It can be a struggle to be an artist in a young man’s game, but the sort of music that the Model School makes renders age irrelevant.

I still feel like a young man,” he says wistfully. “I don’t think my music is exactly reeking of youthful exuberance. I suppose the Model School hasn’t taken long, but I suppose for me personally to put an album out even though I’ve written the material it’s taken a while. I played in bands before that, had a bit of a break, and then Saturns returned: it was time to do something different with my life. Two years later, that’s now.”

And here we are with Alarm Clock Radiation, the debut album for the Model School. Twelve slices of folk, occasionally tinged with electronica touches. The obvious comparison is Beck, and it’s a good one; like that Scientologist, Brendan Wixted has a nice sense of melody coupled with a classy use of whimsy.

“I’m really glad it’s an album too,” he outlines, “because I’m a bit over the whole EP generation. I like EPs, but I really wanted to make an album this time.”

With a range of different material to choose from, Alarm Clock Radiation surprises with a lack of harmonica, which is a feature of the Model School’s live shows. “There were about four or five songs that were never going to make it,” Brendan explains of his range of choices for inclusion, “and for some strange reason it [the harmonica] doesn’t appear on the album. I think there’s going to be enough around for the second album.”

At this stage, Brendan hasn’t reached that point in time where he’s ready to even begin contemplating that second release – instead, all his energy and focus is channelled towards Alarm Clock Radiation. “I actually moved a couple of months ago and haven’t even had a chance to set up the studio yet,” he explains, “so there’s an actual physical barrier to putting ideas down. After I finished the album I set up a ProTools song page and on each track it would be me singing a different song as I thought of it, so that I can put them there, leave it, and then come back to it and see if they’re worthwhile.”

Like all artists, Brendan struggles with the determination of what is and what isn’t a worthwhile idea, less so in terms of musical ideas but particularly when it comes to his lyrics. “I don’t want to say something blatantly clichéd and obvious, or if something is a bit too introspective for its own sake. I can come back and think ‘yup, I’m trying to write an anthem for dispossessed teenagers with short hair’, and if it’s that obvious it’s a good indication to ditch it and start again.”

As the sole crafter of Alarm Clock Radiation, with the band there for the live shows but not for the making of the album, the extra instrumentation on the tracks also comes down solely to Brendan. Several are quite simple, and bare, and then the likes of “Sweet Tooth” feature loops and an array of extra sounds and textures. “Some of the songs start from sampled drums, and I just see where it goes. With the album version of that song I’m really happy with the way it ended up a more bit dense towards the end. Some of it is just about what’s around, and if it works.”

Other songs feature keyboards, such as “Heart Shaped Song”, where a Harpsichord sound comes out. “It just seemed to work,” he shrugs. Getting good sounds out of lesser equipment is clearly more interesting to Brendan than hiring expensive equipment. “I got into that idea because I couldn’t afford a big budget and to hire a certain keyboard than cost $10,000 a week to hire,” he explains. “I decided to revel in what I had around.”

Alarm Clock Radiation certainly isn’t an album that sounds ‘cheap’ – instead, it comes across as being very nicely put together. “It was a matter of not having a lot of room to move,” he says of the recording experience, “so I didn’t want to just throw things in because I could. I didn’t want it to be a massive jump from the EP.”

It certainly sounds bigger than Demonstration Disc. “I wanted it to be able to put on a stereo and sound good loud,” Brendan explains. “Get the drunken punters to like it.”

When it comes to playing the songs live, many of the songs on Alarm Clock Radiation are rendered differently, with the songs cemented in disc by Brendan’s solo musings given flesh by a four-piece band. They’re quite different, as a result. “There’s a bit of license,” Brendan says of the band’s performance of the songs, “and I don’t think it comes down to being a dictator and demand that everything I recorded by played exactly. Sometimes I just want something a bit simpler, or on one song our guitarist plays a solo on a particular song and when it came to recording that I knew that I didn’t want it on what gets recorded.”

From the start, he explains, the band’s members knew that the album would be different. “I felt I had the idea of how I wanted things to sound like.”

The Model School’s Alarm Clock Radiation is out now, with the band touring. Date:
Friday 21 July - Pony Bar, Melbourne