When guitarist Greg Ng left Melbourne pop favourites Snout last year to concentrate on his hip-hop project, the band lost a lot of the momentum they’d gained since 1998’s Circle High And Wide.

But with Anthony Paine (High Pass Filter, The Hired Guns, Obsolete) stepping in, it seems like only a matter of time before they’re back on track and, hopefully, visiting us on a more regular basis.

"We went through a sort of stalling process of Greg leaving and so forth, but there’s just so much good stuff happening creatively that on balance it’s all good," singer/bassist Ross McLennan says. "It’s still sorting itself out because we’re still kind of evolving as a unit. I’ve been friends with Anthony for years, so that makes it a lot easier.

"And I like where he’s at as a musician: his approach to making music is very different to Greg’s, but there’s still a lot of overlap between what we – he and I – do that I think is bringing out different things in each of us. As three individuals, we’re doing things differently to what we’ve ever done before, in some senses. It’s been a positive thing."

With the new line-up has come a changed approach to songwriting and playing.

"They’re quite freeform in what they do," McLennan explains. "That’s probably been the opposite to the way in which Snout has operated, except that we’ve tended to improvise a little live, but always within a very tight, pop sort of way of doing things, generally spurred on by the odd mistake here and there, and just hoping to kind of land on our feet again.

"But that’s pretty much the status quo as far as High Pass Filter goes: they sort of develop songs in a really broad way, and there’s quite a broad palette of sounds as well because of having so many members and the creative collective way in which they work. It’s not at odds with what Ewan and I are into, at all, but it’s just a matter of getting used to working in that kind of way under the Snout thing. So it’s been interesting."

Snout have been working on a fourth album with Shane O’Mara (guitarist with Rebecca’s Empire and Paul Kelly) since January, but it’s unlikely we’ll get to hear the final cut before next year.

"It’s good, it’s just taking a while because as a band we’re still finding out the best way of doing things," McLennan explains. "And also having on top of that a new bunch of songs, it’s a real learning curve for all of us. There’s a lot of back-pedalling to look at things that we may have considered were finished, prior to touring, and reassessing things that we’ve already recorded and going back and putting some finishing touches. It’s been a good way of working, but because we’ve had to tie it in with a lot of rehearsal and gigging, it’s a time-consuming thing.

"The recording can be finished any day now. There’s only a couple more songs to record and we’ve been playing them for a couple of weeks now and they’re all feeling really tight. It’ll be pretty basic to just go in and slam them down, but I think the question really revolves around how quickly we can get a deal together with someone that’s interested in putting the record out the way we want to put it out and just recognising that we know what we’re doing."

In the meantime, Snout have released a remix EP, Stockinged Feet Grooves: Authentic Wildbeat Sounds, which sees them messing with some of their familiar pop tunes.

"The basic idea of it we’ve probably been sitting on for about two years," McLennan says. "We were initially intending to get together with Leah Baker from Triple J, an engineer down here who we’re friends with, and just have some fun down at the studio, not for release or anything. I had a couple of ideas, mainly the ‘Get In The Car’ idea of doing a more jazzy, Blue Note kind of style.

"And it suddenly became this thing where we needed a release, basically just to keep awareness of us there. But under that sort of situation, she couldn’t justify letting us use the Triple J studios, so that part of the idea dropped away. And basically I put my head down and did three remixes and got Greg to do one and Anthony did one. It’s a really good fun thing to do, but like a lot of things when you’re busy – like they say, ‘Is it the lyrics or the music that comes first? No, it’s the phone call’. And when you’ve got that deadline, you get it done."

So has working on the remix EP made Snout think differently about their old songs, in terms of playing them live? "Kind of, because we’ve been using a sampler to do the ‘Stockinged Feet Grooves’ song which is built up out of the idea of the old track ‘Civilisation’. So in a superficial sense we’ve been incorporating that a little bit just at the moment, but I think once the album comes out that’ll probably happen a bit more.

"We’ll probably start doing the things that we’ve hinted at all along, like maybe getting a bit more of the samples in ‘Hey Hey Hey’. It’s become more how we see ourselves in a legitimate light, rather than a B-sides kind of thing. We’ll probably make a bit more of a go of it. But when you’re playing live, you just do what you feel."

Snout play The Healer this Friday Sept 1 with Youth Group and Cunningham. Stockinged Feet Groove: Authentic Wildbeat Sounds is out now on Birdhipped through Shock.

<back>