ZILLIONAIRE ALBUM "Comfort In The Machine" out autumn 2006 Zillionaire have just completed their first studio album "Comfort In The Machine", available free from the Zillionaire website as a download

All together now, “who wants to be a Zillionaire? I do”.

But they got there first. They being Stephan Tomasek (vocals, guitar), Anthony Hall (guitar), Mark Meharry (bass) and Lee Moulds (drums), the first three hailing from different points on the North island coastline of New Zealand and their British anchor hailing from New Essex (OK, near Bishop’s Stortford). It’s the perfect psycho-geographic combination; Zillionaire sound both exquisitely chilled and streaked with a lonesome melancholy (as anyone who recognises the nature of definitive music of Kiwi origin will appreciate) but there’s urban tension and tenacity in their soul. This is delicate, intricate songsmithery but with a swarthy, slowburning gait. Their debut album Comfort In The Machine infuses both dynamics and speaks of experiences both arduous and joyful. It involves shifting life and soul to the other side of the world; over-fragile Spanish bass players; recording in tiny London bedrooms and famous plush Welsh studios; prospective managers coming and going. All the usual trials and tribulations, then. But the result is an unusually sublime collection of songs.

You might expect a confluence to result from two principal songwriters with opposing tastes. According to Hall, Tomasek was the singing/bass-playing Paul McCartney figure in Wellington’s sleek, poppy quartet Binocular. According to Tomasek, Hall was the hands-on Billy Corgan figure in the Smashing Pumpkins-tainted Psyke (Hall agrees, but wants to mention Swervedriver too). Around 1997, both bands would play together in the massive lounge of a house where Tomasek was a housemate before Binocular decided to brave the move to London. “We reckoned we’d be better off as a tiny fish in a big pond rather than a growing fish in a non-existent pond,” Tomasek recalls. “No one makes it in New Zealand. The only band who has was Crowded House and they were based in Los Angeles.”

After two years, all of Binocular bailed except Tomasek, who still wanted to make a go of it but didn’t imagine he’d get a call from Hall, who’d arrived in 2001 with similar intentions. He was even more surprised when Hall relinquished frontman duties, but it all gelled, and the newly formed Astrolab started evolving towards a lighter folk-soul fluidity that Turin Breaks and their ilk were also mining. Things got even better when Spanish bassist Dani Brito joined; “he just lifted the whole band,” says Tomasek. “But we wore out by having to rehearse three times a week! He just wanted to smoke weed”. Perhaps his languid attitude was catching. Having sent out demos, Astrolab sat back and waited. “We didn’t have a clue,” Tomasek confesses. “At the ripe old age of 22, we thought we’d paid our dues. We didn’t want to play gigs; we just waited for a record deal.”

But the old DIY spirit prevailed, and they decided to go for broke: they’d knuckle down and make an album, in Hall’s bedroom on Abbey Road, mere minutes from the world’s most legendary studio. “We knew we were good enough, and at least we had an online presence, so we reckoned we’d press up 500 albums and sell them to fans.” Recording in primitive fashion proved inspiring, and with the coming of a definitive new beginning, the band felt it deserved a new name. It turned up one day while Hall was leafing through a pile of lyrics in one of his old scrapbooks, specifically the beguiling line “zillionaire, can I sleep on your couch tonight?”

But of course, it wasn’t going to be that simple. Drummer Ash Dearmer started a family, and left, and Dani Brito went AWOL, so everything reached the point of despair again. But just as quickly, everything turned around. A promoter who sought to put on a acoustic show adored their demo, to the point of asking if he could fill their vacant bassist spot – welcome, Mark Meharry (“we didn’t know he was a New Zealander until he came to the audition and we heard his accent,” Hall laughs). An ad in the NME turned in Lee Moulds, and the new quartet played the In The City festival in 2005. In the audience was producer Paul Schroeder (Stone Roses, Verve, The Others) who got very excited, and after liaising with a prospective band manager with contacts at Monnow Valley (where Supper Furry Animals, Oasis and the Manics have recorded classics), band and producer headed up to Monnow Valley studios in Wales to re-record and remix some tracks.

The experience was wonderful, but for Tomasek at least, a bit of a shock. “Somehow a bedroom in Abbey Road felt more rock’n’roll,” he recounts. “Monnow was intimidating at first, but the environment and the history was so inspiring.” Hall even remixed some of Schroeder’s work with the producer’s blessing, and so the lo-fi and hi-fi did meet, to everyone’s satisfaction.

As a title, Comfort In The Machine was chosen because the band felt it reflected Zillionaire’s sound and vision. “Our first reviews,” Tomasek explains, “came from posting some tracks on the American website GarageBand.com. We got the feeling that many of the words used had a vintage quality, without being prehistoric; warm, comforting sounds…”

A pause here, to reflect on the words from garageBand.com and other online accolades: “…beautiful slice of hushed melodic rock that gently edges from the speakers like an angelic little whisper…chilled out, hazy mix of simple melodies, upbeat bass and breezy harmonies… An engaging astute melancholy married to a healthy combination of profound pop classicism and sleek guitar shininess… tranquil...autumnal...placid…this should have web-surfers at their knees with the feeling of a languid and lush caress rippling though their soul…”

“And while we were first making the album, we were in this bedroom in the middle of a big city, in a kind of machine…and the album title just came.”

In December 2005, ‘Absent Friend’ became their official downloadable debut single, which got airplay via Radio 1’s Zane Lowe, BBC 6, Virgin and even got a review in The Sun (“a lush and assured debut”). The review from thedownloader.co.uk was spot on: “Built around a melancholic framework of brushed guitars and frontman Stephen Tomasek’s smoky vocals, ‘Absent Friends’ stands just the right side of Air’s coffee-table atmospheric pop as it gingerly pulls at the sun-scorched acoustica of The Belles. Just listen to splendid, fashion-bereft pop classicism unfolding before you.”

Tomasek: “We don’t shy away from a tune that has mass appeal, like ‘Absent Friend’ or ‘For Someone’ but at the same time, we’re very conscious of never being too obvious.”

Hall: “I don’t mind if a song starts out like Celine Dion, the big song or anthem, but then I like to try to fuck it up, to work away backwards to obscurity!”

Be not afraid, ‘For Someone’ is not Celine Dion-like. But it does recall a supremely dreamy Jeff Buckley, or Buckley if he was smitten by Air and Pink Floyd rather than Led Zeppelin. Either way, Zillionaire are a more organic, precious commodity than the living-in-the-material-world suggestion of their name. It’s their in the aching, reach-out-to-get-you love song that is the opening ‘Burn Alone’ (“I won’t burn alone / I wanna give you the world…crowded days and lonely nights / I give the rest to you” from the opening ‘Burn Alone’) and the similarly pensive ‘Love Won’t Change My Mind’ (“take it easy if you want to / leave the world again / and then you’ll find / love won’t change my mind”), and in the friskier, shuffling beats of ’Absent Friend’ (which contains one of Tomasek’s favourite lyrics that Hall wrote: “Flowers they shine / but you know better / She’s so young / wrote her a letter”) and the killer chorus hook of ‘For Someone’ (which, by coincidence or not – Tomasek, who penned the lyric, can’t remember! - begins “don’t dream it’s over”, the title of the Crowded House’s most popular song).

But to these ears, it’s ‘Lonely Chromosome’ that defines Zillionaire, with that sensually achy, lonesome mood. “I live by the sea, won’t you waste some time with me,” Tomaske implores…”Lonely Chromosome’ does sum things up for us,” the singer agrees. We were recording in the middle of winter, but we were harking back to better times, almost like longing for summer, or for something that doesn’t exist.”

Hall: “Like longing for childhood. That feeling you had when you were about eight years old. But a lot of our music is quite lonely, lonesome music. But at the same time, it does ride this wave of being quite optimistic.”

This clash of opposites is beautifully captured by another album highlight ‘I Hope You’ll Be A Star’. “As much as people try to change who they are,” Tomasek concludes, “they always end up exactly where you are. The title is saying, ‘I hope you get to where you’d like to be, but you won’t get there by manipulating and changing yourself.”

Perhaps Zillionaire are the same people as they ever were – but they’ve travelled from the doledrums to holding a precious debut album in their hands, from windswept New Zealand coastlines to the wide world at your band’s feet. Maybe they will be zillionaires by the end of it all

Martin Ashton

For more info see www.zillionaireband.com

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