Fanciful Beast

The lush guitar lines and the big building pop/country-tinged sound of Sydney-based quartet Tin Sparrow has been prevalent through their work thus far – debut EP From The Sun, released mid-2011, and second EP, Fair & Verdant Woods, released in April this year – and it looks set to continue, although as one listen to new single, The Beast, will attest, this is a group still striving to find a sound, still searching for what it is that defines them in a sonic sense. The Beast, the first single to be released from the band's upcoming third EP, to drop early next year, is fuller, bigger, deeper, as frontman Matt Amery explains.

“Yeah, it is a bit bigger in sound,” he muses of this new track. “There's not so many harmonies, we tried not to overdo it with harmonies, and it's more instrument-oriented I'd say. There are vocals there, but they're pretty plain and aren't the main focus. We just wanted to see what we could do with something a little bit more dirty, as opposed to clean, crisp songs.”

Throughout May and June of this year, Tin Sparrow hit the road with Boy & Bear, a tour on which they covered a lot of ground, and a tour they emerged from with, it seems, an urge to experiment more, to try new things – The Beast being a case in point.

“Playing with Boy & Bear, I didn't know what to expect, and Killian [Gavin – Boy & Bear guitarist] at times, had some pretty heavy guitar sounds, which made us think, 'What can we do with our guitar sounds?'” Amery explains on how they began to experiment once home from tour. “Dean [McLeod – guitar] loves guitar pedals, he buys one every two weeks, so it was more like letting him go. So let him go, let him do what he wants to do, find sounds that he likes and then he can bring them back to us and we can go from there. So that made things a bit more guitar-driven, as opposed to our earlier material.”

It would seem then, that Amery, particularly with the new material Tin Sparrow is coming up with, sees McLeod as the nucleus of their sonic evolution.

“Yeah, I see him as the nucleus for some things,” Amery concurs. “[Here] I think we wrote a simpler song, and then used his instrumentation, his sound, and then from there we all thought, 'What can we do with our sound, how can we change this, make it sound a little bit different?'”

Along with drummer Mark Piccles and bassist Sonja Van Hummel, the Tin Sparrow sound is indeed building, growing, morphing and changing – an essential aspect to the evolution of any young band.

“I think there'll be elements of it… but I don't think it'll sound exactly like that,” Amery then says on whether or not The Beast will be indicative of how the rest of this upcoming third EP will sound. “If an EP is testing out a sound, then a single is like a whim – we just went in a direction to see how we liked it, and I think there are definitely some things we'll want to change in the future… I think that louder guitar sound, the overdrive, that may be on the next EP, and I think we'll also try to keep the harmonies maybe.”

Whichever direction they choose to go, Tin Sparrow are growing, and this is indeed the most important thing – The Beast is a new beginning.