10 Things: Melbourne's Skydeck

Photos by Eva Lazzaro

Australians Dominic Kearton and Mitchum Clemens make up post-punk duo Skydeck. Backed by Dinosaur City and Burger Records, they’ll be releasing their debut album Eureka Moment next week, March 15th. But before the whole shabang is out, they’re premiering their third single “Solid State” below and also pushing us aside to tell you why they’re worth listening to with a little creative license.

1) The other night we had a band practice and played table tennis, then watched this series of videos on YouTube where they played a sample of a language being spoken, and a written example of it, and you had to try and guess where it was from.

2) Dom has this kind of annoying habit of saying “the other day/night”, when he’s talking about something that happened years ago. Like sometimes he does it when he’s talking about something that happened when he lived in Vancouver.

3) I was pretty good at the language guessing game, I got Romanian and Amharic right, and was close on a few other ones.

4) Dom was also pretty good at the game, but he doesn’t really understand how languages work in Latin America. Like, the other day we were listening to Juan Waters and he asked what language they speak in Argentina and could I understand it.

5) In the language game there was one example that turned out to be an indigenous language in Brazil that used “ropa” as a loan word from Portuguese for “clothes.” Dom guessed that the language was “Cuban”, because of the Cuban dish “ropa vieja.”

6) I don’t really know of any good Cuban restaurants in Melbourne, but there’s a good Colombian place called Sonido that we both go to a bit, they serve ropa vieja there. 

7) There’s also a Colombian restaurant inside the Maribyrnong pool that sounds pretty interesting, but I don’t know anyone who’s been.

8) I think this song “Solid State” is about the hope that removing yourself from a situation will either help to resolve it, or at least give yourself some kind of clarity.

9) I don’t know for sure though, I didn’t write the words, Dom did. I’d ask him but he’s out of town working at the winery, and I need to move all my stuff back to my parents’ place before I go to Mexico.

10) Dom is better than me at table tennis.

Keep up with Skydeck on Instagram.