The Salteens: Who’s Bad?

The Salteens play The Zoo on Saturday and Indiepopcorn at the Paddington Workers Club on Sunday.

The Salteens seem a generous bunch. The Canadian quartet have just released their second album Let Go Of Your Bad Days, the follow up to their debut long player Short Term Memories. But rather than re-hash old territory, the band expand their sound to pack in pretty much everything you want from a great pop album, and then some. And from this weekend, they’re sharing it live with Australian audiences.

“It seems the music we play seems to make more sense in Australia than in the US,” vocalist Scott Walker relates on past touring experiences. “There’s similar music scenes in Canada and Australia in that we have acts that don’t make it in the US, but still change the flavour of what we listen to in our own countries.”

“For some reason things seem a little more eclectic down in Australia, and people seem a little more accepting of us,” he chuckles. “If not downright excited. Here in Canada they have laws that sate you have to play at least 30% Canadian content on the radio all the time, so we don’t get as much American top 40.”

Similar regulations here would just mean we get more AC/DC than stations finding new Australian acts.

“Well Celine Dion, Bryan Adams and BTO have done quite well out of it here,” he laughs.

With the album wrapped up, Scott looks back on the bands time in the studio.

“The most fun we had in the studio was a day when we had a string quartet in, and a five piece horn section came in at the end of the day. I spent the week before writing arrangements for everything.”

Are you a schooled musician?

“Three of us are friends of university where we all took classical music together. It’s hard to explain to people that it takes us a while to figure some things out, because we’re not schooled in playing rock and roll. Some of the concepts took a long time to settle in. Now we’ve had the experience of being a live band for a while we’re starting to get our rock and roll chops under our fingers.”

Do you try and push yourself with each passing recording?

“Certainly. We still didn’t break 30 minutes of music on a record though, and some of the songs are quite long. I don’t know if I have an attention problem, or if I’m musically schizophrenic.”

Not taking musical Ritalin, then?

“Would that be folk music,” he laughs. “No musical Ritalin yet.”