the Moon’ or the untamed orchestras of ‘With The Night’ - the creation of Why is the Colour… wasn’t so much driven by a particular fetishisation of or homage to the 1960s - by “this record” or “that playlist” - but was guided rather on a basis of a certain select philosophical and aesthetic principles that those great records of the past had been founded on.