The Bags Are Packed

"Last year was lots of touring.” Drummer Jo Syme, of Melbourne duo Big Scary is on the line chatting about the year that followed the release of their much-praised second album, Not Art. “We haven't been writing much for a year, and actually, this week we're down at the beach just writing for maybe the first time since December 2012. So we're kind of out of practice of just jamming together – it's really fun.”

While the release of Not Art made for some pretty major changes in the lives of Big Scary – what with Breakthrough Artist and Best Independent Release nominations in last year's ARIAs as well as a few nominations in the AIR (Australian Independent Records) Awards and contention in the ninth Australian Music Prize – Syme feels that the bigger changes are about to come.

“We're now setting our sights overseas and heading to the USA in March for our first huge tour there in April/May. So that's going be our biggest change for us so far, spending a longer time away from home and playing 30 shows in a row without a break,” Syme chuckles. “It's really kind of starting from scratch. We're timing it for when the album comes out there but we'll be paying our dues all over again.

“American crowds, I think are really different. They're really good hosts and really want you to do well – they're really enthusiastic – but mainly, they're super respectful of musicians and we've always got really good feedback and surprisingly had people at the shows – I don't know how that happens but it's really cool. Like we had pretty much a full room in San Francisco and in New York.”

It'll be a co-headlining tour, Big Scary sharing the bill with American artist who calls himself Say Hi, aka Eric Elbogen, kicking off in Vancouver, Canada, 11 April and working its way through Portland, Denver, St Louis and Cleveland to The Mercury Lounge in New York, with a couple of other Canadian dates thrown in along the way.

Big Scary – Syme and multi-instrumentalist, singer and songwriter Tom Iansek – first took themselves off to the US in 2012, taking in the major music industry get-togethers South By South West, Canadian Music Week and CMJ as part of a self-funded tour, one of the eventual results of which was securing a US release for Not Art, courtesy of a small musician-based label there called Barsuk Records, home of Death Cab For Cutie and Minor Alps among others. It hasn't hurt that hit American TV show Grey's Anatomy used the Big Scary track Thinking About You on an episode.

Not Art also saw Syme taking the lead vocal on a couple of songs. “I'm not a natural singer,” she admits, “and it takes an effort to record, but it's just because I'm lazy and don't work on it, so that was a good impetus to kind of push myself a bit more.”

As for what you can expect from Big Scary album number three – well, eclectic as always really. “We came to the conclusion that we shouldn't put any pressure on ourselves. So far it's been everything from circus tunes to psych, to some really, really, like David Lynch-esque kind of feeling songs. We're not having any preconceived ideas about the direction. Once we look back, we can shape those ideas better and see what we're kind of vibing on.

“When we were chatting to labels, before our first album [2011's Vacation], they'd say to our old manager, 'We love all these styles – but what are they gonna do for the album?' They kind of couldn't think beyond… they just want one genre. So we've been lucky that we've never been forced to rein anything in.”