Antonia Sellbach pulls her bleached bangs behind her ear and leans out past the edge of the sofa. It’s a Thursday night at the 9:30 Club, and her Melbourne, Australia-based band Love of Diagrams has just wrapped up a 45 minute opening set for Ted Leo, punk rock local hero and elder statesman. His set is being recorded for NPR’s All Songs Considered live series, but she’s upstairs in the dressing room, doing something relatively new for the band—talking to the press.
They’ve flown nearly 24 hours for a tour whose 30-something dates dwarf their regular circuit of Australia’s five major cities, and the bassist and singer still seems a little overwhelmed by the enormity of the trip.
“The only way I’ve ever traveled is with the band,” she says. “I don’t even know how to be a tourist.”
The trio has been at it since 2001, with four releases to their name. This week’s release of the band’s second full-length album, Mosaic, shows them at the height of their powers, even if that’s not quite high enough to make them a household, or even dorm-room, name.
Love of Diagrams started playing their variation on the early ‘80s post-punk sound before it got trendy in the last few years, giving them time to hone their fractured, aggressive pop songcraft in the vein of Mission of Burma, the Pixies or the more upbeat moments of Joy Division and the Cure. Conveniently, the band is also poised at the prime moment for maximum appreciation. Mosaic’s catchy, driving bass lines, insistent rhythms ground vocals and epic single-note guitar riffs washed in layers of echo, exploded in new melodic directions every few seconds.
Sellbach and guitarist Luke Horton play like they keep getting distracted by new ideas and can’t resist immediately pursuing them, but their endless tangents are held in check by drummer Monika Fikerle’s furious but locked-in beats.
The formula works extremely well across the first half of the album, on songs like “The Pyramid” and lead single “The Pace or the Patience,” but things start to drag around the “Interlude.” All the songs begin to feel a little too familiar to avoid facelessness before “Trouble” and “Bonus Track” reinvigorate the back end. The mix is still dynamite live, though, and the band’s experience is a huge asset in keeping their set tightly focused enough to get inside the head of any casual listener at the bar, establishing their sound with a capital S.
Though imperfect, Mosaic still trumps recent efforts by fashionable sound-a-likes such as Bloc Party or Wilderness, and the album’s release on the heavy-hitter indie label Matador has done wonders to make that fact public.
“Since getting signed to Matador, that’s changed everything, because now people can actually buy our records,” Sellbach said.
Before making the jump up to the musical equivalent of triple-A ball, the band did no press and booked all their tours themselves, including three previous trips across the States. Their induction into the cream of the minor league crop is the payoff of such constant globe-trotting, and it’s given them the chance to expand their audience—on this continent, at least.
Love of Diagrams is the model of a working rock band thinking globally in a time when Modest Mouse and the Arcade Fire can top the Billboard charts, and the internet is collapsing the old mainstream/underground artistic binary into a matter of taste rather than access. At the same time, promoters and commercial deals are taking the independence out of indie rock.
Sellbach stressed that the key to finding an audience these days, beyond glad-handing the kids on MySpace.com, is making the effort to go places other bands don’t.
“We did a big tour of Eastern Europe in 2003, and the audiences there were so excited that a band had bothered to come all the way from anywhere to play in their town,” she said. “It was quite mind-boggling; any young kid who was interested in music came out.”
Love of Diagrams isn’t anywhere near quitting their day jobs yet—they rotate through employers willing to give leave for months at a time—and they’re still pursuing their studies in the meantime. Sellbach is an abstract artist in the middle of an MFA program (she’s done much of the band’s album art herself), and Horton is finishing up a Ph.D. in American History. His area of expertise? The history of the recording industry.
