TIM BARRY To No Avail
Singer-songwriter Tim Barry will be in Australia very soon touring his corker new album 40 Miler. He will appear at The Den on Wednesday, August 8. BEN WATSON spoke to the Richmond, Virginia native.
Rosetta
ROSETTA
Philadelphia Experimentalists Philadelphian post-metal band Rosetta are set to warm up Perth this week as part of their Australian tour. The band kick starts their tour at the Rosemount Hotel tonight Wednesday, July 25 before continuing the next evening at Fat Shan Records on Thursday, July 26. AARON CORLETT spoke to guitarist J. Matthew Weed about the tour.
Tim Barry is one of a growing number of singersongwriters in recent years who were raised in the punk tradition but have gone on to forge successful careers as folk musicians. Some may remember Barry as singer of erstwhile hardcore band Avail from 1987 to 2008, but he is now eight years and five albums into his solo career and – musically at least – he hasn’t looked back. “At first, small handfuls of Avail fans would come to check the shows out,” Barry says. “Nowadays, it’s a massive mix of people from different backgrounds, ages and places. I’m thankful to have the opportunity to play for such a diverse group of people. “The transition was minimal and unintentional. I never set out to be a folk, acoustic player. It just sort of happened. And because it was an accident I didn’t really notice the transition. Also, many of the Avail songs were first written using acoustic guitars and then moved into a big and loud band format. So the writing process has remained nearly the same.”
As a solo musician, Barry has become very much an Americana wanderlust dream. Sleeping in vans, constantly on the road, the parallels to the punk-hardcore touring schedule are obvious. The title track to the new album, 40 Miler, was written at 6am in a van outside a friend’s house after playing a show the night before. That’s very punk rock: a post-show revelation about his desire to write music for himself, rather than for other people. But this is a man who has written songs on freight trains too, and that cuts through to a much deeper tradition— reminiscent of the Depression-era box car riders of the kind evoked by people like Woody Guthrie or Jack Kerouac. Barry admits that his punishing schedule can become a little overwhelming at times. When he spoke to X-Press, he was 60 shows into a US tour with ‘plenty more to come’, but there is little doubt that it is a life he has chosen and a lifestyle he embraces. “I really do love it, or I would stop,” he says. “It’s that simple. To keep centered I make sure that music isn’t the only thing I do or am interested in. I make sure that it is just another one of my
Tim Barry hobbies instead of my only hobby. I have never been and never will be the type of person who only does one thing or follows a single interest.” Indeed, Barry’s love of reading is well known. He clearly has a thirst for knowledge and experience that extends beyond his music and the road, but given that he is on the road so much, it is something that must be integrated into his working life. “I haven’t been sticking to topics lately,” he says of his reading, “because when I’m on the road, I always seem to read newspapers. It’s funny, every day I read whatever local newspaper in whatever city I’m in. Then I’ll look at the international news. “I have a lot of stuff planned out for whenever I’m not on the road again, but I come up with a lot of weird shit to study. I dunno why. I didn’t go to school. I just kinda make school up in my head and just roll with it.”
After capturing the attention of Australian audiences in 2008 with their powerful live show, Rosetta are back. J. Matthew Weed says the tour will not be radically different from the 2008 shows, punters can expect more stage dives, extreme volumes and strange smells.“If anything it’s gotten more intense. Since we’re playing shorter songs now, it means we can play more of them and keep things moving,” Weed explains. “The weather in the outback looks stellar in August, especially given how disgusting it will be on the east coast of the USA at that point,”Weed says. Since the 2008 tour, the band released their third album, A Determinism Of Morality, in 2010 whilst also releasing a host of split-releases with a variety of bands and undertook multiple tours to Europe. Weed describes their hometown scene in Philadelphia as different from other scenes. Most bands reach a critical mass and then hit the road, because they’ll almost always be received better in other places,” he says, explaining that, in some ways, the band feels disconnected from their hometown: “Many people in Philly don’t even think of us as a Philly band.” Weed says the band’s sound is hard to describe. “We’re situated in a strange middle ground between noisy hardcore and psych rock and ambient music. I think we’re much more interested in texture than anything else, though we do try to incorporate technicality and a sort of narrative element in our music. It’s loud, confrontational, and sometimes melodic and beautiful. I think it’s uplifting in a strange way.” The band is also developing new material to be released next year.“We’re working on a [four] song EP right now that we’ll record at the end of the year. That’ll come out on Translation Loss in 2013, and as soon as the tracking is done, we’ll start working on a new fulllength,”Weed says. He describes the writing process as like pulling teeth. “It’s frustrating because it’s isolating, expensive, and discouraging,” he admits, adding that the length of time they spend writing songs is always different: “Sometimes it feels like we work on certain ideas forever, only to toss them at the last second. Sometimes we write songs in the crunch right before recording, which is nuts but the results work out somehow.” As for the rest of 2012, Weed says the band will lay low and write music. “We’ve been out of the writing mode for a long time and it’s time to get back in it.”
www.xpressmag.com.au
13