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FOURTH FLOOR COLLAPSE - Drink 'Til You Drown (Single)

The Band

The tale of Fourth Floor Collapse began in the suburbs of Perth as far back as playgroup when Michael and Rhys first met in a sandpit. Dan was living only a suburb away, honing his guitar playing skills on his wooden ruler, before finally finding himself at the same high school as Michael. And so, a group of teenage boys with guitars, a garage and a need for an outlet for their songwriting talents came together and created what eventually became Fourth Floor Collapse in 1998.

Songwriting for the band is a democratic process as Dan, Rhys or Michael will bring in a song in basic form and the band will work on it as a whole. By looking at the world around them they can be inspired by friends, films, books, music, people, emotion, and even happy accidents to create music that turns raw emotion into richly layered songs.

Their music is honest – they feel it, they play it and sometimes they feel good, and sometimes they feel bad but they’re always honest. It’s music that doesn’t waste your time and doesn’t take the listener for granted at any stage.
Some of the characters may have changed as the story has unfolded but Michael, Dan and Rhys have remained constant. Now these ex-Perth boys are citizens of the world and have been joined on their travels by local Melbourne drummer, Mick Parker.

Drink til you Drown

Drink 'til you Drown is a song written musing on how lucky we can be to find ourselves living comfortably in a beautiful country, with relative freedom and surrounded by people we love.

The line, ‘the chance of being taken in my sleep is only slight’ illustrates this beautifully as there are so many places in the world where this most definitely isn’t the case. However, we also live in a time where everyone is preparing for a worst case scenario...living in a bunker with bottled water...

Miller says, “My grandfather said to me ‘If you had of told me that one day people would pay over two dollars for a little bottle of water I would have laughed...what I should have done is buy a rain tank and a bottling plant. People seem to buy anything these days as long as there's a label on it’.”

Drink til You Drown is the centrepiece of the album. The album hinges on it and takes a big right turn. It's the pivotal track quite literally. Drink is a grand statement and could quite possibly become a signature song as it illustrates most of the things the band is about.

B-sides

Cold Ambition is a mandolin-based tune that was written while ruminating on the nature of reality music television and trying to work out if every person is simply standing in that process line. And, how we sometimes have to make sacrifices to the detriment of people around us to realise our ambitions. The dark lyrics are offset by what actually is a beautiful tune.

Street Full of Car Alarms was inspired by a death and combined with a personal feeling of exaggerating fear. It's the age of terror and isolation and that paranoia has been inserted into a suburban context rather than making a grand political statement or taking to the soapbox. The instrumentation was created imagining a Neil Young-esque country song to echo his electric albums but then swung back toward his acoustic side.

For more information on Fourth Floor Collapse, visit fourthfloorcollapse.com

Fourth Floor Collapse - Drink til you Drown 4:38

 

 

 

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