Jakob

“I read a lot of artists that say they don’t care what the reviewers say and all that sort of stuff,” says Jakob guitarist Jeff Boyle. “But I do, of course. If you’re putting yourself out there, you’re putting yourself out there to be responded to. Otherwise you’d be sitting on an island with your guitar playing music to yourself.”

Jakob’s brand of instrumental prog isn’t an absolute anomaly, but instrumental rock outfits are something of a rare breed. The critical fervour incited by Sines shows that when bands get it right, it makes an especially resonant impact. The copious admiration for the album isn’t exactly out of the blue, but its debut in the New Zealand Top Ten was certainly unexpected.

“It got to number ten in the general charts and number two in the New Zealand charts,” Boyle says, “which is pretty amazing for a purely instrumental band with nothing that even resembles a hit single. That blew our lights out, to be honest. We weren’t expecting that at all.”

Presumably, the commendations for Sines would be tremendously rewarding for any artist. For Jakob, it goes some way towards vindicating a lengthy and often arduous record-making procedure. The prolonged gap between album releases wasn’t the result of the band going under for a few years and recently reconvening. Rather, a large chunk of the time that’s elapsed since 2006’s Solace has been spent working on Sines.

“‘Magna Carta’, which is probably the oldest one, was written just after we got back from the tour with Isis in Europe in 2008,” Boyle says. “The original chord progression and feel for ‘Harmonia’ was written shortly after that. ‘Emergent’ was written back in 2010. ‘Blind Them With Science’ was written in 2011.

“We did the initial tracking sessions at Roundhead, which is Neil Finn’s studio in Auckland, in late October, early November 2011. [Then] I went over to LA to mix it with a friend of mine, Aaron Harris, the drummer from Isis. We were a couple of days into mixing and I realised that, ‘Man, this isn’t finished. This isn’t what we’re after,’ which is pretty devastating.”

From there, the band got back to work, making alterations and conducting DIY recording sessions in its private rehearsal space. Reaching a point of total satisfaction is perhaps unrealistic, but after endless laptop labour, Sines was eventually deemed complete. Now that the record’s available for listeners to sink their teeth into, Boyle can reflect on itwith an air of contentment.

“Because I probably did thousands of hours on this album, it’s hard to remove yourself,” he says. “In the time between the actual finishing of the album and the time of release of the album, I’ve had some space from it and I can listen to it almost from an outsider’s point of view. I love it all over again.”

This week, Jakob commence an Australia-wide headline tour. Having just wrapped up a sold-out tour of New Zealand, Boyle says performing the album material live has been truly revitalising. “[The songs] take on a whole new life now they’re in the realm of the connection between us three again, as opposed to sculpting them in the studio. We’re just really enjoying having the freshness to the new songs. That brings a new life to our whole set.”

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