“For me, music shouldn’t be taken too seriously,” confessed Nicholas Owens, vocalist, keyboardist and resident songwriter of The Brow Horn Orchestra. “You should be able to have a laugh at yourself and have a good time.”
It’s this notion of ebullience that pervades the quintet’s blend of grooved-based rhythms and afro beats that are drizzled with the right amount of electronica and hip-hop. It makes The Brow Horn Orchestra one of those bands that are hard to ignore and difficult to dislike. Their current single Fade, from their EP Two Fires, has received medium rotation on triple j, while the band have been added to Peats Ridge Festival, Pyramid Rock Festival, Trevor Music Festival lineups later this year. On top of this hectic schedule, the Perth artists will be performing frequents sets at St Kilda’s Prince of Wales this December. Things are really heating up for the band.
“It’s really exciting for us because over the past couple of years we’ve worked really hard in our hometown Perth to build up a big following,” explained Owen, elucidating the band’s recent stops along the east coast, including the notorious BIGSOUND earlier this year. “It’s really nice to have this as the kind of thing to look forward to, ‘cause it feels like [we’re] moving forward. It’s like a stepping stone and it makes you feel like we’re doing this for a reason.”
This gratification is what enamored Owen towards the end of his degree – he studied a Bachelor of Film and Television – causing him to reevaluate his career path. “Music has that immediate gratification,” said Owen. “You play a single note and you’re already achieving some response from yourself and other peoples as well. I guess it’s a bit more immediate, and if you’re impatient, like me, it’s probably a better career path.”
Consequentially, this led to Owen’s collaboration with trombonist and synth virtuoso Karri Harper Meredith. The pair started busking together in Perth for two years before acquiring more members in 2009, eventually becoming a band of epic proportions.
“We used to be a much larger sized band, at one point we were a 12 member [band],” explained Owen, giving story to the ‘Orchestra’ of the band’s name, however, this number dwindled to the five-piece it is today as the group garnered more attention. “[As] our reputation got bigger people fizzled away, or found it wasn’t for them. Through having other people leave [we’ve] come to a five-member strong band.”
This rearrangement followed after The Brow Horn Orchestra’s first EP Can’t Afford This Way Of Life, altering the outfit’s layered reggae/funk tracks to the electronic collusion it is today. Two Fires consists of a backbone of afro beats powered by rhythmic horns and layers of sporadically erratic electronica. This musical backdrop provides a platform to launch the quintet’s punchy rap lyrics provided by Owen’s affinity for didactic lyricisms.
“I put a lot of effort into the lyrics. We’re a really up-beat, happy [kind of] music. The lyrics are not a focus, but I really enjoy the irony of having dark, full-on lyrics over happy music,” explained Owen, extrapolating upon the joy he gets from this paradoxical superposition. “It’s a fun juxtaposition. It transforms experiences for you. If you have some sad moment in your life that you need to write about, you put it behind happy music, then that experience that you had evolves into people dancing and having fun to that song.”
This cadence, however, is lost within the band’s sonics, but that doesn’t bother Owen as he sees views The Brow Horn Orchestra more sonically, embracing the lighthearted sound the quintet produces.
“My mum and my aunty are both really musical. My aunty lives in America now and she has a Doctorate in Jazz Vocals,” gushed Owen, then added that his aunt tutored Norah Jones during her years at university. The vocalist’s family provided a musical foundation for the artist, one that led him through many paths including movie soundtracks, which he would do outside of the band if the opportunity arose.
“When I was still in high school we had a music body called WAMI – WA Music Industry. They have an annual song competition and I was 15 or 16 [at the time]; I was shortlisted in one of the categories and a few people heard the stuff I was doing back then,” he says, displaying his musical inclination from a young age. “It was very different to what it is now, but a lot of people said it sounded like movie soundtracks and mopey, minimalistic electronica.”
Despite Owen’s evolution as an artist to what it is today, the songwriter is still hesitant to release an album, still holding onto the dwindling hope of forever producing EPs.
“I know you need to put out an album, but there’s a part of me that’s really scared to do that,” said Owen carefully. “It’s a very special thing to do your debut, but at the same time I’ve got to stop being precious. The industry and the people prefer albums, so we’ve just got to go ahead and do that.”
The Brow Horn Orchestra, regardless, have time on their side; with a full set of dates over the summer it will be a while before quintet can settle down to record.
