Short Stack: Striking back

28 November 2011

by Nathan Jolly

"I think it’s definitely gone away. I think the main thing people thought was that we wouldn’t be around for a long time. We are as popular now as we’ve ever been. As for being accepted, I guess we really worried about it when we were younger, but it doesn’t bother us now. As long as we are still selling out our shows, and kids are still coming, we don’t really mind.”

Short Stack’s vocalist and songwriter Shaun Diviney is talking about the early barrage of hatred the band received. They were easy enough targets: the unashamed sugar-rush of their sound, their adoption of emo aesthetics, the hordes of visible, audible teenage fans – but this attitude obscured the fact Short Stack put the hard yards in, from riding trains for years to spending every waking hour building a large following via social media. Their second album This Is Bat Country silenced most critics who assumed they would be a flash in the pan, while the indie elite found different targets for their vitriol. “It sold more copies than the first album by like, second week,” explains Diviney. “It’s almost double Platinum and the other one only went Gold. We consider it a massive success.”

Yet, two days after this interview took place rapper 360 uploaded an embarrassing, inarticulate Youtube rant titled Fuck Shortstack [sic] that backfired royally when Diviney uploaded his response: a whip-smart parody of 360 that could very well be the best career move the band have made in quite some time. It will certainly endear them to people who had written them off as faceless bandwagon-hoppers. This accidental stop-gap should sate fans until the release of their third album, which is slated for a March 2012 release. Diviney highlights another shift, from the dark widescreen dramatics of This Is Bat Country to a more stadium-sized sound, namechecking The Police and U2 (in particular The Edge shimmering guitar lines) as key reference points. The band’s September single Bang Bang Sexy, however, acts more as a diversion than a showcase of their new wares.

“Bang Bang isn’t really representative of the album at all, we actually did that song for fun. The whole album’s a lot more rocky I feel. It’s the heaviest stuff the band’s ever done and Bang Bang is kinda the opposite of it, so it contradicts that,” he laughs. Possible next single Suburbia is described by Diviney as “sort of like a Bruce Springsteen type of thing,” and it seemingly finds the band stretching out in the studio a bit more.

“We sort of went a little bit Pink Floyd on it, we got this children’s choir in, that sort of thing. I think we’ve just... the label now just gives money to do whatever we want, so every stupid idea, we put in,” he laughs.

The bigger sound is due in no small part to the augmentation of their live sound to include a second guitarist and a keyboardist. These extra elements have helped the band grow sonically.

“There’s lots of input from these extra musicians, not so much for the melody or the structure [of a song] but more with the arrangement and the dynamics of it, which has never happened before.

“We’re on the third album now, the last album was an answer, the first album we were young and now for this album we are just being ourselves. It has all the elements that I like in rock and we’ve thrown it all together.”

Another milestone for the band also occurred a few days after this interview, when the band headlined their first ever over 18s shows in Sydney and Melbourne. Diviney’s anxiety at this prospect really hammers home the fact that the band are barely out of their teens. “I’m kind of nervous, “ he admits, “but at the end of the day it is a Short Stack show, so they are going to be Short Stack fans. There’ll be people buying drinks from the bar, too, which has never really happened before!”