Flight Of The Kites

Joining the ranks of the Jamaican bobsled team in Cool Runnings, our friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man and Gryffindor's resident goof Neville Longbottom, Melbourne band The Paper Kites are proving themselves something of underdogs on the rise. With just two EPs under their belts and a debut album set for release in the very near future, this little Australian band is gearing up for a huge couple of months, with something like 40 dates on the cards – a good portion of these alongside Canadian dreamboat Dallas Green (aka City & Colour), all the way over in the USA. 

The sheer size of the tour is obviously quite daunting and frontman Sam Bentley's comments only confirm the band's somewhat mixed feelings. “We've never done a tour this big before. It all sounds fine now, because it's something that's coming up and not something we're in the middle of, but I think we're all pretty nervous about having to pull it up.” Nerves and fear aside, Bentley keeps a positive outlook and a hearty sense of humour about the situation, laughing as he explains some of the more hard-hitting tour issues. “Hopefully we'll manage it all okay and not get too sick on the road or eat too much bad food. To be doing the venues that we're doing here – which is already big for us – and then going overseas and doing these 2,500 people-sized theatres with Dallas is amazing. It's quite a privilege for a relatively small Australian band to be having their first trip to the States and doing a tour like that, it's really exciting.” 

The Paper Kites are a band that aren't strangers to the concept of hard work. Forty dates sure sounds like a hell of a lot of shows, but the creative process of their recently completed and soon-to-be released debut album, States, was on a potentially more rigorous wavelength. This was an album that required the cooperation of five band members, an album that took a great deal of time from the Melburnians. “We had a lot of songs before we even started. I had gone away, and we'd been collecting demos over the last year or so, and we had around 40 songs or so just sitting there. We were sort of lucky that we had that many songs to pick from, but I suppose when it actually came down to translating them in the studio and working out the best way to put them down, that was where we all started having discussions about what we thought worked. It was really a matter of everyone wanting to put their best foot forward. There were a lot of conflicting styles in songs, and we ended up with a really eclectic album in the end because we all listen to different sorts of music and we all have different tastes, so the whole album is a bit of a rollercoaster I think.” 

Read our review of States here.

Much like the content itself, Bentley explains just how scattered a procedure it was. “It was a pretty long process. I mean, we're all pretty diplomatic when we get together. We like to discuss things and make sure everyone's opinion is heard, so we had a few meetings and we then tried to cut down the songs that were there. In the end I think we had 13 songs that we were going to record in the studio, so we put them down and we were going to cut down from that, but by the time we recorded them, everyone was so attached to those 13 songs in different ways that we decided to keep them all – that was the best way to go. 

“I guess it's a bit longer than the standard debut album, but we thought, we're putting our music out there for the people who enjoy it, so I'm sure they're not going to mind a few extra tracks. It was a long process, but it was ultimately worth discussing everything. Then, by the time we got into the studio, it was just a mountain of sound that we had to sift through and work out what would work and what didn't. We just kept really expanding on the soundscapes on the songs and we ended up with a pretty sonically interesting album. It's something we definitely put a lot into. We were all pretty exhausted by the end of it; there were songs that perhaps Christina would be singing on, and she'd be half asleep because we'd been doing so many takes. We put a lot of effort into it, and I think that's what you have to do on your debut album. We're all really happy with that.”

Without much time to rest, the quintet have begun sinking their teeth into preparing their songs for the stage. As Bentley explains, this is something that is at the foreground of the band's concerns. “I think it's really important to get it right live, so what we're going to try is bring in a few new little toys to try and replicate that as best we can. It is a part of our sound, and I think we wouldn't be doing the album any justice if we didn't try and get it exactly right. We're just experimenting with that at the moment – how to translate everything live – but we're hoping to get it as close as we can for everyone that's coming along. 

“We have a really great team we're working with on this tour. We're working with a guy called Tayor Hislop who is Gotye's lighting man, and he's brilliant, he's just got some really great ideas for the show. I can't say exactly what that is, but I think he's bringing in a few big things for the stage,” Bentley pauses, and to keep things shrouded in mystery, he cheekily chuckles, “I think.”