Powderfinger

Bernard Fanning – vocals
Darren Middleton – guitar, keyboards and vocals
John Collins – bass
Jon Coghill – drums
Ian Haug – guitar and vocals
Timeline
Check out the interactive Powderfinger Timeline, covering all the major events from 1992 to present day…

Odyssey Number Five is Powderfinger’s fourth studio album. If you didn’t already know that, if you’ve sadly not yet sampled any of the extraordinary music created by these five gentlemen hailing from Brisbane, Australia, we humbly suggest you stop whatever you’re doing and immediately introduce yourself to the magic of Powderfinger.
We guarantee you won’t be disappointed – in fact, we reckon you’ll probably look back on this moment in years to come as an undoubted musical highlight for the year 2000. This isn’t just press release babble. If you don’t believe us, ask any of the half-a-million Australians who own and love one of Powderfinger’s previous album releases.
So, all aboard for Powderfinger’s Odyssey Number Five. Have a great trip. If you’re familiar with the work, life and times of Powderfinger, all you need to know is yes, this is the follow-up to 1998’s Chart Topper, Internationalist. We know you’ve already put the new disc in the player, so we kindly ask that you proceed directly to paragraph nine (*) at your leisure while we give these poor sods some history before they catch up.

Okay, Powderfinger formed in Brisbane in 1992. Two years later they released their impressive debut, Parables For Wooden Ears. Despite the merit of that recording, its an album the lads themselves now write off as “all metal riffs going all over the place”.

But that’s the creators being unnecessarily harsh to their old Parables. Its just that, in hindsight, everything that Powderfinger has delivered since then has been on such a higher plain. Indeed, 1996s Double Allergic and 1998’s Internationalist – two of the most successful Australian albums of the last decade, both artistically and commercially – have been such beautiful and powerful musical statements that they’ve seen Powderfinger get drawn to the centre of Australian popular culture.

Spend any time with the lads from Powderfinger and you soon realise that no matter how many records they sell (“Double Allergic” is certified Triple Platinum, Internationalist is now 4 x Platinum and still rolling), no matter how many Australian Record Industry Awards they might win (they took out 4 last year: Album Of The Year, Best Rock Album and Best Artwork – “Internationalist” – and Song Of The Year for the single “The Day You Come” AND they scored the vote for “Best Group in 1999” by the MICA’S), none of it will ever go to their heads. They’re too serious about the business of making music for any of that sort of nonsense.

But enough words and facts. The first moments listening to Odyssey Number Five will tell you more about where Powderfinger find themselves in 2000 than anything you’re going to read here. So put this press release away for the moment, and – if you haven’t done so – turn the stereo up loud, come back to us when you need some background on how this journey all came about.

(* Paragraph nine.) Well, welcome back. How was that? Pretty Special, huh? Everything we promised, wasn’t it?

Odyssey Number Five was recorded over a month in Melbourne’s Sing Sing Studios, with American producer Nick DiDia (of Internationalist fame) again behind the desk.

If the previous Powderfinger albums were partly just a process of the band crystallising its unique sound, then you’ll agree Odyssey Number Five takes the band to another level. The rock is rockier, the softer moments even more emotive. More than ever, the focus this time around is totally on the songs and the eleven tracks that eventually made the final cut identified themselves from the outset.

“We thought, ‘What are the best 11 songs that are going to make this a really good album?” explains drummer Jon Coghill. “We weren’t thinking whether each song was going to be a great song, we just wanted to make it a full album of really good listening, that you could listen to all the way through and not have anything stick out like it’s out of place.”

Which sort of explains why the re-recording of the year-old “These Days”, (voted Number 1 on National youth radio network Triple J’s Hottest 100 Poll in 1999) retained it’s place among the ten new classics.

A couple of the other tracks will be familiar too, Like “My Kind of Scene”, which recently appeared on the highest selling soundtrack in the world this year, “Mission Impossible II” and “My Happiness”, the first original single to be lifted from Odyssey Number Five itself.

But that only accounts for three of the tracks. The rest, well, we’ll let you discover those gems all by yourself.

Again, enjoy Odyssey Number Five. We know you will. Over and over and over again.