Just Because Dumb Things Are From Brisbane Doesn't Mean They're Robert Forster's Mates

When Adam Vincent — guitarist/vocalist from Brisbane group Dumb Things — was at university, he decided to study abroad for a year. He ended up in Guangzhou, China, to study Chinese, wholly submersed in a foreign culture and a foreign language. “In that whole year, I think I only ran into one other Australian,” recounts Vincent.

Because of that exchange, he started yearning for the culture he’d grown up in. “Before that, I’d always had a bit of a cultural cringe with Australian stuff,” he admits. “But, during that year, I got pretty homesick, and found a new appreciation for Australianisms. I found myself listening to a lot of Paul Kelly and Crowded House, classic bands like that, but then also what was, at the time, new Australian underground stuff like Twerps and Boomgates.”

Back in Brisbane, he marshalled that sentiment into the formation of Dumb Things, a band that matched him with an old sharehouse housemate, drummer Pat Hill, and guitarists Madeleine Keinonen and James Southey, and bassist Andrew Robinson. For a band whose sound, in both vocal and jangle, seems so quintessentially Australian, it’s curious that their 2017 self-titled debut ended up being self-released at home, but coming out on labels in France (Hidden Bay) and Spain (Bobo Integral). In turn, that meant that their Australianness had been understood, or perhaps misunderstood, largely by foreign audiences.

“A lot of it seems to be centred around comparisons to The Go-Betweens,” Vincent offers. “I did an interview for a French magazine or blog, and obviously English wasn’t their first language, but they’d just assumed that, in the Brisbane scene, everyone just knew Robert Forster, and he was a mentor to everyone. Unfortunately not!”

Vincent grew up in a more Grant McLennan-esque setting — the cane farms and mines of Mackay. He got into music in his adolescence, soon graduating from loving Limp Bizkit and blink-182 to his parents’ Pink Floyd, REM and Bruce Springsteen records. He played in a teenage punk band, Border 17 – his role, Vincent offers, was “similar to what I do in Dumb Things, but not as well: playing guitar and a bit of singing” – and harboured musical dreams. But, as Vincent worked as a surveyor in Toowoomba, then studied in Brisbane, those dreams were largely put on the backburner.

That all changed after his stay in China; all that listening to musical Australiana inspiring his own songwriting. Dumb Things picked back up on old friendships, slowly taking shape over endless jams, the fledgling outfit working out how their songs would fit together. A moment of clarity came with Drivin’ Home, the opening song of Dumb Things’ debut LP – this was how they wanted to sound, how they wanted their band to feel. Beyond that, ambitions were pretty modest. “We never set out to be some massive band that gets played on the radio,” Vincent recounts. “We just enjoy hanging out together, writing songs, making music.”

Setting out to make their second album, Time Again, Dumb Things did allow themselves to dream a little bigger. They wanted to make something “tighter, more concise” and, even, “the best record [they] possibly could”. Again, the guitars jangle, and the lyrics are filled with the feeling of the seasons turning. “Time is, obviously, [a recurring theme],” Vincent offers. “It’s not something we consciously do, it’s just that it’s this recurring sentiment that gets a bit of a mention. Especially time passing. Time is such a multi-faceted thing, it can come up in different ways, and you can take it in different directions.”

Despite the thematic resonance, titling the LP Time Again was still “a bit of an inside joke,” Vincent says. “I thought that if we named the record Time Again, after the closing song, that people would be more likely to listen [to the end]. If you look at streaming numbers or numbers on Bandcamp, you’ll see that people start out listening to the first six or seven songs, but they almost never make it through the whole thing. And then, there’s also the idea that we’re doing this all again. A lot of the songs on the first album had time in them, and then, with this one, here we go again.”