Bananagun - Why Is The Colour Of The Sky? LP

To say that the intervening 4 years since the arrival of their debut album had been tumultuous for Melbourne/Naarm’s Bananagun would be an understatement. Released during the height of lockdown in the summer of 2020, the group were forcibly “scattered” following the release of The True Story of Bananagun. Australia’s ultra-strict lockdown rules - declaring it illegal to travel beyond a 5km radius - made it nigh on impossible for the band to get together at all, with the only rehearsals requiring them to sneak past military checkpoints undetected.

Coinciding with this too was a great period of personal change for the band’s guitarist/vocalist/flautist, and songwriter Nick van Bakel.“ "I had a myriad of mountains to be crossed which was pretty challenging” he explains. “so I just cocooned into lots of spiritual side quests and soul seeking. Band members were travelling etc so it was ages before we got through the stop-start stop-start phase and regained some band momentum…”

This climate of upheaval does not go unheard on the band’s long-awaited follow-up, ‘Why is the colour of the Sky?’. While it’s by no means a pessimistic work - far from it - it’s 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.