The Guru Guru: A Descent Through Turmoil

“Wire, Pepper, Turmoil / Fire, Copper, Tinfoil,” chants Tom Adriaenssens amid a flurry of whirling guitars on Chramer. Those six words seem complete nonsense written out on their own, but step into the dizzying mind of Belgium’s THE GURU GURU and suddenly they make absolute sense. Known for their “borderline inspired rock music”, the five-piece have been on a genre defying mission to abstain from traditional rock constructs to create a sound that is completely their own, first offered on debut album PCHEW in 2017. Skip forward two years and their latest offering Point Fingers delves into the realms of musical chaos, lyrically digging deeper into turmoil that sits close to their chests.

“This chaos is something that happens naturally I’m afraid. We don’t really intend to be chaotic or to have these energetic explosions, it just happens. Every time!” Tom Adriaenssens laughs. “I think on the first album we were still searching for our sound on record and with the second we were a little more confident and allowed us to be more sincere I guess. It allowed me to be more sincere and a little more autobiographical in my lyrics,” he says.

Following a successful festival season in both the UK and Europe in 2019, THE GURU GURU tucked themselves away in the studio with producer Wouter Vlaeminck [RAKETKANON, KAPITAN KORSAKOV] who helped them capture their wealth of ideas onto record, refining their penchant for introducing sounds created using everyday objects into their work. “He’s a genius, he’s worked with a lot of bands that have inspired us. We really love all of the records he made. We really respect the role of the producer, and he can make the big decisions which is also quite easier for us to be creative that way I guess, when someone else is the boss,” says Adriaenssens.

“At the end of the record we had our tour manager and our stage hand come to the studio to play some piano and drums…that’s the piano you hear at the end of the record. We just try to put some nice sounds that were also quite personal to us, there’s also a sound that was just Simon [Theys, drums] our drummer rubbing a mic against his beard with sound effects on it,” he explains.

But it’s not just musically experimenting that has made Point Fingers such a beacon of light in the bands career. They used it as therapy. Tom is in a good place right now – he suffers from insomnia (outlined on his favourite track This Knee On Ice), is a high school music teacher and is on the other side of a divorce. In Chramer he sings of a world collapsing around him echoing the bleakest point of his break up.

“At that point we started writing the record so there’s a lot of that in here. And this song is really about the power of things beyond your grasp and the world really collapsing around you. The turmoil, it’s the power of nature the power of things around you,” he says. “It’s been three years now so I’m feeling a lot better at this point but there’s the recording of the record and writing of it has been very therapeutic for all of us, and because we’ve been, we’ve all been having our personal struggles, and we managed to put all of it into the record.”

THE GURU GURU also used the record to metaphorically detail the little things, particularly on Am I Singing Aren’t I, perhaps the most vulnerable you’ll hear the band to date. “I wrote that song on a ukulele when I came home from a rough day at work. I really love my job but sometimes you just feel like kids aren’t listening. If you listen it becomes a message to the whole outside world I guess. Am I Singing Aren’t I is a reference to people that say that I scream a lot in my music, and it’s a just a statement ‘Well here I am singing!”

What’s even more poignant about Point Fingers is the how just those two words themselves have brought the whole band together as a family. Behind all the chaotic guitar riffs, anarchic time signatures and hit point vocals, beneath the surface is a band who look out for each other in the face of turmoil. “It started as a part of a lyric on the song Delaware. We just like [those] words point fingers, and then something happened,” says Tom. “We went on tour and our guitarist Emile  [Van Den Abbeele, bass] went skateboarding and broke his wrist after the soundcheck and we couldn’t play anymore. We had to cancel the tour and we had to just go home and we had to cancel another tour. We don’t play with a substitute so the most important thing to keep in mind was at that point in time was to not point fingers at anyone, and that’s also the moment we decided on the title of the album.”

There’s moments in Point Fingers where it feels like you’ve been invited into the hive mind of THE GURU GURU — a maniacal glimpse into a band that isn’t afraid to brazenly push boundaries while laying bare their personal struggles.“We all get stronger going through shit like that. We’ve really grown as a family.”

Point Fingers is out now via Luik Records/Grabuge Records.

Like THE GURU GURU on Facebook.