Since forming in 2004, Melbourne indie group Skipping Girl Vinegar have built up quite the following around the country, having already made their mark on some of the country’s biggest festivals including Splendour In The Grass, The Falls Festival, Sunset Sounds and Pyramid Rock.
The five-piece are now on the road again following the recent release of their second album, ‘Keep Calm, Carry the Monkey’.
“It’s a darker record but it’s still got lots of melody and hook and all that sort of stuff,” says singer/songwriter Mark Lang.
“We call it hobo pop. We use old elements of garbage in the mix to kind of push the character boundaries, so it doesn’t sound vanilla.”
A lot of the album was recorded in Point Lonsdale, a coastal town in Victoria.
“It’s an extremely peaceful and beautiful place to be and it helps you to kind of switch off from all of the craziness of touring and you go swimming and surfing and that kind of stuff,” says Mark.
Songs were recorded out of the studio in an old house, and some of the sounds of the house have crept into the final product.
“The natural character of a house is very unique to a recording – the size of the room or the floorboards or the squeaky fridge or the birds from outside,” he says.
“When you record in a studio normally, the sound is so clean which means that everything you record is perfect. But it’s often the imperfections of things that are so beautiful to a recording, like someone’s slightly out of time or slightly this or slightly that, that the humanness to it all starts to unravel.”
The tour kicked off in the group’s home town of Melbourne to a packed out crowd, followed by a gig at the Snowy Mountains of Music Festival in Jindabyne, where they spent a bit of time on the slopes.
“I’m not a skier or anything and I was a bit nervous about trying skiing at the start of a tour so we invented this thing called bum skating,” says Mark.
“We had these water-proof pant things that we borrowed from people so we spent some time on the mountain skating down on our bums.”
From there, they head up to Brisbane before making their way back down the east coast for a string of show, and Mark says he expects fans to be blown away by the latest show.
“I think people will be pretty surprised when they see the band play live in comparison to what they’ve seen before.
“We’re actually really excited about the tour. At the show in Melbourne lots of people were quite taken aback by it so it’ll be interesting to see how it goes around the country.”
Catch Skipping Girl Vinegar at The Street Theatre on Friday 8th July from 7:30pm. Supported by Colleen Hixenbaugh
