There’s something inherently special about a good musical trio. Some of the most innovative music in contemporary pop has originated from bands like Cream, The Jimi Hendrix Experience, The Police, Morphine, Husker Du, The Jam and Nirvana. Perhaps it’s the necessity to play at a higher level of musicianship to compensate for the lack of instruments, or even the need to be more creative to ‘fill the gaps’.

Either way there tends to be a chemistry happening that is not always evident in a more densely populated group of musicians. When the three members of a trio have known each other since primary school, then it’s even more likely that there’s going to be something almost telepathic happening on stage. Add to the equation a new album full of ridiculously well constructed pop songs and you have Tasmanian bred Oscarlima, a band with all the ingredients required to make a chart topping success of themselves.

I caught up with vocalist/guitarist Elroy Falcon and drummer Sven Grinner just prior to the release of their album ‘Desert Caravan’ and asked them how it all came together and why they’ve decided to blow my romantic notions and theories on trios to smithereens by employing the services of a fourth band member.

 

Congratulations on the album, how long did it take to record?

EF: About three or four months, over weekends and weeknights, a day here and there. And that was because we did it in someone’s house, a home studio kind of vibe which was really nice. Basically the producer John (Burnside) set up the studio for us. We had a couple of rooms we used. We had a tracking room and control room and then a couple of little rooms so we could do bass or vocals.

SG: The bass was done in the dunny so we had to break every time someone wanted to use the toilet.

You all went to primary school together, has knowing each other for so long had any influence on your music ?

EF: West Launceston Primary. We used to rub each others faces in the dirt.

SG: I guess it has because we have known each other for so long we don’t take any crap from each other. I think everyone spoke their mind in the writing process for the album.

EF: Nothing seems to get by. If someone vehemently disagrees with something or doesn’t like it we just say OK, fair enough, we won’t do that, we’ll do something else.

There are some great songs on the album. Do you ever finish a song and say How could they not play that on the radio? Do you have that confidence in your own ability?

EF: Not really. The best time is when you’ve just written a song that’s when you get that sort of vibe. After you have listened to it fifty times on playback, mixed it then heard the master...you can’t become detached from it. You don’t really have a response. You don’t know if it’s a good song or a bad song. You just wait to hear what other people say.

How do you document your ideas.?

EF: Last year we just had a shitty little cassette. One with one little speaker and the cassette door doesn’t even close properly. Then of course we demoed them all.

SG: When we got to the recording process we had this gigantic sheet of paper with all the song names we were going to record and then a list of ideas for each song that we would just tick off once they were explored.

EF: In rehearsal we had a white board, an ideas board. Apart from a lot of stupid things written on it we actually got some good ideas from it.

Were there any songs that you took into the studio this time that sounded completely different by the time you’d finished it?

SG: "Doing It Like Before" was probably one that was completely different. We demoed it as a 3 piece then when we got to the studio, we embellished it with strings and it’s got a couple of drum samples on it. We recorded it in bits and pieces. We recorded the first bit then the pre-chorus, then chorus and sticky taped them all together.

EF: I think "Deep In My Heart" too, we were really trying to capture the demo and I don’t think we did in the end. There was this really nice thing working between the drums and the bass and we didn’t quite capture that moment. I think the song scrubbed up OK but we all prefer the demo.

Are you the type of band that has bits and pieces of songs lying around for years?

EF: Very much so. The little tapes and stuff that we have kicking around .. sometimes when we jam, if that’s not such a daggy word, we’ll come up with riffs. That’s all they’ll be, like 8 bars of one riff that we know one day will make a great song one day but we just haven’t worked out the rest yet.

Tell me about some of the gear you used on the album?

EF: I borrowed some guitars from friends and a guy named Darren Garth from the Guitar Emporium in Melbourne. He let me use the most beautiful Telecaster I have ever played. I used that and another guy’s Tele and just all these classic guitars really. I’ve only got a Tele that’s good live but not particularly good for recording. Most of the songs were played through my amp which is custom made and it’s just a really nice warm valvey amp.

Did you experiment with different guitar and amp combinations?

EF: We did. We used the custom-made amp most of the time but I have also got this little amp which is a Moody which is really quite gravelly and distorts really well. We used it not only for guitar but for the drums too... miked it up.

Sven, what about your kit?

SG: For the album I used the very first drum kit I bought which was a Tama Rockstar kit. One of my favourite things on the album is a snare drum which is a custom made snare. We’re a bit of a custom made band. It was made by a guy by the name of Greg Hinds who buys shells from a company in Canada and puts them together in different depths and tries different hoops on them so they’re a really nice drum.

I notice Charlie is credited with percussion, what sort of things was he playing with?

SG: Vibra slap, wood blocks, tambourines, cow bells, and one of those fish things, they always have fish painted on them, some kind of Latin thing. We did this thing on the last song, "Highway" where it falls apart at the end. We used percussion but it wasn’t traditional but more bits of metal or just hitting things, getting that ’ Stomp’ thing happening.

Is there any thought put into what the Oscarlima sound should be like or is it just a combination of the songs, the gear you use, and your personalities coming together?

EF: I think we have become reasonably comfortable with what you have just put in a nut shell there. I think that’s where the sound comes from. We don’t strain too much over what we should sound like or having a definitive sound. What we do is write songs, we try and write good songs, then we try and portray them so it does justice to the song. I guess we get some sort of sound out of that and definitely our personalities are part of it too.

Why did you select "Desert Caravan" as the title track?

EF: When we were writing the songs for the album, that song was probably one of the most poignant moments, and we thought that we really excelled ourselves in our songwriting and creating a mood.It just seemed relevant... writing songs in a little tin shed.

Do you think there is something special musically about trios?

EF: Some of my favourite bands and I’m sure Sven’s too, have been trios. You know The Police and Nirvana.

SG: It’s good for touring too because you can fit across the front of a cargo van with gear in the back.

Do you think that with only three members a trio tends to be more creative?

EF: I think it short cuts a lot of stuff and there is less ego. These guys are pretty subservient and listen to everything I say!

SG: That’s right sir.(laughter all round) It’s good for rehearsal because there’s one less person to organise too.

There are some tracks on the album that I would imagine being difficult to replicate on stage as a trio. What are you going to do when you go on tour?

SG: We’ve bought on board a gentleman by the name of Sonny Portland who plays keyboards and guitar and does backing vocals so that kind of bridges the gap between what’s on the album and what comes out of the PA live. I guess we try to reproduce as much as we can that’s on the record but realise that it has limitations, so some of the songs live will be in a different format or feel from the record.

EF: If we can’t actually recreate what’s on the record then we just try to make the song work. I think some people who go and see live bands don’t necessarily like the verbatim sound anyway.

Do you look at the long term with the band and say this is where we want to be in a couple of years?

SG: I guess sometimes it’s pipe dreaming saying in two years we want to be in the top 40 and dah de dah. We have plans in that we want to start recording another album by the end of the year. We are building our own studio at the moment. That’s the next step. We’ll be touring to promote this album and depending on how long we want to do that, we’ll then take some time off for the next album.