“There’s getting to be some real big names in our wide genre, which is opening up for a whole lot of other bands to come through. It helps when you’ve got such amazing bands like Karnivool and Dead Letter Circus to bring attention to it.”
Much like the aforementioned bands, it’s evident a lot of labour goes into Tell Amarosa’s songs. Their early recordings clearly exhibit technical proficiency, but guitarist Andey McDuff indicates this isn’t the driving intention.
“Any technical-ness that comes into our music is in part from our influences, but also some of it comes after we’ve written a track and we just get bored and want to have more fun with it,” he says.
Of course, it’s no good to simply focus on instrumental fiddling if you haven’t got anything to say. Thankfully, Tell Amarosa understand the importance of a memorable melody.
“Kiddo [Alistair Kidd, bass/vocals] and Tim will spend hours writing and re-writing melodic lines until they think it’s workable or we have the melody stuck in our head,” says drummer Nathan Home. “We really think melodic lines need to be strong so we work pretty hard on that,” adds Kidd.
A lot of time goes into refining and crafting Tell Amarosa songs, but care must be taken to prevent any pedantic tweaking from crushing a song’s original vitality.
“If we take too long or get overly involved in a track it’s easy to lose the perspective,” Folliot says. “It’s like if you say a word over and over again, it starts to sound different and weird, it really loses all context. That’s what it can feel like for us if we work on just one track for too long.”
Something that helps prevent the group from over-editing is a democratic ethos. Kidd describes their commitment to mutual consensus.
“We’ve had votes on ideas before and we generally won’t go ahead with something unless it’s unanimous,” he says. “We’ve all been good friends for so long, which probably helps. I think we’ve also established Tell Amarosa with the very strong idea that we leave our egos at the door whenever we go in for a session.”
Speaking of egos, although the band have played only a handful of gigs they’ve already received plenty of positive affirmation. Local booking agency Gunn Music Productions were so impressed with their Espy Artist Showdown performance that they gave the band a booking contract. Folliot describes the buzz of taking out first place.
“Taking out the Espy Artist Showcase was insane; we never thought we’d take it out. That final show was so much fun. The Gershwin Room was just packed and had such a good vibe,” he enthuses.
The band will return to the Espy for Rock The Bay festival in February (alongside Dallas Frasca, The Love Junkies and many more) and McDuff reveals they’re also preparing to hit the studio.
“We’ll be launching a single in the first few months and then drop an EP towards the end of the year. We’re in early pre-production at the moment but there’s so much we want to do.”
Rock’n’roll and modesty have never sat well together and fittingly Folliot states his determined ambition to move Tell Amarosa up the Aussie rock ladder this year.
“By the end of the year we just want to look back and laugh at what we were 12 months before. Even in the last few months our songwriting and playing has just been getting better and better so we hope to have made an impact on the scene by the year’s end.”
BY AUGUSTUS WELBY
