Kampei - Kampei For Dummies (EP)

Duderocket's own Mr. Boobonique Plague has boosted this week's quality by granting us permission to put up Kampei's second release, Kampei For Dummies, for download. Here's what he had to say while strolling down memory lane...

After throwing together an "EP" in the spare room of a lovely fellow whose parents made us sandwiches, our little band decided it was time to step things up a notch. No more would back-alley audio endeavours satisfy our vigour for production decadence, and quite frankly our prospective chart toppers deserved better. Consequently, we bandied together the proceeds from prior successes and locked down two entire sessions at a professional, WORLD CLASS recording facility.

The "sessions", like most others I imagine, revolved around diving headfirst into mistake city. Even though we had doubled our rehearsals to TWO per week, this was like throwing a big magnifying glass over every detail of the newly created sounds. I distinctly remember playing a guitar solo about a hundred or so times and buggering the same part every time - the result I believe is what they like to call a "composite" track. But it wasn't all bad news. In the studio it sounded big, amazing, fantastic and I listened to it for ages afterwards because I thought we were awesome. There were times when I listened and thought "Wow...that's us?" Listening back now after some years it's pretty clear that it was indeed us.

Unfortunately, we kind of dissolved after this recording. Like all good bands, the gigs got further apart, practice too burdensome, and then I just don't think we could be bothered anymore. That's just the way it goes I guess, but I'm glad we did it and hung out and played shows and got messy together - it was a very fun couple of years.

(I think I'm supposed to talk about the songs so here it goes)

Download Track 1 - Tuned Out
This is essentially about letting the depressing side of the news and current affairs get you down, and wondering if life would be more enjoyable if you blocked it all out and just lived in blissful ignorance. I don't know how else you're supposed to feel when you follow all of the world's bullshit - it is a pretty depressing place sometimes.

Download Track 2 - Midlife Crisis Mobile
Probably my favourite song to play at gigs, although I don't think it ever really caught on. One of those mid-set fizzers you would play to a few coughs and yawns I suppose. The lyrical subject matter as you might have hazarded is an observation of older men who take to the convertible when all else fails. I realised afterwards that the verses are pretty similar to that Frenzal Rhomb song "Russell Crowe's Band." Oops!

Download Track 3 - I Love Billy
Kirsten wrote the words for this song and it's about smoking weed, plain and simple. Heaps and heaps of it, out of a big old dirty unwashed bong. It was always fun to play as we didn't have many reggae-ish songs and some of the others were just not so hot. The "woah yeah's" were also a perpetual struggle, particularly so in the recording studio. I'm sure it's just the same one over and over, though the engineer probably told us otherwise. Oh, and "I Love Billy" is a brand of shoes, I'm pretty sure. You know... just in case it comes up in trivia or something.

Download Track 4 - Nowhere
Everything in this song had happened at some stage in my relatively short gig-playing career. Getting extremely lost looking for venues, leaving my guitar on the driveway at home only to realise at the gig, microphones falling over, playing on the floor (was always fun!) to a captive audience all sitting down (a little weird), a bass amp that died every gig, and all the rest of the fun that makes being in a band an awesome but sometimes trying experience.