Malojian Gives Us More News From Nowhere

At Hot Press, we’ve always held a special spot in our hearts for Malojian, the band created and helmed by Steve Scullion. Steve is a tireless performer who has independently built up a massive body of work in the last eight years. Malojian’s new album, This Is Nowhere, was released earlier this month and judging by the first listen, it seems that the band is as on form as ever.

Juggling family life with a career is never easy and our conversation with Steve is punctuated good-naturedly by the cries of his three year old child Henry, who turns hysterical when the TV freezes during a particularly engrossing episode of Bubble Guppies.

But even with the trials of child-raising, Steve has retained an insatiable appetite for making music, an appetite which found him in a Chicago recording studio earlier this year working on a new album. “We recorded This Is Nowhere at the end of February. We went out to America and recorded in the Electrical Audio studio which is owned by Steve Albini (Pixies, Nirvana, The Stooges). I’d been thinking for years about going over to the States to record and then finally the Arts Council of NI had some funding open up. I’d already booked the studio before I found out I had the funding because Albini was at the top of my list of producers. With all the budget worries I had, I knew that someone like Albini – who’s not overbearing and just lets you work – was the right man to go with.”

Scullion apparently has a gift for working under time and budget constraints which even the seasoned American producer was impressed by. “Albini had a bit of a freak-out when he saw how big some of the songs were,” explains Steve. “You know, we were coming in with guitars, drums, electric guitars, three vocalists, and we were only there for four days to get everything done. Albini told us, ‘This is never gonna happen.’ He thought we were coming over as a small three-piece band, but we sometimes had up to ten things going on at once. Still, by the end of our second day we were in our stride and we managed it. I’d say if you went into a studio with Albini and you hadn’t done the homework, it’d just be a waste of money. He’d just look at you and say, ‘Right, the tape’s rolling, get a move on.’ But we already had a lot of the album recorded and we’d been doing a lot of pre-production work ourselves.”

Four days on lockdown in a recording studio led to the emergence of an LP which is more reflective in tone than previous offerings (songs about parenthood, disillusion, and disappoint fill the album). Chief amongst the more contemplative songs is the final track ’The Great Decline’, a melancholic piece about grief blanketed by a beautiful piano melody.

“There was a couple of songs were I spent longer on the lyrics because I thought I was onto something,” says Steve. “‘The Great Decline’ was one of those. Grief isn’t a subject you can be trite about, so I wanted to get it right if I was going to really tackle it. There’s no throwaway lyrics in there.” Suffice to say, Steve tackles the difficult issues with wonderful aplomb. And even behind the more weighty themes of the album, the famous Malojian charm effect works its wonders, so that you can’t help falling for This Is Nowhere’s pleasing harmonies.

Asked what’s in store for the future, Steve hints at a possible collaboration with Belfast-band Arborist and confirms that more solo work is in the pipeline. Never short of ideas and always offering new gifts, Steve is the epitome of the assiduous artist.

This Is Nowhere is available now from Bandcamp. Malojian play Whelan’s, Dublin on November 26.