Conflicts Within The Paper Kites Made A 'Rollercoaster Album'

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 just released, 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.”

Continue reading.