What is a man most frightened of? Moments that turn you cold on the inside. Skipped beats, piss stained horror and dark edges where shapes form just beyond the reach of eyesight. These shapes moving in the periphery have a soundtrack.. After 12 years of mining for light in doomed relationships (2001's Blueprint For Modern Noise), dead end towns (2004's Damnation) and wandering the outer isolated extremities of society (2007's Protest Songs), The Nation Blue have returned to roost in the most insipid locale, their own backyards... While criticism of surrounding environments have provided easy fodder for The Nation Blue in the past, uneasy has been appraisal of their own failings and insecurities. Stewing in their own bleakness while writing a comprehensive list of all the appalling things they have done to people, the band have created a rather claustrophobic and ominous work that has taken over a year to complete. Written just south of crack alley on the peninsula and then later in an aboriginal community in the Kimberley, Rising Waters was finally thrashed out collectively over a weekend and then taken straight to the studio where Matt Voigt, previously responsible for Cat Power's Moonpix and Nation's Protest Songs, helmed the good ship SS Doom for another round of downers. Having only played each of the songs once before, the band wanted to put down cro-magnon versions of the 20 songs tabled initially. Knuckle draggers that weren't too bogged down in customs or civilised behaviours. When the energy was ominous enough the thing was taken back to its birthplace on the peninsula where a small shed in the middle of a large paddock played host to the additional voices and noises needed to complete the album. Rising Waters is a hopelessly sliding account of people on the wrong side of youth trying to reconcile problems in their heads...surrounded by darkness and spinning saws.
