This is how I keep it real.

Back in April, one of my favourite bands of all time announced that they needed a new vocalist. With my own band's stability in a tough spot, and having already an existing relationship with main-man Robin Staps through my journalism and promotional work, it was a no-brainer. I would try out for The Ocean, and willingly relocate to Europe to be a part of the band if things worked out. I had three weeks on the road to sit on the idea, and I came back with a fierce determination for that position. I hit up my mate Dan Field @ Studio 454 and we recorded three massive sounding tracks, replacing existing vocals with my own. Dan really pushed me and got the best result possible. I was screaming and singing every part so hard that I felt I may pass out. Halfway through the recording my voice straight up just broke - no gradual decline, all of a sudden it just snapped and I couldn't even speak anymore. Finished it off over the next few days, and the result far exceeded what I had expected I was capable of. I sent my application off, and over two months of anxious waiting followed. Realizing the actual possibility of the situation, I started working eight shifts a week over two jobs (as a glassy at The Fringe Bar, thank fuck that’s now over!) in order to pay off my immediate debts, and prepare myself for a possible European adventure.

After over two months of limited feedback but a definite interest, this is the email I finally recieved:

Hey Lochlan

sorry for the late reply. I have been busy finishing up my diploma thesis while recording drums for the upcoming ocean album and really didnt have any room to breathe those last few weeks.

thanks for recording and sending over the tracks. as i already told you, we were quite impressed with your vocals. timing is real good, your voice is really powerful and the singing works too. We have received more than 100 vocalist applications and you were among the top 3... finally, it looks like we're gonna decide to go with another swiss guy. decisions like this are essentially subjective, the main reason is that his clean voice fits our newer material better. so thanks again for taking the time to record these and i hope to see you in europe or australia some time soon!

peace

Robin

No Europe trip for me. Yet, I am not disappointed. To have been an actual consideration for The Ocean still feels completely surreal. I still vividly recall receiving their 'Aeolian' album in a bunch of promotional material from Metal Blade Records in 2005, and deciding to chuck it on straight away based alone on the biography and immaculately present artwork. Opening track 'The City In The Sea' immediately presented to me a band that resonated on an unprecedented amount of levels. There can be made plenty of comparisons, but in terms of encompassing every element they present, The Ocean is a unique band built by an absolute brilliance rarely uncovered in the modern world. Although I did not get the job, the whole experience was massively positive, sent my vocals to the next level and motivated me enough to gain employment and get out of debt. You can download the tracks I recorded here.

While all this was going on, The Surrogate actually started to pick up some steam once more. With Josh from Art Vandelay in the band on guitar and vocals and James from The Vanguard Tic on bass, we had some new creative juices to play with and we managed to give birth to a song in one jam session and recorded it about a month later. You can check it out here. Some of the vocal lines are a little shaky, but it's a live demo and we've never implemented all these different vocal styles before, so it was a little bit of an experiment, almost. I think the creative juices we have flowing now are more intense and natural than ever before. Now that The Ocean is definitely not happening, we’re going to start knuckling down and get an album going, starting to sniff around for some interstate shows later this year too. Our album will be an epic affair and I really can't wait to, finally, release an album that is the result of my own desires. We have two gigs coming up this month, both of which I am very excited about. We are playing with some cool bands, namely Alchemist from Canberra, and Die On Planes from Lismore.

While I'm at it, here's a new photo of us. Much like the new vocal styles, it recieved mixed feedback.

Now I’m super excited on the way The Surrogate is going, but I still feel that I need another creative outlet. I miss being a vocalist and the complete catharsis I feel after having screamed my guts up and run around wildly for 25 minutes. I am digging around for a band at the moment, so who knows what I will end up doing. I just want something fun, fast, heavy and creative. Something where I can sing as well as scream. If you want to have a jam, get in touch.

Caving in? Growing up? I'm just taking it all as it comes...

I have previously been quite disparaging towards the concept of having my own blog, yet here I am. Tapping away at my keyboard has never before felt so much like a delicious scoffing of humble pie – or maybe I’d just forgotten what it felt like. Once upon a time, I was also quite adamantly against having a personal MySpace or Facebook page – something which I am now quite comfortably a certified fiend for, complete with first-name URLs and, at the time of writing this, exactly 2250 collective online 'friends'. So here I am yet again, moving onto the next stage of the internet social revolution, a few steps behind everyone else. I’ll be damned if I ever sign up for Twitter, though.

When the juice bar franchise craze first started going nuts in the early 00's, I refused to even put one of those styrofoam cups near my lips. This stance lasted for literally years, before I finally caved sometime in 2007, and henceforth enjoyed many healthy and overpriced - but more importantly - hip beverages. I guess it has always been instinctual for me to reject the status quo and go against the current. While I revel in the human stain, there are seemingly endless aspects of our race that disappoint, disgust, enrage, sicken and sadden me, and now, more than ever, I see such aspects within my own being, and am almost developing a sense of peace with this while still keeping those elements at a safe distance. The truth is, I think I was always aware of their presence, but through a mishmash of youthful naivety, teenage angst, and an overextended sense of logical self-assurance, I pushed my mind into the furthest corner possible, held onto far too much generalised spite, and aggressively battled against my own being through way of thinking that it would be possible, and wholeheartedly fulfilling to live a life above (or perhaps below) the general flow of humanity. How wrong I was, at least in the circumstances of my existence.

Going back to the juice example, the hardest part about swallowing my pride is that the consumption wasn't hard at all. Boost Juice is fucking delicious, and it can wash down that humble pie a treat. So easily the cynic, I had deemed the juicing practice to be painfully trendy and disgustingly wasteful, yet everyone's keen dollars made sure that for a while there, it seemed an outlet existed on every city block. Everyone was enjoying it. I knew I would enjoy it too, but that just made the boycott so much more necessary.

Taking us right into the now, my life has, once more through the practice of eating humble pie, taken some turns that the Lochlan of yesteryear would be absolutely appalled by. Firstly, while most days are still filled with such food, I can no longer call myself a vegetarian. After a solid couple of years without consuming animal flesh, and a few months in the middle there with barely an animal product at all, I no longer have the strength to impose such rules upon myself, rules that I would subconsciously resent so many others for being free from. Those first few hungover mornings, where I’d wake up with stomach cramps, and then flashback to buying a slice of BBQ chicken pizza from a dodgy kebab joint and eating it out of sight before shamefully stumbling home, where hard to deal with. However, it was the prospect of eating my own words, and subsequently having to defend or alter this image of myself that I had established that was much worse, and in fact totally overshadowing my faltering feelings of empathy towards animals and the planet. This started a very gradual chain reaction of thought processes that eventually lead me to the conclusion that it was time to be honest with myself. Meat, much like juice, is delicious and nutritious. I may still consider myself to be more intelligent than the general population, however at the end of the day my DNA came from the same monkeys that Karla O’Brian*, the fucking dumbshit single Mum with a bad credit rating who was denied the ability to buy a phone off me, descended from. And there are so many more of them than there is of us.

(*false name that represents a whole variety of ‘trailer trash’ style characters)

Selling phones you say? Well my stream of consciousness may have just got a little out of hand, but you may remember that I used ‘turns’ as in plural in the prior opening sentence. As of nearly two months ago, I obtained my first ever corporate office job, working for 3 Mobile. The fact that I am now working for the only mobile phone service provider I’ve ever had made the transition a little easier, as their clever marketing made me feel like I was a part of it from the beginning. Far from the days where I swore to never wear business clothes or work for such a large company ever again, life’s really not too bad. I’m more stable than ever, and even happier than I’ve been in some time. After being burrowed deeply into exclusively working and playing within the worlds of metal and hardcore, it’s actually quite refreshing to experience the real world beyond my precious underground scene, and I’m making some great friends, friends that wouldn’t know what a breakdown was if Hatebreed smashed down the front door of their house. So enlightening is this refreshment, that I’m not even sure if my goal of running a full-time music business even exists anymore. When music gets turned into a game of numbers and dollar signs, it can become tarnished, and in many ways, it has been a massive relief to separate where I source my income and exercise my passion/escape from the world. I will continue to work within music. However it will be under my own terms, and for the pure love of it, not money.

I guess the whole point of this rant is to display the way in which I deal with change on a daily basis and to illustrate that this blog marks a new era of my life, an era with a more open mind than ever before. As the above experiences display, overcoming such hardline opinions can be difficult, but it’s through each ego battering that I am becoming more at peace with this world and myself. Life is full of grey area and I suspect I will experience more by exploring all sides of the fence. I feel as though I am no longer a moral blade trying to drive itself through the fibres of humanity, but a swift and malleable blob of experience that’s absorbing as much as it can while still keeping a level-tempered distance from the dust and rubbish that could potentially get caught in the unstoppable moving mass. The posts from here on will no doubt serve as a showcase for said blob and its evolution through every terrible fuckup, exciting happening, change of opinion and complete victory to come. Welcome.