Setting The Past Alight

"We've been sitting with it for a few months now and we do our best to try and not live with it and, as much as we can, try not to listen to it because it can do your head in. But the fact that we're now looking at rehearsals and we're about to walk into [our] first tour in about sixteen months, the band's quite excited. It's going to be good.”

Ian Kenny, the pitch-perfect vocalist for Birds Of Tokyo, is calling in from his Melbourne home a few days before the Western Australian band migrate to Sydney. There they'll carry out final preparations for the March Fires tour before hitting the road hard, wrapping around the country in celebration of what will undoubtedly be another rapturously received record. On paper this run of dates seems a strange one. Last tour they were headlining much larger than haunts than The Tivoli and Enmore Theatre. However, the benefit this time around, according to the vocalist, is that they get to play their venues of choice rather than having demand dictate the rooms.

When discussing this he casually mentions starting again. Which begs the question: are Birds Of Tokyo looking at March Fires as a new beginning? Kenny confirms the assumption.

“It is man, it's a new chapter. It's been almost three years between records and a lot's happened in [that time]. From an outside point it might not look like a lot, but we were writing this record for the best part of two years so a lot's been happening. And we've deliberately created something new we think; we've started another conversation musically in this band. At the core it's still the [constant] elements of the band, they're not going to change, but we've got a new thing going on and I can tell you from our side it's so exciting, it's fucking so cool.”

This “new thing” led the quintet away from their Perth home, the creation process of March Fires taking the band to fresh recording locations in Australia and overseas. Kenny admits that this stimulated the record's shifting dynamic no end.

“You can't help but be affected by your environment, and we do like to get out of our homes and out of our cities to completely get away as a group and just focus on writing, to be distracted by nothing bar our music,” he tells. “We spent lots of time in the studio in Sydney, then we went up to the Central Coast and worked out of The Grove [Studios]. Then we went to Nice, France, and just got a house there and locked ourselves away for five weeks, just purely songwriting which [was] great. That was around mid-2011 and that's where we kind of, I guess you could say we broke the back of the record. A few songs came out of that session where we were like, 'Okay, this is starting to reveal itself, we're starting to get a handle on this'.

“From that point on, songs like Laterns and This Fire and a couple of others started to take a strong hold and we were like, 'Okay, cool. I think that all we've been doing up until this point, writing and stylistically – deliberately stylistically on this record – is starting to show itself and it's working'. From that point on we followed it, and it started to lead us after that.”

Sydney and Los Angeles, where the band finished work on the album, are fairly well-chewed creative pastures for Australian groups. Nice, however, stands out as something of an anomaly, precisely why it made perfect sense for Birds Of Tokyo to disappear there.

“We just like to get away from what we consider normal,” Kenny admits. “We had this little villa up in the hills. We were quite isolated, there was no one around. There was one bakery and one bottle shop that we pretty much lived at. We didn't speak the language. Yeah, we were just completely out of our norm so it was good. It's lovely [there], it's amazing actually. And it was pretty cool because we were just on the border of Italy, and we had this shitty old car we drove into Italy to the neighbouring border town for lunch once a week. It was just a fucking trip, man.”

This colourful writing process also helped the band, especially the new (bassist Ian Berney) and fresh (touring, now full-time keyboardist Glenn Sarangapany) bond creatively and personally on a deeper level. “We're in a good place at the moment.” Kenny confirms. We're feeling quite relaxed about our little musical place in the world.”

But don't mistake this happiness and comfort for complacency. The hard yards are still to come. “We've been a band for... shit, the best part of eight years, and we've been through our own ins and outs and exorcising what demons a band can have, but we've come out the other side and we're onto something new now. We're still going to have our hurdles, it just comes with the territory, but we've definitely shed a lot of that crap and left it behind.”

With more textures and harmonies found within the music, and newfound refrain used on the compositions, March Fires is a departure and progression from Birds Of Tokyo's straight-up rock of old. Kenny is convinced, though, that older fans are going to follow the band on this new stage of their journey.

“[We've] managed to carry some weight and there's a gravity to this record which is different,” he states. “That's what we wanted to do. We wanted to find other ways to speak volumes sonically with the message of this band without having to slam a distorted guitar or heavy-weighed drums in your face. I mean, it works, it's still good, don't get me wrong – we love it – but, there's just so many ways to colour a palette. And as a songwriter, once you discover and you're doing this – you're getting what you want out of it – it's really hard to ignore. So we took it in our stride and we're just following what we think is right.

“I'm confident that people who are into this band, [they're] going to want to know more about the record,” finishes Kenny. “I'm assuming this is going to be a record that people will keep coming back to. The whole idea behind [March Fires] is to communicate with people and just to connect on a human-to-human level. There's nothing socially or politically guessing about what we say, but on a one-to-one and a communal sense we hope that it reaches as far and as wide as it can.”

Birds Of Tokyo will be playing the following dates:

Thursday 7 March – Prince of Wales, Bunbury
Friday 8 March – Fremantle Arts Centre
Sunday 10 March – Breath Of Life Festival, Launceston
Tuesday 12 March – UC Refectory, Canberra 
Wednesday 13 March – Waves, Wollongong
Friday 15 March – Panthers, Newcastle
Saturday 16 March – Enmore Theatre, Sydney
Sunday 17 March – Enmore Theatre, Sydney
Tuesday 19 March – Laurieton United Services, Laurieton 
Wednesday 20 March – Plantation Hotel, Coffs Harbour
Thursday 21 March– The Tivoli, Brisbane
Friday 22 March – The Tivoli, Brisbane
Saturday 23 March – Coolangatta Hotel, Gold Coast