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Love Outside Andromeda.
 "We're
actually on our way back to Melbourne for a couple of days,"
explains Love Outside Andromeda's Sianna Lee, clearly exhausted
from more than a month of touring and excited by the prospect
of going home. "I'm in a phone box at Shepparton so if it cuts
out or anything I'm going to have to call you back."
It must be complicated, having to fulfil promotional obligations while in the middle of a tour. "It doesn't shit me at all," she declares, "although I just realised that I was meant to get some Rolling Stone questions in by today and I haven't, so the whole thing of being totally disorganised I find difficult."
A few months ago the Melbourne four-piece hit the road in support of Brisbane's Epicure. The two bands have decided to hit the road together once again. "Because we're going back to Sydney within a three week period, and the same kind of thing in Adelaide as well, we're just going to try and play some different songs from the album, mix it up a bit. And we really like Epicure, there seems to be a kind of - I'm trying to load the money into the machine, and it won't accept it! It seems to like 20-cent coins and nothing else - but yeah, I find Epicure's audiences very receptive to us, so I really enjoy touring with them... This phone won't take my coins! Oh well... I've got 95 cents left; I'll just keep trying to jam them in."
This brings us onto the first single, the killer rocker Gonna Try To Be A Girl. Only I remember that in my first conversation with Lee, just before the release of the 'Something White And Sigmund' EP last year, she mentioned the song, saying she was happy with it live but would never record it at all.
"Did I say I was happy with it? Because I was probably lying," she admits almost callously. "I dug the sentiment of it but I didn't have the confidence that it was going to be received as seriously. I thought it was a bit gimmicky, a bit throwaway - I was quite frightened that it would put me in the same category as The Casanovas for some reason. I thought that it was too trashy, too obvious, and I had a lot of songs that had a lot of depth to them, and that didn't have a lot!"
Lee also declared there was a lot more pressure in the studio after the success of the EP. "I think it was more intense because it was an album, and there were so many more songs to get through. I felt this immense amount of pressure. And also because there had been a lot of attention drawn to my voice, I felt that I had to get the vocals really right. For the first day of recording, I showed up and I had a sore throat, and I couldn't sing properly. There was all this psychosomatic stuff going on. It was kind of difficult for everyone, and it was difficult for Shane [O'Mara, producer and former guitarist for Rebecca's Empire]. He was very helpful!"
She's initially surprised when I ask if there was a deliberate attempt to avoid the trademark falsetto that attracted so many people to the 'Sigmund' EP? "I think you're very right," Lee agrees, "there was a bit of a formula. I had a very specific way of [having] a climax, a tension and release thing, going on. I don't think it was something I deliberately avoided [on the album], I just think that the other songs were different. I didn't fool around with how I was going to sing them; I had already decided that before I went in there.
"It was apparent when we recorded [the EP], I went for that speccy - that's what we call them, when you jump on top of a football player and go 'ah!' and get the ball. There were speccies in Sigmund, and speccies in Third Dimension Colour Scene, and I did the speccy live in Raido but we were thinking three out of five is too many. So it was because it was obvious that that formula was a bit repetitive on the EP, I did try and stray from it for the album. But I don't remember it being a conscious thought!"
Ben Revi
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Love Outside Andromeda play with Epicure at the Gov on Fri 15 Oct, and 'Love Outside Andromeda' is out now through Remote Control/Inertia.
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