Second Flight Rock

Newcastle four-piece The Owls have achieved quite a bit in their five years together. This year they won the local band competition to play the Butter Stage at the Fat As Butter festival, last year they won the Jack Daniels Set Competition in WA and their first single, Go, Let It Go, from their 2010 self-titled debut EP, got them plenty of triple j and community radio airplay as well as support slots opening for, among others, The Jezabels, Gyroscope and Cloud Control.

“Recognition's always nice,” singer, songwriter and guitarist Josh Bailey admits a little dismissively, “but at the end of the day, what we're about is just getting some good music out. I mean, I love playing with big bands and don't get me wrong, I like getting recognised, but at the same time I just want to keep writing good songs for people that are genuinely interested in the music rather than anything else.”

Which is why, when it came time to record their second EP, they thought they should go to a proper studio with a proper producer. In the end though, they came out with something they weren't happy with, so they bit the bullet, borrowed enough cash to fit out their tin shed like a recording studio and did it themselves. The result, which took them a year to get done as they learned how to be recording engineers, is their Swamp Love EP, the first single from which, Better Off Deaf, has already taken them around the country.

“A lot of overdubs and a lot more guitar amps I think,” is how the band approached recording the EP, “a lot of pretty much listening to it back and trial and error really. In terms of the vocal sound, we wanted to get a bit gritty with it, so we tried a few distortion pedals, tried to put a few effects on it to make it sound a bit raw. We didn't want it to be too polished; we didn't want to have it too clean. The grungier the better, we were going for, and we were able to capture that.

“I think less is more sometimes, and that's what we learnt from the first recordings. We weren't too happy with them – I just found it too 'studio',” he chuckles, “and we just decided to do it all ourselves. And I think it was just a better representation of us; we're a bit more gritty when we're playing.

“I think we wanted a bit more of a rock element to it, but we were all going through difficult periods. After the first EP, we were in limbo as to where to go with it, and with a few personal issues we had a restructuring of the band and we just decided, 'Let's get all this raw emotion we're feeling at the moment and just put it down on a few tracks and see how it goes,' and I think that's why we ended up calling it Swamp Love; I mean, we love doing what we do but it has its highs and lows, like most things.”

That “restructuring” involved their original lead guitarist leaving, and their bass player, Lewis Gillespie, who contributed both bass and lead parts to the Swamp Love EP, move to lead, with Joey Bourke taking up his spot next to drummer Matthew McDonough. As for that tin shed… “The studio is all wires everywhere so it's probably a health hazard,” Bailey laughs. “But I don't want to give up too much information because we might get kicked out!”