Shoes, Smiths, and Sonic Dualities: Inside 'Tabis' with Convenience Store
The Melbourne based duo unpacks the themes, sounds, and subtle contradictions behind their debut record.
With the announcement of their debut album 'Tabis' set to release 12th September, Melbourne based band Convenience Store makes a compelling entrance into the art pop and indie rock landscape. Recorded in a basement studio and shaped by years of quiet evolution, the record explores themes of duality, illusion, and the performance of self. We spoke with Nick and Jack about the meaning behind the album’s unusual title, the influence of DIY recording, and the strange emotional terrain their songs try to map.
Why 'Tabis'?
Nick: I think it came from the idea of internet fashion and particular shoes or brands that become memes. The shoe has been a shorthand for a chic, trendy style for a while, like for a particular idea of city life. The shoe design is so strange and striking, people gravitate around it because it's a marker of your taste to agree that it’s cool.
At our age, life involves a lot of complications that we try to simplify or clarify with things like style and the way we represent ourselves to the world. It’s obviously impossible to simplify anything properly. The image of the shoe is also about being in two minds, caught between possibilities, like Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment.
On Illusion, Artifice, and the Performance of Self, Was there a specific moment or event that sparked this central theme?
Nick: No specific moment really, but I guess these things that the album is focusing on came out of a general progression of what I’m interested in writing about. I guess after writing songs for a few years, I’ve reached these sorts of ideas. Especially with a debut record, there’s the feeling of being a ‘debutant’ where it’s nice to offer something cohesive with sure ideas.
And through life in general, whenever you appear in the world you’re adopting some artificial persona I guess. I suppose it’s something that’s just woven into every experience we have.
Jack: I think as well that we spend so much time recording music that’s about trying to arrange things to appear ‘natural’ when there’s really so much artifice involved. Recording music seems to be about understanding that balance between how things are supposed to be presented and how they actually happened. You’re always playing with the agreed-upon conventions of what recordings are meant to be.
Hidden Layers and Ambiguous Meanings
Nick: I think the clearest one is the single ‘Tabis (Walk Me Through The Night)’, it’s about partying vs. romance, love vs. drugs. Just about operating in-between specific meanings.
But it’s the same for something like this new song ‘I Wanna Be Your Dancer’, it’s not clear if the singer is like wanting to be humiliated or occupying a more powerful role.
A Basement Studio and the Beauty of Constraints
Jack: It has a huge influence, the space is sort of cluttered and we’re always rearranging amps and chairs and stuff to get mics set up. Most of the decisions about how to approach recording something are pretty intuitive and made quickly, but it’s often just because of what’s already set up or what we can be bothered to do. Most of the miking of guitar amps, for example, is just an SM58 over the same place on the speaker that I’ve always put it, we don’t really spend much time learning new approaches, we just start with what works and then tinker with it until it sounds ‘right’.
Having our own space that we can spend so much time in used to let us be too perfectionist with everything. When you have that luxury of time you kind of miss a bit of what a good recording process is about, which is treating the ‘session’ as an event where you captured whatever you captured that day. We’ve been trying to treat the time we spend in our studio space more like that, where you just have faith in your processes and commit to things. Things like the scarcity of physical tape or limited studio time are actually a part of a lot of 20th century records that we’re inspired by; sometimes you need to simulate those sorts of limitations in your head, even when you really have infinite digital recording potential and infinite time.
Nick: Having our own space is also nice for tracking vocals. We can just decide we’re gonna do vocals on a certain evening and there’s no rush or pressure to perform in front of people we don’t know. The space is set up so that I can’t actually see Jack when I record, or he can’t see me. There’s a blanket in between. Jack can just produce it and I can just perform without any sense of being watched. It’s a very private thing.
Revisiting “I Wanna Be Your Dancer”
Jack: We’ve got a bunch of songs from the earliest days of the band that we just held onto, wanting to record them someday when we felt ready to do it. Particularly with this one, it’s such a poppy song that we just didn’t really know how to do it until more recently. We’ve actually recorded it a couple other times over the years, but didn’t like how it turned out.
Each time that we came back to recording it, some things would stay the same. There were rules, like it always had to be a double mic stereo Roland Jazz Chorus for all the guitar parts. But we ended up finding that the song sounded kind of bad with Nick playing his Strat, so we ended up borrowing a friend’s Tele for this recording and it made it work way better.
The song reminds me a lot of 2019. Back then the lyrics were completely different but the guitar parts were all the same. There are other songs that we have from the past few years, since we started this when we finished high school. We’ll probably record them in the future too.
A Tribute to The Smiths
Nick: Of course we all loved the Smiths when we were young. They’re a classic teen band, I feel like many people are drawn into that kind of dramatic songwriting and delivery. You see Moz being able to adopt this referential persona, making himself into whatever he kind of wants to be. It often seems like you’re not meant to do that, but then when you’re young you see this guy who makes life seem so epic and Romantic. He doesn’t need any credentials to do that, he just pulls it out of himself.
And Johnny Marr was always a huge influence on my guitar playing and I love the idea of guitar parts that seem to sing, and seem ‘orchestrated’.
Jack: The sound of that original Smiths self-titled record was really influential for me. All the songs are just amazing, and I actually love how it sounds even though the Smiths themselves didn’t like it and thought the way it was recorded sucked. Every time I hear the start of ‘Reel Around The Fountain’, the drum sound blows me away. Same as the guitars on ‘Hand That Rocks The Cradle’. That guitar sound might be one of the best ever recorded.
Writing Across the Emotional Spectrum
Nick: It was challenging when our approach used to be more ‘curated’, like trying to be too clear or precise. When you do that, you set yourself up with an aim, and then there’s room to fail. Now I just write more freely about my own actual thoughts and experiences and things. I think that if writing is truthful and meaningful to you, it’s fine, you can throw things out there and the work if you were accessing something authentic when you thought of them.
It feeds into the live show too, where you can rework each song infinitely because there’s less of an agenda to the song.
What Do You Hope People Take Away from 'Tabis'?
Jack: I’m not really sure, but I guess it would be great if people want to go back to the start and hear it again. My favourite feeling when I’m listening to something new is when you’re just really intrigued by what you’re hearing and it sounds familiar but with something utterly different at the same time. I watched some Dan Nigro interview one time where he talks about how songs often centre around a particular moment where the composition just makes you go 'wow', and you're completely captured by what you're listening to. When it makes you go: "Wait what? That's actually what it sounds like? They were able to make it sound like that?"
If Tabis Were a Place...
Nick: Probably some urban place, with fluorescent lighting. Blurry and fatigued.
Jack: Maybe the Strawberry Fields Forever world, from the music video. Like a cold but familiar grassy field somewhere. Or the recording space that we made it in, with all the pictures that we have printed out and stuck on the walls.