SOMETHING FOR KATE'S Echolalia is one of the most anticipated Australian albums of the year. "I've said the strangest things. Sometimes it's the only way to describe a sound in your head, like 'imagine that the song is a photograph, I want it to sound like the negative'," singer PAUL DEMPSEY tells MARTIN JONES.

I've got to know the members of Something For Kate much better in the last month. Especially singer Paul Dempsey. That's what you're supposed to do as a journalist - maybe not at street press level where you're often given a 15 minute phone conversation on which to base your revealing expose. But you write for Rolling Stone USA or something and you might get to spend a few days or longer with your interviewee, sharing a variety of experiences.

Having goofed about with drummer Clint Hyndman at Triple J, talked at length back stage with bass player Stephanie Ashworth and spent an evening over dinner with Dempsey, I could reveal the kind of personal details the NME editors crave. But having come to a better understanding of what Something For Kate is about, I suspect that neither the band nor its fans would be so keen for such divulgence.

I will tell you that Dempsey is particularly pensive. He's seriously and actively out to make sense of his environment and our existence - which happenxs to be a fantastic trait for a songwriter. Balanced by Stephaie's sensitivity and Clint's cheerful energy (obviously oversimplified characterisations), it's understandable that they make a close-knit and effective team. This has been proved on previous recording and courtless, unforgettable live shows.

But the nature of the band's latest and third album Echolalia seems to be significantly influenced by a fourth - a new team member. And that's where my view of things is a little deprived. I would have liked to have met album producer Trina Shoemaker and seen first hand what she added to the group, but instead I have to ask Paul.

"I think actually her strength was realising what we had in our heads," Paul says of Shoemaker. "I think the reason why we're so happy with this record and so happy with Trina's work on it is because it sounds exactly the way we intended it to."

That may not seem such a great feat to someone who's never made a record - hell, that's the producer's job isn't it? But Something For Kate didn't approach Trina for her to assume the typical production role - the band had all the production and arrangement for the album carefully considered and mapped out in pages of notes. They wanted someone who could interpret those notes and bring the ideas to life.

"Yeah, I've said the strangest things," Dempsey smiles in recollection. "Sometimes it's the only way to describe a sound in your head, like 'imagine that the song is a photograph, I want it to sound like the negative'. And these engineers are just looking at you going 'I don't know what you're talking about'. But she just had it, she just had this instinct about where we were coming from.

"Her Strength was listening to us read our notes and go 'oh yeah, I know what you mean'. You know: 'Trina, we want this thing to sound like a dog in a time capsule at the other end of the universe' and she would just be 'oh yeah, I know what you mean. You mean like this?' 'Yeah!'

Intuition played a big part in choosing Shoemaker for the job. Though the band hadn't really even met her before teaming up in INXS's Gary Beers' Mangrove Music studions, all the information they were presented about her just seemed to fit the bill. The extreme diversity and underniable quality of her past work (she's recorded with Sheryl Crow, Queens Of The Stone Age, gospel artists, etc), the fact that she was a woman, and the fact that she was thanked by Sheryl Crow for being willing to try anything.

Paul's intuation about her proved correct and Shoemaker has become a close friend of all the band members. Paul attributes her recording with making the album much easier to listen to that past releases, and this may help explain why this batch of songs hits and holds your attention so much more quickly that the Elsewhere For Eight Minutes of Beautiful Sharks sets.

'Course, all this is distracting credit from where it should be most firmly laid - it's difficult to fathom the amount of time and exertion Paul, Clint, and Stephanie applied to conceiving, preparing and recording Echolalia. The best part of two years resulted in about 30 fully formed songs of which only 13 could be presented on the album. In fact the band is currently arranging to record songs they didn't have time to get to tape with Shoemaker. And now it all comes down to one date - June 25 - the date Echolalia is released to the public.

"Yeah, it is a significant date," says Paul, "because we can stop worrying ourselves. Until it comes out we're shit scared of it turning up on the internet or do you know what I mean? It's like it's still ours for a little while. We've put so much into this record and it's been such a huge part of our lives for two years, that we've designated a date that we're going to let go of it. Until that date, we're still attached. It's like severing the umbilical chord - that's such a dramatic analogy but it's the only analogy I can think of. Mark [Aldrich, Sony] handed me a finished copy today with the artwork and everything and that's the first time I've seen it and even that was a kind of shock. Like 'God, I don't know if I'm ready to give this away'".

Does this mean this new child is more precious to its parents than the previous two?

"Oh every times it's more so than the last," Paul affirms. "I don't know, as of the 25th of June, it's open to criticism and comment and then it's kind of not ours anymore. Everyone's going to have their two cents about it which, at the end of the day, doesn't affect us becasue we've made our record and we know what it means to us."

Echolalia is out now. SFK will be signing the album at Gaslight this Saturday 30th from 2pm.

Martin Jones is a regular contributor to Inpress. He can also be read at www.addicted.com.au