Beat Interview with The Lucky Wonders' Jessie Vintila, Oct 2010. Jack Franklin.
The Lucky Wonders are one of those bands that slightly slip between categorisation ; calling them ‘roots’ makes it sound like they have a djambi player, which thankfully they don’t, ‘folk’ would make them sound too traditional and ‘indie’ would just be incorrect. They are fun though, and crucial to sucking punters into their melodic maw, they do feature ukulele and a sweat voiced girl singing in an Australian accent. “It’s feel good but it’s not vacuous,” singer and one half of the band, Jessie Vintila says by way of summing up their sound. “It’s not folk pop, its different folk, but I don’t want to put the indie word in there just to have to give it substance.”
The Lucky Wonders have come from seemingly nowhere, having only formed last year, they released their debut album Thirteen O’Clock in March, which pulled down some notable radio air. Now they are back already with a new double a-side, Anyway and Thing about Leaving. Hailing from Byron Bay, the core of the band consists of Jessie and Emma Royle. They are the song-writing team, with bass and drums roped in for recording and tours. “Emma and I just sort of ended up having to put together music for a puppet show in the Adelaide Fringe Festival,” Jessie says of the birth of the ‘Wonders. “I had the gig and she came through at the last minute after some others pulled out. So we collaborated on this music for the puppet show, and it came very easily, which I had never found that before with anyone else while song writing. “I find co-writing quite awkward and have leant to avoid it,” she adds. “But with Emma it flowed really well, so it naturally kept happening; we played a few shows amongst friends and set up a few gigs, and we just had this huge response. “People were just coming and demanding albums at the end of the shows, so we thought we may as well just go and make one then.” And so here we are. Thirteen O’Clock is a lovely Waifs-sounding disc, bouncing and trundling through a number of standout tracks, So You’ve Never could be a lost track from Frente’s Marvin The Album, with sing-a-long ‘ba-ba-da’s’. |
Beat Interview with The Lucky Wonders
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