Papa Vs Pretty

Tue 21st Jun, 2011 in Features

With less than a year passed since the release of their breakthrough EP, Heavy Harm, talented Sydney boys Papa Vs Pretty have just unleashed their debut full length entitled United In Isolation. They’re set to have an absolutely frantic couple of months ahead, hitting the road in support of the release.

FasterLouder caught up with front man Thomas Rawle to talk about his thoughts on the album and the band’s bright future.

Now that your debut United In Isolation is finally out, how do you feel about the final product and the direction the album ended up taking?
We’re all pretty happy with it. It’s almost an exact representation of the live band we’ve had thus far and it’s a record we’re all pretty proud of. I mean that a lot of our EPs previously we weren’t completely happy with, but I’m pretty proud of it.

How long have you been working on the album?
The songs were written starting in November 2010 and going through to December, and we recorded the whole thing in January to February 2011.

Are these new songs or ones you’ve been working on over a significant period of time?
All the songs on the record were written for the record, there hasn’t been any songs cherry picked from any previous things or whatever.

Your older work did have more of an electronic feel to it, how did you come about transitioning the band’s sound?
It was more a necessity. When I first started doing stuff I was about 13 playing around on synthesisers and drum machines and all that kind of stuff. After I met Tom [Myers] and Gus [Gardiner] and really made the band, in around ‘09 after we had all left school, we were invited to tour with the Howling Bells. We did a tour with them and we knew we weren’t able to tour with our keyboard set-up because we just didn’t have enough money, so we really had to just cut everything back to just guitar, bass and drums so we wouldn’t have to drive around all the gear.

And did this change the writing of the band’s music?
Yeah I really had to write songs in the frame of the three members, just the guitar, bass and drums. So it kind of shifted everything and changed since everything had to be really strong at the bass level: the songs have to be really strong acoustically, the melodies have to be really strong and it just needs to be really strong at a musical level so I guess that’s kind of how the change came about.

Does this mean we won’t be finding any weird samples on the new album?
Well there’s quite a lot of electronic elements in the album anyways, there’s just not the electronic drum machines or anything. There’s not really samples but there is an ending of a song which has all these cut up advertisements together.

That sounds like it has little influences from Gotye’s Thanks For Your Time?
Haha, I love Gotye. He’s really really great but I guess on the whole it’s more of a basic record, I guess you could say it’s a ‘rock’ record as much as ‘rock music’ is not as cool as it used to be. That’s really what it is at heart.

Are you still the prime contributor to writing the band’s work, or is it more of a team effort?
The way it works is that I’ll write a song just like an acoustic with all the chords, lyrics and the melody and then Tom and Gus will come up and construct the bass and drum parts and together we’ll flesh out the song and then it really becomes a band thing.

Do you think you’ll continue to be fluid and changing in terms of genres?
The real reason it was like that at the beginning is because I was about 15 when I started putting EPs and things like that out, and it’s just when you’re that young and playing music you don’t really know what direction you’re going in. Really when you’re just releasing your experimentations and things like that you’re going to have quite a strange output in hindsight, but now since we really have a working method as a band everything is a lot more simple.

So there would be a chance of you guys pulling a Radiohead in 20 years and releasing some deep experimental electronic album?
Yeah totally, there’s a chance for everything. Like I mean, nothing has totally got a line through it and to really do that kind of thing it’s just logistically a matter of pulling it off well. I’d only want to do it if I feel like I’m pulling it off really well and I didn’t feel like I was being a good enough songwriter to do that kind of thing, so I wanted to take it from the basic level correct first before I went on and did more complicated things.

You guys have a notoriously large unreleased back catalogue, do you ever plan to distribute some of your older work in the near future? Or the Memoirs From A Bedroom EP in another form?
The only way the Memoirs From A Bedroom EP: Issue 1 is being available is via a pre-order and the only way we’re making them available is through special things. For example, Issue 2 will probably go with a show at some point in the future and with Issue 3 we might do a special gig for it. We’re just trying to kind of drip-release everything instead of putting it all out as one since it’s a cool avenue to put the back catalogue out because there’s just so much of it. We might release them individually, it’s a bit of a work in progress. The main plan is to release them in a limited run so those who are really into the band can get a little extra.

You’re going to be on Bluejuice’s new album. How was working with them?
Yeah I played some guitar for them. It was fun, I literally just went in and Jake [Stone] asked me if I could play on a few of their songs and I said yeah so I ended up just playing guitar.