Silence Is Golden

The fact that Melbourne musician Sara Retallick named her outfit Jimmy Tait in homage to her late grandfather – a drover from Katunga in country Victoria where she was raised – makes a lot of sense in the context of her music. The five-piece band conjures a restrained yet majestic brand of pastoral fare, with a core emotional sincerity that makes it strangely compelling. This haunting music is also intrinsically Australian in feel – a fact that Retallick partly attributes to her rural upbringing – so it makes a lot of sense to name the band after a relative with such a clear affinity to our vast land.

“I think that [Australian feel] just comes from my personality and the other personalities in the band,” she offers. “I grew up in the country in northern Victoria – just in a rural farming area – so my childhood had a pretty straight-up Australian rural farming influence, and I think that comes through in the music to a certain extent. Plus I feel that we're all a bit knockabout – that there's no kind of bullshit, in that Australian way. We're just down to earth, easygoing people and I think that comes across.”

Jimmy Tait's second album long-player Golden is defined by its lush atmospherics, and a liberal use of space which may also contribute to the outback feel.

“I've always enjoyed space in recording – I feel that it's just as important as filling the gaps – so I guess the atmosphere comes from that,” Retallick ponders. “I feel like that space and atmosphere is a really important part of our sound. To a certain extent I had a fair idea of what the vibe would be like [before we started]. I wrote the songs over a fairly long period – some songs up to a year before we started recording, but some I wrote six weeks before. I guess half of it was predictable – we knew how the older songs were going to turn out, we had a fair idea of what we were going to do with instrumentation – but the newer ones were a bit more organic.”

And while both Retallick and Jimmy Tait are now firmly ensconced in Melbourne's urban confines, they're not really part of any musical scene per se. “We've never really felt like we fit into a scene down here. There's definitely heaps of bands that we can play with and it works – we suit bands like Harmony and The Spinning Rooms and bands like that, who are all pretty different but it works together. I don't know if it's that Melbourne scene's dark rock'n'roll thing, but it's a weird one – I feel like we fit into a few different genres, so in a way it's just been easier for us to play with lots of different people and do diverse-but-interesting shows. There are those little scenes in Melbourne, like the Tote scene with Batpiss and those kind of bands – it's like they're congregated around venues almost – and we've never really fit into one of those, but we can float around all of them.”