Let’s face it; Hilltop Hoods were the catalyst. While Phrase released the ebullient ‘Clockwork’ last month, and Bliss N Esoreleased their volcanic, platinum-selling ‘Flying Colours’ last year, Adelaide’s hardest crew broke through to an astonished mainstream with their monster album ‘The Calling’ in 2003. Three years later ‘The Hard Road’ debuted at number one. The trio’s midas touch even extended to a classical version.
In essence, Hilltop Hood didn’t just pioneer the current explosion in (quality) Australian hip hop, they’re actually a couple of albums ahead of the curve. “Are we going on amount of albums released?” MC Pressure snickers, “Because if we are, I don’t want everyone to know exactly how old I am.”
Pressure modestly attributes their success to being in the right place at the right time. But it has taken many more years for anyone else to get to that place. “I guess it’s half luck, half hard work,” he demurs.
The rumours revolving around the gap between ‘The Calling’ and ‘The Hard Road’ was that the first album was turgid with uncleared samples, never thinking they’d be found out as an obscure Australian hip hop band. Then, when it came to writing the next album, they had to reinvent the wheel. But Pressure clarifies that when they hit the spotlight they cleared samples after the fact, no big thing. The gap he attributes to their anal retentiveness, and much the same again before the release of ‘State Of The Art’.
Hell, maybe it just takes that long to produce quality. On the eve of what can confidently be presumed their third chart-topper in ‘State Of The Art’, we’re reminded that they’ve dilly-dallied around for three years in between each album. Pressure corrects me. This has been the longest gap in between records. They’ve been finessing the album for two whole years, in between tours for the first and more focussed in the second.
“The way we make hip hop is: a beat gets made, the raps get written, they get recorded, and we keep going back and adding to it and adding to it, tweaking it, cutting the samples differently, adding session musicians to it, taking things out, re-recording verses and cuts, changing verses…” Pressure reveals.
He says he’d still tinker with it now if he could. So is there a chance ‘State Of The Art’ is overcooked? “You can overproduce music, for sure, especially this kind of music,” Pressure considers, at their leisure in their own studio, producing, engineering and mixing. “There’s a fine line between that and making it full and big and how you want it to sound,” he reasons.
The most obvious sample on this ambitious album is Bob Dylan’s ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ cut into the gloriously tasteless ‘Chris Farley’. The Hoods declare that they wanna party so hard that they die, like the titular overdoser and our own tragically whiskey-felled, Bon Scott.
Pressure snickers about it: “The thing about that track is that it’s tongue-in-cheek.” Even though they’re chart-toppers, Hilltop Hoods are still larrikins. “The type of people who would get their f…in’ precious knickers in a knot about that kind of shit are the people we want to, and we’ll laugh at it when they do. If it stirs up a bit of controversy, good. It’s a party track. We say we’re going to party hard ‘til we drop.” Dead, presumably.
It’s one thing to drop a regrettable rhyme at a battle, but another to assess it over and over for years and still include it on your album. Do rhymes get outdated? Become irrelevant? Or is ‘State Of The Art’ a series of snapshots of particular time? “Art is never finished, it’s only abandoned,” Pressure sagely notes, “When you’re rapping it’s usually from a very personal place, your own perspective and opinion. Over the years you change and your raps age and date.”
“I look back on a lot of old material and f…in’ cringe,” he laughs with a healthy dose of perspective. “Not only was it a bad rap, but I don’t agree with it anymore! You’ve gotta separate yourself from it at some point. You gotta put it down and not worry about it.”
They’ve had a chance to test the new tunes to a slavering crowd of Triple J kids in Sale recently. Triple J kids are their kids. What was the response? “It’s hard,” Pressure explains. “They kinda feel it out and try to get a vibe for it. It can be a very cold and awkward vibe, trying new tracks live. Sometimes we haven’t got a feel for the track yet either.”
Regularly being the lone hip hop act at national music festivals has also steeled the Hilltop Hoods live show, with some publications actually calling them the best live act in the country. “I don’t know about that,” Pressure chuckles again. “We’ve always tried to work at it to do different things, because we don’t have a drummer or guitarist going nuts. We try to interact with the crowd or do chants. It’s about giving an entertaining performance. If anything, hip hop bands have to work harder than [traditional] bands because they don’t have those instruments.”
But they do have instruments. A string quartet features on four tracks on ‘State Of The Art’, as well as a local act, Lowrider, helping out across the album. “It’s something we wanted to do deliberately, make the sound bigger and use more session musicians,” Pressure admits. “I guess working with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra really opened our eyes that there really shouldn’t be limitations with what you can do with your music.”
It sounds silly coming from the trio who added a new richness and boldness to Australian hip hop, breaking though and setting the bar, an act that has elevated the entire genre. After 18 years in the game, and finally experiencing success that they could never imagine, Hilltop Hoods still know how to be humble, how to work hard and how to impress.
Copyright : MTV Australia
