Rocket Science: Organ Transplant.

Rocket Science play The Zoo on Friday and the Troccadero, Surfers Paradise on Saturday.

“Melbourne is very spoilt when it comes to good music, so as a generalisation they’ve got that ‘you really have to do something special to impress me’ kind of mentality,” muses Rocket Science bassist Dave. “Maybe it’s just paranoia...”

Rocket Science should have little to fear from their hometown crowd, or any town’s crowd for that matter. Their incendiary set throws together the attitude of sixties garage with the peaks and troughs of freak out psychedelia to create a massive Hammond organ fuelled Rocket Science barrage. It ain’t brain surgery, after all…

“I’ve used this analogy before, but it’s like a footy coach having made some nasty remark and the players use that to put in a good performance,” he continues. “It’s not exactly like that, but if you’ve got a reason to really push what you’re doing when you keep something like that in mind.”

Rocket Science have been in the studio putting together demos for what will eventually be the follow up to their Contact High album. Contact High found the band moving miles from the directions they took with their debut Welcome Aboard The 3C10, and it should be no surprise if their upcoming release finds the band continuing to evolve.

“We’re kind of heading in four different directions at the moment,” he laughs. “We’ve all got a few ideas each, and we’re all just listening to each other’s ideas and trying to communicate each part. I guess it’s an extension of what 3C10 and Contact High were. There’s a Rocket Science sound, but there’s room for a lot of diversity so we can try out different musical ideas from psychedelic soundscapes to cock rock to straightforward catchy pop music. There’s a few different flavours going on at the moment. We’ll try em out live before we record them properly.”

How do you find the middle ground between everyone’s influences and ideas with each song?

“We spent a lot of time working on one of Roman’s new songs, for example, and we all kind of agree on what works and what doesn’t work and what direction to go in. I had a song done with a basic structure worked out, and Kit was keen on it, but Paul said it wasn’t doing it for him, so we had to work out a way to get it to his liking and my liking as well. Everyone has their own unique taste. Something might push my buttons that will make everyone else cringe, you know. You’ve just got try not to get personal.”

Do you try and give everything a live workout now before you hit the studio? Wasn’t the first Rocket Science album done as a studio project before you started playing live?

The punchiest rocking songs on the last couple of records are the ones we did live. We never played songs like In My Head live, and we probably never could. Something like Hyperspace would have been pretty tough work to get it to sound like we wanted. It just makes you more confident in the studio.”

“With 3C10 we’d only been together for four months, so we were all just wide eyed and excited about jamming every week. When we were recording we’d finish a song and just indulge in some big feedback thing and have five-minute endings to every piece of music, you know. With Contact High we’d played the songs before, so we weren’t so prone to that much spontaneous waffling.”

Are you still getting into doing as much instrumental stuff?

“Actually that’s kind of been reduced over a while. We’re all fans of instrumentals, and Roman had written a lot of instrumental stuff, but as time went on we got more songs to choose from in the live set. All our favourites generally happen to be more of the vocal songs. But having said that, there’s always room for an instrumental acid wig out session, and I’m sure that at some stage in the future we’ll probably record more of it.”

Who’s your all time favourite acid wig out act?

“Id’ say Acid Mothers Temple are pretty way out there. Modern Japanese psychedelia with a nine-piece band. It’s way out. It’s so out that without being an everyday full on acid freak it’s kind of hard to be in the mood for it, or find the right time to listen to it. It’s great bean bag and headphones type music.”