Going Scary Big

I realized I wasn't seeing my friends as much as I used to, and that was when I realized there was a cost to what I was doing, and there was a price to all the adventures,” Tom Iansek admits belatedly. Ironically, in Big Scary's debut LP Vacation, Bad Friends is lead singer/guitarist Iansek's triumph. With a painfully suppressed murmur, the delicate Melbournian ambles through the decay of old friendships, and the story behind the song shares its pathos. “I had a gig in Hobart, and was meant to fly back to Melbourne the next morning and play at one of my best friends wedding. We missed our flight, which meant we missed the wedding. It was a tough day,” he confirms, before adding, “it's [a song] about outgrowing people in a way, and whether that's being professional or not.” Iansek's confession resonates in the track's lyrics: “I watch the planes fly overhead/I will say nothing at all/I'll sing the song of silence/I'll sing no song at all”.

Bad friends might make for compelling songwriting, but working in a duo can put pressure on the best of artists. Yet it's a dynamic Iansek and bandmate Jo Symes have taken in their stride. “Jo and I were hanging out this morning, and she said I'll see you after Easter, and we realized we'd been hanging out every day for the last month. We're great mates, and it helps,” Iansek explains. “Originally, I was just looking to put some new project together, and I met Jo through a friend of a friend,” he confesses, half-laughing. Something sparked, because there's undeniably vital creative chemistry between the two of them: Vacation was paraded as a triple J feature album last year, snagging a place in big cheese Richard Kingsmill's top ten albums of 2011.

Lined up against a wall, Autumn, Winter, Summer and Spring are the core of Big Scary's EP catalogue. The graduated shift between each season is a suitable metaphor for the Melbourne two-piece's steadfast refusal to adopt one musical style over another. “Nature and the elements were a recurring theme to me,” Iansek explains. “Lyrically, more than musically, perhaps. Originally, it wasn't going to be about seasons. We were just reliving songs every couple of months, and then we were like, why not just release songs as seasons, and then it kind of formed that way,” he adds tacitly. “We're varied stylistically, and we had a pile of songs that sounded like they could be winter or summer anyways, and the rest we made up as we went along.”

Sure, Big Scary's debut LP Vacation is an album that takes mug-shots of Australian alt-rock kingpins like Nick Cave and Steve Kilby, but it's not a record that can be rationalized into some simple narrative of genre. Leaving Home and Gladiator are contemplative, downtempo tracks that explore the minimalistics of Big Scary's White Stripes guy-plus-girl guitar-and-drum fundamentalism, while Tuesday Is Rent Day goes nonchalant garage-punk. Iansek is keen to evade the media's genre-trap, and sees tropes as more constricting than constructive. “Absolutely, there is a pressure to conform to one style. People want to sum Vacation up simply. It's easier to market that way. And there is an argument out there that people will get it better if it's all similar. There's some truth to that, but you know, that's not how we work. If we tried to adopt homogeneity, it would be like putting a square peg in a round hole,” he concludes. “Sometimes I wish I could ask people what we're like, and then just use that for the press releases.”