by Zolton in New Music on Friday 26 June 2009

Australian indie-rock band, The Paper Scissors, the hippest thing to come out of the dusty streets of Byron Bay since flavoured wheatgrass, have done it again with another awesome single, Howl [listen below], a short, sharp jab of pitch perfect, power pop. We checked in with their David Byrne-ish frontman Jai Pyne and asked him how was the recording process differed for this latest EP from their previous album: ‘It was completely different. We did the tracking live, with all four of us in the room together. It was great. I think it freed us up and let us be more of a band. We’ve come a long way since we recorded Less Talk More Paper Scissors. Now that Ivan [drummer] has been in the band for about a year and a half, it is a lot easier. We are all very comfortable playing with each other. We’ve been doing it live a lot’.

‘Last year we did a few big tours and some big festivals. This time we tried to take that energy and get it into the studio and try to distill it somewhat. It was really fun. On both these new tracks and a couple of other ones too, we had a 25-piece ramshackle choir — made up of a few of our parents, my little brother (he’s seventeen) and some of his mates, who are all young musicians in Byron Bay, and a bunch of young kids from the Steiner school in Mullumbimby where Xavier’s dad used to teach.

‘So we had all the fun parts that we have used in our previous sessions, but it was more organic. Having said that, we did track some overdubs to try to get everything perfect and did a lot of additional recording at home in Sydney. Maybe the clean air was too much’.
[audio:Howl.mp3]