Sodastream - Capture the sound of a Melbourne Winter
Not to be confused with the famous drink creation machine, the duo of Karl Smith and Pete Cohen partnered musically in 1997, and Sodastream, the band, was born.
“We’re lucky that we have always had very closely aligned goals and expectations, and also have complimentary strengths to bring to the band – with Karl writing all the lyrics and main structures of the songs, and me taking care of the business side of things,” Cohen says.
Sodastream have just released their fourth studio album Reservations, which the band poetically secribes as;
“The sound of a Melbourne winter, full of quick changes and cold snaps and a turn away from the grander stories of the last album to a quieter, more personal story of breakups, pain, loneliness, and the arms we defiantly put up against our seas of trouble. It is an album of sunlight just barely peaking through clouds.”
“We consider it to be quieter than the previous albums, and without the louder moments that most of the others have. It is also the first album that we have recorded and produced ourselves,” he says.
“Writing is never a problem for us. The recording itself wasn’t too hard, but we had a few disasters along the way with the computer, which were traumatic to say the least! There were a couple of moments there where it didn’t look like this album was ever going to see the light of day, but we got there in the end.”
After the trauma of the recording process, Reservations appeared on the shelves in late May.
“...The launch tour is about to start, and I guess that is the celebration. By the time we actually finished the recording we were too exhausted to do anything too celebratory. And by the time the release date came around we were too flat out then also. So we’ll need to let it all out on the tour!!,” Pete says.
Sodastream has toured extensively overseas with the audience's reactions often different than those of their home country.
“In places like Italy... people and very generous of spirit. Live shows are different over there… somehow more intense. We very rarely have support bands, and we would usually play for an hour and a half or something,” Cohen says.
“[Touring] is probably one of my favourite things about being in a band – all the people that you get to meet and the amazing experiences that you couldn’t even buy with money. People are also nuts about music, in Europe especially, and that is fun to be around.”
Questioning the boys on whether they are tired from years of touring, their answer highlights the pros and cons of taking your music to the stages locally as well as overseas.
“The touring keeps us going in some ways, as we aren’t successful enough in Australia alone to justify the amount of commitment it takes to keep everything going. But it is more the financial side of things where we feel the strain. Even though we get to travel often more-or-less for free, we are also always skint, and that gets tiring,” he says.
In 2002, whilst touring Europe, Sodastream performed on Italian MTV.
“Yeah… it was pretty weird though – with Mercury Rev playing on the same show, and all the Pirelli models too. And then there was a misunderstanding that resulted in me nearly being wheeled off the stage during the interview after we played! Talk about national humiliation! All fun though,” he says.
The year 2004, saw the band touring the USA, their first tour of the country.
“That was a pretty tough tour. The USA can be unforgiving if things aren’t set up right, and given that it was our first time over there, things weren’t set up all that well. We were well received by the relatively few people that we played to, but in terms of registering on the radar of the scene over there, well that is pretty hard to do,” he says.
Sodastream will tour Australia's East Coast in June, and then Adelaide and Perth in September.
“Unfortunately we won’t be getting to Tassie this time. I really hope we get a chance to go back before too long as we had a really great time when we went down in 2003, and even survived our night at The Dog House,” he says.
So whats next for Sodastream? “We have a new albums worth of songs pretty much ready to go, so we’re looking forward to getting into that next year.”
