GIG: SKIPPING GIRL VINEGAR
Image: Skipping Girl Vinegar are just about to head off on their biggest national tour to date, titled Music From Cold Places, off the back of their debut album Sift the Noise.
You get the sense, with Melbourne band Skipping Girl Vinegar, that its members might once have been the odd ones out in the playground.
It could be the fact that everything from their drum kits to their website is festooned with hedgehogs and owls, as if the indie four-piece wandered out of an episode of The Animals of Farthing Wood and decided to stick around. Or perhaps it’s that the band is made up of brother/sister duo Mark and Sare Lang, and childhood friends Chris Helm and Amanthi Lynch, yet the four are eerily functional: a kind of musical, mono-generational Brady Bunch.
“Chris is literally like my brother, and Amanthi really is like another sister to me, to Sare – so it’s kind of, we’ve got this long history of understanding each other’s nutbag qualities,” laughs Mark, when asked if there’s much sibling rivalry going on. “You know, you understand it and you give each other the space that’s required when you need it. There’s no major egos in the band.”
That approach seems to be treating them well so far. Skipping Girl Vinegar are just about to head off on their biggest national tour to date, titled Music From Cold Places, off the back of their debut album Sift the Noise. “We started recording the album in winter, on a really cold Melbourne winter, and then our album was actually finished randomly on a snowy day in Nashville,” Mark says, by way of explanation. “It hadn’t snowed in Nashville the whole time I was there, and then it snowed on the very last day of making the record … the bleakness of winter, and the coldness of winter, sort of found its way onto the record.”
It’s not something you pick up on at first listen: theirs is a warm sound, a credible, earthy kind of pop. What Mark describes as “rambling, alt-acoustic”. There’s a slight pause: “It’s not really all that wanky.” And he’s right, it’s not – certainly not by indie-pop-darling standards. After all, Skipping Girl Vinegar aren’t those kind of kids.
Aug 7, The Vanguard, 42 King St, Newtown, $17-20, $46 for dinner and show, 9020 6959 or thevanguard.com.au
