Even Stevens

Alex MacFarlane, co-lead singer of Melbourne based jangle pop outfit The Stevens, is fiddling around with a delay pedal when we call him around lunch time on a Thursday. This is playing fairly well to type – his band having gained a bourgeoning reputation for guitar-based slacker pop of late. Card carrying members of the town's recent infatuation with what has become known as 'dolewave' (along with bands like Twerps and Boomgates – both of whom share members with The Stevens), MacFarlane and his cohort Travis MacDonald have been tooling around in their bedroom for several years after first meeting upon MacFarlane's relocation to Melbourne from the Central Gold Coast region. Only recently have they brought their half recorded ideas together to form a whole.

“We actually did it quite a while ago,” MacFarlane explains of the six tracks that make up The Stevens' debut self-titled EP. “It was recorded in 2011, just after we first started jamming, we recorded 20-something tracks and whittled it down to six. Me and Travis both had home recording projects so we just put together a band and started recording how we'd normally do solo stuff, in various houses and this weird abandoned church in Kew. It was a share house that Travis was living at with a bunch of people that he knew from uni, but people just started moving out until he was the last one living alone in this big decrepit church. There was a hall and everything with a piano in it so we just used that.”

To call The Stevens prolific is a bit of an understatement. In this interview alone MacFarlane mentions over 50 tracks recorded by himself and MacDonald. It's not surprising then to discover that The Stevens have their eye on following up their EP as soon as possible with a long player, some of which recorded by another local legend. “On the album, which is hopefully coming out in September, we recorded a few of the tracks with Mikey Young [Eddy Current Suppression Ring, Total Control],” explains MacFarlane. “Half of that is still home recordings but for some of the tracks we went away to Elphinstone, hired out the scout hall and spent two days in there recording songs with Mikey. That's where Travis is from so he had some connections to the scout hall. It was good to get away from Melbourne – and we recorded 26 tracks there with Mikey. Then we recorded more than that amount at home and sort of collaged it all together for the album. Both the album and the EP are culled from a lot of tracks.

“We have a lot of stuff floating around but it's of varying quality, you know,” he continues somewhat modestly. “I went back and looked at some of it the other day and some of them sound like absolute shit. There's still 27 tracks on the album. It fits on one LP though so it's not actually that long. Some of the tracks only go for like a minute or something. We had a lot that we wanted to cram on. It'll probably be really irritating to listen to but we've gotta get it out of our systems, I guess.”