Melbourne band Harmony is the meeting of six musicians from a number of separate projects that cover myriad of stylistic backgrounds. Accordingly, the band’s music involves an unlikely confluence of austere guitar, bass, drums, and lead vocals with three female backing vocalists singing in beautiful harmony. These contrasts could easily give way to toxic imbalance, but one of the band’s vocalists Amanda Roff (also of The Ukeladies and Time For Dreams) confirms that no such malaise afflicts them.
“We actually love each other and love hanging out,” she says. “I don’t mean to brag for all those bands out there who hate each other’s guts, but we actually do adore each other’s company. I think there’s room for all sorts of relationships within bands. I’m sure there’s great music made by people who can’t fucking stand each other. It’s a different kind of relationship, but for quality of life it is great to love the company of the other people in your band. I certainly feel like I’m really lucky in that my best mates are my band mates.
“Bands are never without tension and issues,” she adds, “but for Harmony, it works great. That makes touring really fun, recording really fun, playing shows really fun.”
It was bang on 12 months ago that Harmony released their second album Carpetbombing.The sextet kept busy through much of last year supporting the release, and now 2015 is set to be a quiet one. But before retreating from public view, there’s an appearance at Kyneton Music Festival penciled in.
“I remember reading [the lineup] going, ‘Oh my God, it’s like the whole of Brunswick and Collingwood have moved to Kyneton’,” Roff says. “You’ll just be walking around in the streets of Kyneton seeing all these people you’re used to seeing down the pub in Melbourne.”
Like cigarettes and ice cream, or a beer in the shower, on both Carpetbombing and 2011’s self-titled LP, the band’s various elements combine to masterful effect. It’s a fairly delicate balance, though, so in a live setting there’s a risk of things getting lost in the mix. The festival stage works as a buffer against this danger.
“One thing about the sound is it’s expansive,” Roff says, “so it does have the capacity to really spread out and that works in a festival setting. Our mixer John Watson is a bit of a wizard and it’s great to see him get on a really big PA.”
The bigger-than-usual stage size is also beneficial: “[With] six people in the band, it’s nice for the backup singers to be away from the drums and bass. On your Tote-size stage with the band all crammed together, it’s kind of a war between the loud atonal instruments of the band and the precise harmonies of the backing singers. When you’re trying to hear each other and sing harmonies and there’s this crazy massive cymbal behind you and John [Chapple] leaping around doing his athletic bass-playing, it can be a bit of a squeeze.”
Harmony’s records have a markedly tragic air and at times the songs start to resemble elegiac hymns. With this in mind, performing while the sun shines could provide a curious complement to the band’s music. Roff ponders what Harmony’s ideal gig location might be.
“I’d like Harmony to be in some sort of epic outdoor setting,” she says. “If you’re familiar with Pink Floyd Live at Pompeii, that would be probably my ideal sort of vibe. But not Pompeii, somewhere in Greece. Probably Crete, and maybe the Minoan ruins at Knossos or somewhere like that. Some sort of epic ancient amphitheatre on an island.”
Crete might have to wait, because after Kyneton the band’s various digits will move their energies elsewhere. Letting Harmony slip down the list of priorities for a time is healthy, says Roff.
“It’s working out well that everybody has different things to concentrate on. I feel like, with music, the more you play the more inspired you are. I don’t get burnt out by being in a bunch of bands, I get more inspiration and more energy.”
However, as a vocalist, Roff takes a unique pleasure out of performing with Harmony: “It is great when Harmony’s in form and playing a lot of shows, I notice that my lungs are in incredible shape, because I’m wailing. Whereas in my other bands I sing quite softly, Harmony’s all about actual diaphragm exercising – power singing. It’s so cathartic to sing like that. I get a bit of a high from it. I get an endorphin high from singing really hard.”
Roff’s endorphins mightn’t be lying dormant for too long, as a third Harmony album is already being discussed. In fact, it looks like songwriting may have just commenced.
“I believe the seed has been planted,” she says. “I’m not sure, neither am I at liberty to say what has occurred so far. Tom [Lyngcoln, guitar/vocals] and Alex [Kastaniotis, drums] – who are the cornerstones of the band musically – I think there’s starting to be bubbling sounds from the cauldron.”
BY AUGUSTUS WELBY
