Evermore - You Can't Handle The Truth
New Zealand’s Hume brothers step up their game with their third album, the ambitious concept record, Truth Of The World (Welcome To The Show). 3D’s Jonno Seidler steps into the Dystopian world of Evermore.
Jon Hume and I are comparing attention spans. Not of each other, of course, but rather the ever-shifting levels of commitment between artists, listeners and their craft. “I think our new album could sort of be seen as a reaction to that whole iTunes generation, where people just pick a couple of songs off an record and forget about the rest of it,” he muses in his lovable Kiwi brogue. “But it’s not just fans, it’s also that there just aren’t that many bands making whole albums that require you to listen to all of it at all.” Believe it or not, this is not a tangent, but the focus of our conversation, due partly to the fact that Evermore have returned to the music world with album number three that could be seen as nothing less than an ambitious concept album, pursuing a common theme and musical framework, the likes of which have not been seen exercised in over thirty years.
Truth of the World (Welcome to the Show) already sounds ominous, but that’s before you put the Hume trio’s latest effort into your CD player. Now add to the fact that it comes with its own logo, advertisements and news broadcasts (care of brother Dan), and you’ve got yourself quite an interesting kettle of fush. “It’s kind of like a [George Orwell] 1984 type thing, this news organisation that takes over everything,” explains Jon. “But most of the time we’re just having fun with it.” Take the bombastic Girl With the World On her Shoulders, where the girl “is actually ‘hope’ and she’s trying to support everything else. That’s probably one of the more serious, i.e. ‘not sarcastic’ ones!” laughs Hume.
This release sees Evermore expanding on their ridiculous amount of talent musically as well as thematically. They’ve brought on a fourth member “because we just can’t possibly play everything anymore”, and can boast that the album has pretty much no silence, with every song linking straight into the next, a la Pink Floyd’s eponymous Dark Side of the Moon. That doesn’t mean the Hume clan didn’t take a bit of poetic license, after all, it was crafted in their studio and produced by Jon himself. “I’m very happy we got some of the lines in there, you know. I didn’t think we’d be able to slip in commentary about the economic crisis and make it musical!” So obsessed was Evermore with their new world that the brothers would often come into the studio in character, as “the whole concept kind of took over!” This eased the way for the biggest sounds the band have ever created, including electronic influences, orchestral percussion and gigantic string sections augmenting the already widescreen Evermore compositions. “Normally, you can’t make an album that’s so diverse,” Jon concedes. “We decided that we’d finish as much of it as possible before we showed our manager or our label, otherwise that completely laugh it off.”
WHO: Evermore
WHAT: Truth of the World (Welcome to the Show) through Warner
WHEN: Out now
MORE: evermoreband.com