Sexy secret's out of the bag

The Grates's John Patterson and Patience Hodgson relocated to Brooklyn to craft Secret Rituals.

The Grates's third album delivers a more mature sound for the duo.
RECENTLY, Brisbane alternative-pop duo the Grates spent the day in Melbourne visiting radio stations and meeting journalists. By mid-afternoon they could see the narrative taking shape: writers were inquiring about the group's sojourn in New York to write and record their third album Secret Rituals, while radio DJs were suggestively praising the record's streamlined first single, Turn Me On.
''Every time we go into a radio station, everyone's like, 'Turn Me On is so sexy, how did you feel writing such a sexy song?''' vocalist Patience Hodgson says, slipping into a DJ's honeyed tone before rolling her eyes.
Despite the Grates's casual Queensland demeanour and the high-energy yen for communication carried on their first two albums, observers often misjudge the successful group. Sex, both as a form of pleasure and an emotional weapon, was often a subject on 2006's Gravity Won't Get You High and 2008's Teeth Lost, Hearts Won but few noticed because of Hodgson, guitarist John Patterson and former drummer Alana Skyring's predilection for raucous live performances and an eccentric, handmade aesthetic.

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Now that their outlook has matured, it's become a belated and incorrect assumption. ''To me, Turn Me On was a plea to be stimulated creatively and to feel the rush of writing songs that I'm in love [with], rather than songs I'm familiar with,'' Hodgson says, sitting alongside Patterson in their record label's office.
That desire for change underpinned the Grates's move to Brooklyn.
Originally, they fetched up there in July 2009, when they were still touring North America and Europe as a trio. But by the end of the year, when they were due back home for Christmas in Brisbane, they understood Hodgson and Patterson would return in 2010 but Skyring was leaving the band. The drummer, whose departure was only revealed - somewhat clumsily - in recent months, spent a year studying at a culinary school before getting back to playing with Neil Finn's new side project, the Pajama Club. Without their high-school friend, the remaining two returned to Brooklyn to conceive and record an album that would short-circuit their career so far.
''We needed to make a change,'' Patterson stresses. ''We started writing songs in Australia and it just wasn't going anywhere, which was becoming stressful. It was like a nice clean start with no distractions.''
Hodgson adds: ''For me, the biggest thing was to get out of my comfort zone and do something different. When you put yourself out there like that you'll have something to say at the end of the day that you just don't get when you're back in your house in Brisbane.''
The two shared an apartment around the intersection of 23rd Street and 6th Avenue in Brooklyn, where their un-Brisbane-like urban surrounds included an electricity substation, a boarded-up, derelict building and a cemetery. It looked scarier beforehand on Google Street View than it did in person, Patterson says. They joined a food co-operative, bought bikes and got used to the perpetual street noise at night. In a rehearsal room 10 minutes' bike ride away, they would work together five or six days a week, persisting even when little initially eventuated. They were there from January 2010 until March this year. Jamming as a way to start songs proved to be a different matter when there were two people at work as opposed to three.
''There was a directness and honesty that came out when it was just the two of us in the room,'' Hodgson says. ''John could hear what I was saying straightaway. Smashing drums had been a security blanket because, although we worked quicker in the past, for me, lyrically, I knew I had time because no one could hear me in the rehearsal room.''
At one point they invited a bass player to jam with them and she ended up asking Patterson if he could turn his guitar up. As well as Turn Me On, other new tunes, such as Change, document the back-and-forth of the band's creative process.
''We did get a little obsessed with the creative process because we've never thought about it in the past,'' Hodgson says. ''This time around, getting over the fact that we could hear everything made me want to be more honest.''
Their first two albums captured the freedom, offset by confusion, that marks the period between finishing your schooling and venturing into the trappings of adulthood, such as a career or marriage. The Grates, while still exuberant, have moved on. Professionalism has taken hold.
When recording for Secret Rituals finished earlier this year, Hodgson and Patterson returned to Brisbane. Mission accomplished. ''It was time to go home,'' Hodgson says.
The Grates launch Secret Rituals Saturday, June 25 at the Corner Hotel, Swan Street, Richmond. For details, see cornerhotel.com.