The Lucky Wonders have come from seemingly nowhere, having only formed last year
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’. The new singles follow along in the same up-beat folk frivolity. “They represent the really happy and relaxed style of what we do,” Jessie confesses.
“The album is a real journey, with balanced light and shade, whereas these two songs are both really happy. I will listen to them for pleasure, which is quite unusual when you have just made something. To put it on voluntary and want to hear it. I put Thing About Leaving on to relax me, especially the harmonies, with Emma, Ben Franz and I, we just came up with the harmony out side the recording studio, having an idyllic little sing-a-long out in the country and just put them down for the song. You can feel that in the song I think, it is really relaxed.”
Jessie’s musical story is almost stereotypically Bryon Bay, her mother was a folk singer and she was at gigs as a toddler, hanging around, grabbing microphones and wanting attention already, even singing German nursery rhymes at her mum’s market gig. But it is the songwriting dynamic between Jessie and Emma that keeps The Lucky Wonders fresh.
“We come from slightly different musical backgrounds,” Jessie says of her band mate. “I’ve been brought up on a lot of folk and blues and Emma is more if an indie-pop Triple J-type. So we have become really compatible, we both bring something to the table and we really like how it combines, it becomes something of its own.
“It’s got its own character, the stuff we do together,” she surmises. “If one of us has a whole lot of a song coming out, we won’t bother to finish it because we would rather have the other person inject their flavor into it. The whole thing is quite seamless and we quite often can’t remember who did what in the end.
“We don’t sit down and say ‘we want a song about this’,” Jessie adds, “some experience or emotions are bubbling away and they just come out in a song from one of us and the other will jump in and help out. There is one rule of thumb, which is if it is really bleak, then it’s not finished.
“We all go through hard times but if you can’t shed a bit of light then it’s not something we are interested in putting out there.”
The new LUCKY WONDERS double A-side Anyway is out now and they are in town playing at Wesley Anne with Hello Satellites this Saturday October 9, and a Sunday arvo session the next day at The Bendigo Hotel, from 3.30pm with The Stillsons.
