ISSUE 5
MUSIC
Where West Auckland meets Midwest Emo: An interview with Melanie By Reece Skelley (he/him)
Self-proclaimed semi-professional music guy Reece Skelley trekked to Morningside to have a chat with three-quarters of the boys from “Mid-West-Auckland Emo” trailblazers Melanie - specifically, Robin Davey Lusk (guitars), and brothers James (guitars/lead vocals) and William Dentice (bass/ backing vocals). This interview doubled as a special occasion, since it lines up with the second anniversary of their debut album ‘42 Losers’. DoBros were drunk and yarns were had for a good half-hour - here’s an abridged transcription of that exchange.
Reece: We’ll get a bit of basic band history down first; you guys met at SAE? James: Robin and I met at SAE with our first drummer De Stevens. In November 2017, Robin wanted to do a late 90s/early 2000s themed birthday party, and he wanted a band to play a whole bunch of shitty pop-punk covers… So you can imagine, like Elemeno P, we played ‘Basket Case’... William: Didn’t you guys play ‘The Anthem’? J: ‘The Anthem’, ‘The Sweater Song’, just lots of great singalongs… Robin: ‘Stacy’s Mum’! J: Stacy’s Mum! Max’s Mum! And Max’s mum’s name is Melanie? R: That's the one! The band’s lineup shuffled a little; while Jordan Randall-Whiu was in the party lineup, Will came into the fold when the boys were asked to open for Lookin’ Up at Whammy. Later on, De also eventually made way for current drummer Joe Gasparich. J: We didn’t have any songs for the gig! We didn’t have anything sussed, and it was in two weeks, so we went to my mum’s garage R: and we got about 15 minutes of material (2018’s Melon EP) and yeah, it was sweet. And now you’ve got way more! You’ve got 42 Losers, you’ve got the ABCD EP, they both absolutely slap.
J/R/W: Thank you, man. What’s the challenge of making midwest emo in midwest Auckland? W: It’s very American, I think we’re just very super inspired by that kind of stuff. We blend the pop-punky side and also some of the “sad boi” stuff, but not too much. J: I’d like to think if we were over there, that’s the scene we’d fit into comfortably. And it’s hard to “genre-fy” a punk band these days. R: So many niches. J: But as soon as you get past the two-factor “emo or pop-punk” it starts getting really wanky and you gotta slap the vague “punk” label on it. Like, I tell work mates I’m in a pop-punk band and they go “wow, I was really expecting like, bubblegum, Blink-182” kinda things. I can see the Remo Drive LP on the shelf, so definitely not bubblegum! R: The challenge is there’s not really a midwest scene here. J: And it’s hard to do it without sounding super derivative of what’s going on over there, there’s a lot of cliches you can fall into making that kind of music, and we try our best not to fall into a lot of them. It’s tricky to do in that genre. W: Well James is the main songwriter and I think he’s doing a pretty good job of not falling into that.
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