Dog Trumpet’s new album, ‘Medicated Spirits’, caps a long list of achievements for Australian artist and musician, Reg Mombassa.

“I always thought I would just be a painter or a drawer,” Reg (real name Chris O'Doherty) admits. “I started doing graphics pretty much by accident, really, because I was in a band (Mental As Anything) and we needed t-shirts and posters.

“Then other people asked me to do things and the guy that ran Mambo had seen some of the record covers that I did and asked me to do something similar for Mambo. It was really that all these opportunities opened up from doing other things.”

Dog Trumpet, who consist of Reg and his brother Peter O'Doherty plus touring members, recently released their sixth studio album.

“We tossed up [splitting the album into two releases], but we just thought tearing it down to ten or twelve songs would have been hard because we thought all of the songs were reasonably good, and we also had a few extra ones as well which we had already half recorded and started working on, so we were getting a bit ahead of ourselves and we thought we may as well put out a double album.”

Dog Trumpet have tapped into countless genres across the years. Subsequently, their discography crosses genres such as blues and country through to psychedelic rock & roll.

“In terms of instrumentation, Peter plays a lot of mandolin now which we didn't have on the first record. Our basic approach is still guitar, acoustic guitar, slide guitar, but with the addition of mandolin. [Plus] I think Peter’s production and engineering has really improved vastly from when he started doing it. He's produced all [of our albums] except the first one. Without him doing that, I'm not sure that we would exist.”

For Dog Trumpet, sticking to their roots is what's important.

“Basically I played guitar and slide guitar with Mental As Anything so there's not an enormous change. A lot of the songs that Peter and I wrote and recorded with Mental As Anything are not vastly different to the stuff we do in Dog Trumpet, really.”

Dog Trumpet play the Brisbane Powerhouse Nov 14 and Byron Bay Community Theatre Nov 15. ‘Medicated Spirits’ is available now.