Lying Down a four-piece based in Brisbane, Australia, consisting of Lachlan Airey, Conor Claffey, Siena Hart, and Alistair Taylor. In way of explaining the name, the band was born when Airey broke his leg and remained confined to his bed for a number of months, and the blend of isolation and oxycontin driving an introspection keen enough to kindle some artistic direction. After a number of years and changes in line-up, Lying Down are ready to release their debut record, De Rigueur, which is coming out on the 12th of February via the ever reliable Hidden Bay Records. Today, we have the pleasure of unveiling a single, ‘Betty and Barney’.
The track opens with gloomy guitars, crashing cymbals punctuating the steady drumbeat (fans of last year’s great Viewfinder album take note), evoking a creeping sensation, like being sucked into an increasingly strong conviction or paranoia. When they arrive, the vocals are downbeat and sardonic, delivering strange and disturbing lyrics that suggest the track is about Betty and Barney Hill rather than Betty and Barney Rubble—a couple allegedly abducted by aliens near Portsmouth, New Hampshire in 1962.
Like most close encounters, the story is a strange one, with the original sighting accentuated by missing time, bizarre night terrors and eventual hypnotic regression with a view to dragging memories through their amnesia for further understanding. The result was that Hills were thrown into an increasingly unsteady world where truth and fiction merged, where no memory could be trusted and no dream written off as pure fantasy. And this is what Lying Down capture so well, and perhaps something akin to what Airey felt trapped in his room on opioids. The unsettling certainty of the too-deep obsessive, at once held captive but also somehow set free—as though in being jarred from reality, they reach a sense of higher purpose.
“I’m growing afraid of what I cant see
They were there, I felt them, there.
Something in my head attracts the tall white,
plagerian white, alien white,I’m growing afraid of what i can’t see,
they were there i felt them there,
I am a hybrid,
Protect the hybrid”
You can pre-order De Rigueur now from the Hidden Bay Records Bandcamp page.