Total Control are the best band in America right now, only they are from Australia. They are here on tour with Thee Oh Sees and have been knocking minds and blowing socks off everything and everyone for the last month. Do not miss the chance to see them live in concert at the Crocodile tonight. My first time witnessing them is in my top 10 best shows I've seen, a list that includes The Country Teasers, Silver Apples, and Love. If you like Warsaw-era Joy Division, Suicide, This Heat, early O.M.D., Eddy Current Suppression Ring (one of guitarist Mikey Young's other bands), and Coldplay (just kidding), you won't be disappointed.

I sat down with the singer Dan Stewart and guitarist Mikey Young and asked them to talk about each track on their new fantastic record, Henge Beat. As I think Dan's lyrics really stand above and beyond the competition, I included my favorite line from each song for another installment of Track Meet:

SEE MORE GLASS
"the room is not vacant / the decay of memories"

Dan: A man on some faraway beach. Internal monologue for the character Seymour Glass from J.D. Salinger's short story "A Perfect Day for Bananafish." This story punches very hard. The original name of this song was "Summer Suicide," because we were writing the record in summer... and it sounded like Suicide. The first thing that came to mind when I thought about summer suicide was this perfect, tragic story, and was listening to a lot of The Kinks' The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society at the time and thinking that nostalgia is a bad trip and wanted to write about THAT.

RETIREE
"the handshake is coming down, the gold watch is ticking down the days"

A scene from a dream I had when I was in the middle of a two-month, 9 books in a row Philip K. Dick spree in 2009. The dream was a grim factory setting, with rows of children seated at conveyor belts, chained down, syringes of glue plunging into their spinal cord to keep them alert and staring at an enormous clock counting down.

ONE MORE NIGHT
"waves crush your love on the rocks tonight, there's never gonna be one more tonight"

When we toured here last year with the UV Race, we put this song together on the roof of Kelley Stoltz's house. We collectively came up with the lyric, wanting something Christian Death-esque, dramatic and romantic and pompous. I always wanted to use the word "tonight" in a song title, the song is an unkind dismissal of desperate, lonely chameleon types, a bit vicious.

THE HAMMER
" ...she saw her dreams all at once" (lyric misheard my by the author)

Not sure which lyric you mean here. I wanted to write a song about the consequences of abandoning attachment to the idea that who you are is somehow connected to what you believe in, or what you think is right or wrong. How this can sound like a liberating idea, but ultimately can lead to betrayal of the trust of other people and long periods of crushing isolation as your sense of self wails around in a void.

STONEHENGE
(lyrics obscured by delay)

This song is about watching important historic events happen and feeling utterly disconnected from them; history just flows by and the individual is insignificant and ineffective. This can make you feel
like a worthless piece of shit, but this song is about feeling the triumph and glory of it.

CARPET RASH
"drinking detergent and licking the walls, eating your breakfast in shower stalls"

This was another one written about a dream during the P.K.D haze. It is about intimacy. It is about projecting ideas of sex into the distant future. It's a science fiction pornographic scene. People rubbing
themselves against household items to get off. Sexual sterility, the cleanliness and tidiness of sex. There's a kind of dullness to the longing in this one. I like it.

SHAME THUGS
(Instrumental)

Mikey: Hmmm...me and Zeph (bassist) were chillin' in his fancy city apartment and he has this sick tiny little Casio the size of a pencil case with some shitty beats on it and I had my guitar and we just jammed for a few minutes and it sounded cool on playback. No big story here. Just cut out the best minute of it. We tried a few little jams like this as we also wanted little bridging bits of music to make the transitions between songs a little less schizophrenic, a bit more flowing.

NO BIBS
"what you want you never get / hahahahahahaha"

Dan: You can write songs about noble gestures and sometimes you can write songs about very cruel and unpleasant gestures. This song is not nice. It was originally called "No Wimps." It is about that sadistic feeling when you watch weak, pathetic people who spend their lives complaining about how terrible their lives are and nothing goes their way and everything sucks and music used to be better and nobody understands them and food used to taste better, that feeling when you see them sink even lower, something unfortunate happens like their social networking account gets hacked or even more extreme they lose their job or their hand, and you just don't give a fuck, you laugh at them, because they are weak. Not nice.

MEDS II
"to take pills to remember, to take pills to forget"

This is about drugs. The only song to directly reference Philip K. Dick (the character Palmer Eldritch). It is about the shortcuts to enjoyment that you take that get hijacked and end up in horror.

SUNDAY BAKER
(Instrumental)

Mikey: This i did earlier by myself. I was on tour with Kelley Stoltz in Europe, driving to Berlin down the autobarn. I was trying to sleep unsuccessfully on the parcel shelf in the back of the van and was in a shitty mood for a few reasons. So thought I'd cheer myself up by trying to make some kraut rip-off on my laptop. It wasn't intended for Total Control, really but it works well. 'Tis a nice breather. What's on the record is pretty much exactly what I made in the van. James came up with a name as a tribute to our good pal Jerry.

LOVE PERFORMANCE
"in the last days they'll sing your praise, these are not the last days"

Dan: There is a temptation for every generation to find great meaning in the catastrophe and war of their time and the predictions and prophesies of the past to confirm that this generation will be the last to experience human sentience, and that an inevitable event will wipe out every human being from earth. This is a pretty well-documented reality from the recurrent mythology of our own culture, but it extends back a long, long time. There's a lot more to it than an asshole from Australia could understand, but this song is just suggesting that we project the terror of our own death into the culture around us so we don't feel so burdened, and this collective terror just makes people do really insane things, and I'm not talking just of suicide bombers or pro-life murderers, but of people who believe they can resurrect a dead relationship just by loving another person more, or people who believe they can end human conflict by pushing this idea that annihilation is imminent. I guess it's really about losing someone you love and thinking crazy things like they were destined to stay in your life, or that this loss means that the world is askew and the apocalypse is upon us. But life goes on, and yours means very little, and take what comfort in that you can while you can.

Where does the title Henge Beat come from?

Nothing too exciting: Mikey was on tour with Kelly and wrote a song at Stonehenge called "Henge Beat," and James thought it sounded cool and insisted we call the record that. It's Japanese for "Pork Friendship," I think.

Where does the name Total Control come from?

The Motels had a hit in Australia with a loooong dirge called "Total Control," the clip I remember watching as a young chap enamored with this beautiful elegant woman smoking a cig and looking haunted. Mikey and I agreed on the virtue of that track long before we talked about doing a band, and when it came to it we were blown away no good band had used the name. It's a tough track to live up to.