Even: High Times.

Even play the Great Northern Hotel in Byron Bay on Thursday, The Zoo on Friday and the Troccadero at Surfers Paradise on Sunday.

Things are looking rosy for Even. Their third album A Different High has been out for a while, attracting near-unanimous praise for its lovingly-crafted guitar-pop stylings and Ashley Naylor’s classic, top-drawer tunesmithery. It’s a richly textured disc, shot through with lean, muscular riffery and invitingly hazy psych-pop ambience. Now the band are whizzing ‘round Australia to lay it all before you live-style, before jetting off to wow some punters overseas. Bass-person and all-round decent bloke Wally Kempton seems happy with the reception the album’s received.

“I think the response has been pretty much matched all throughout,” he muses. “The first, second and third albums have all got pretty much similar reactions from the print media, it’s all been majorly positive, which is nice; and radio - Triple J has been immensely helpful, pretty much everything we’ve ever put out has gone straight onto high rotation, so someone there’s lovin’ us! Unfortunately it hasn’t crossed over onto any of the other stations until recently, I think Rock ‘N’ Roll Saved My Life has been picked up to a small extent by Triple M here in Melbourne, I don’t know about the rest of the country. So it’s had a certain appeal, the three records, and a certain appreciation that hasn’t crossed over into anything huge!”

I wouldn’t imagine World Domination looms large in Even’s modus operandi anyhow.

“Nah! Not at all!” Wally concurs. “If it did we’d fall flat on our face, we’d put out a shit album that nobody bought anyway!”

One of the most enjoyable aspects of the album, for me at least, is the increasing importance of vocal harmonies to the group’s sound. Hardened Beatle nut that I am, the lovely voice melding of Messrs. Naylor and Kempton on A Different High can’t help but remind me of Lennon/McCartney/Harrison at their best. Where did you guys learn to do it so well?

“I think probably just from our previous bands, just learning,” Wally considers, “’cause I think we were all in our mid-twenties when Even started, and by that stage we’d all had at least half-a-dozen years experience under our belt playing in other bands, so I guess it just comes from that, and all of us love a lot of stuff that’s got a lot of harmonies in it. We just love pop music basically, so it’s inherent in our nature to want to do that ourselves, you know, ’oh, that sounds great, how the fuck did they do that?’ So when it comes to recording your own stuff and making a new song you go ‘hey let’s try that’ and if it works, it sticks and if it doesn’t we go ‘wooh-ooh, maybe we haven’t quite mastered it! Let’s move along shall we?”

I remember being quite surprised, a couple of years back, to see Even’s previous opus Come Again being reviewed very favourably indeed in learned British music rag Mojo. Surprised, because I wasn’t aware that many folks had heard of the group beyond our shores. Wally says they’ve been fortunate enough to do a little touring overseas.

“We have been to Japan only the once, we’ve been to France a couple of times, Germany just the once, but we’re hopefully getting back there this year cause we’ve got a festival in England at the start of June and a few extra UK dates. Then (I’m going to) Spain with The Meanies and then once that’s over we’re hopefully gonna be staying in Spain for a while and flitting over to France and Germany and places like that.”

Eager beavers that they are, Even have already got a new album underway.

“We’re actually halfway through it,” Wally reveals. “We were hoping to have it finished before we went overseas so that it could come out here in September, but unfortunately time’s gotten away from us, I don’t that’s gonna happen now. We’ll have to get it finished when we get back; of course our return date isn’t 100% yet, I mean it could be as early as June 20, it could be as late as August, it just depends on how things pan out for us while we’re over there. So who knows, I guess ultimately the new album will come out in the first few months of next year at the very latest.”

Wally says the band is working with a slightly different approach for this one.

“What it actually is, is an amalgamation of songs that we ran out of time to finish from the previous three albums, plus a handful of new ones,” he states. “Although it won’t necessarily be a la REM’s Dead Letter Office, which was just offcuts, throwaways, B-sides and stuff, it’ll be a bit more of a complete album; it’ll sound coherent because once it’s all finished the one producer will be mixing it all, so it’ll have a continuity to it. But it’ll end up being a rather eclectic piece of work I think, because it’ll have songs from each time period, but none of them were actually finished 100%, so the way our mindset is now, the way we finish them will make them sound current.”