Local etherial dream pop masters Fire Behaving as Air recently unveiled their stunning new LP Vapour Trail (available now via Bandcamp) which sees the band traverse sonic territory previously unexplored by the Melbourne group.
Beginning back in 2008 by husband and wife songwriters Owen (guitarist) and Beck Lee (vocalist/harmonium), over the seven years the band’s family has grown and morphed to include Chris Compton (lead guitar) and Mark Taylor (drums), as well as numerous guest appearances including players of additional harmonium, tabla, djembe, violin, cello, bansuri, moog, keyboard and trumpet.
Drawing inspiration from of 60s explorers The Velvet Underground and channeling emotion similar to of 90s dreamers The Dandy Warhols, Mazzy Star and Portishead, the band have kindly penned a track by track run down of their new LP which you can check out below. If you like what you’re hearing pop by the band’s Facebook or Bandcamp pages for more info.
SILVER TONGUE
Owen: We have always been inspired by bands that choose an opening song based on creating emotion and texture, songs that slowly welcome you into the overall feeling of the album; Sunday Morning by The Velvet Underground, The Dandy Warhols’ Be-In or Black Sabbath’s self-titled are perfect example of this. We chose Silver Tongue to start the album and we felt it gradually introduced the correct aesthetic of Vapour Trail.
Beck: ‘Silver Tongue’ initially was a bit of a problem child given that we wrote the song with unusual timing, it took all of us a long time to get the slow groove just right but we refused to give up on it. I like this song; it’s got a vicious streak.
TO THE SEAFLOOR
Beck: Although we all agree this might be our most digestible song, I do love that in true FBAA fashion it’s a little messed up. I love Mark’s drumming in the verse; there is so much going on, I love Owen’s eerie ebow which in theory should be the antithesis to such an upbeat song paired with Chris’ dirty grungy lead with that catchy surf bend.
I purposefully made my vocal melody quite slow over the fast pace of the song with the duelling harmonies which is just me being a pain in the arse and rebelling against it getting anywhere near a “pop” song. Lyrically the song is about returning to where your soul wants to be. I had grown up with close contact to the ocean and it had always been calling me home, this was my way of proposing to turn our world on its head and move home to be close to the sea.
WHEN SHE’S BORED SHE DIES
Owen: When She’s Bored… is by far the oldest song on the album and has been through more changes than any other we have written. Originally When She’s Bored… was our loudest/heaviest song; with all six of my guitar strings tuned to the note of E we would do our best to drench the stage in feedback and noise and was a regular closer to our set when we started playing live.
TOLERANCE
Owen: ‘Desire to Disappear’. This song represents how Beck and I began to feel over time while living an inner city lifestyle. For close to ten years we lived in and romanticised about being amongst the culture and contributing to the scene through our music and performance/fine art. Though the longer we stayed and the more we got to really know the city, the more heartless it became.
I guess we were forever in search of our own Silver Factory, we hoped to build a community amongst emerging artists and for us to come together and grow as a family, free of selfishness, greed or pretention. Sadly this never really happened and we found ourselves reverting inwards to find solace, hence the line “This world is mine”… Subsequently, we now live 1900km from our old lives and feel immensely freer for it.
UNCONQUERED
Beck: When we write we always aim to create an atmosphere to help us escape into a dream, whilst expressing whichever emotion we’re in at that point of time.
With that we find most of our music originates as some form of ambient soundscape and then we shape that sound into a song; that formula was how ‘Unconquered’ was moulded. This song was one of many that outsiders would tell us to speed-up in order for it to appeal more; we would always defiantly ignore these kinds of comments and continue with what felt correct in our hearts.
PEACEFUL
Beck: ‘Peaceful’ was originally written by Owen a very long time ago, the bones were there but it never really had taken on its own life so it always just quietly sat unused and unfinished. About halfway through recording the album a very close friend of ours suddenly passed away, it shocked the entire band to the core.
Owen had encouraged me to write my feelings into lyrics as I was having a hard time coping but the words just weren’t flowing. One day I brought ‘Peaceful’ back out and we sat and listened to the chords then suddenly the words started spilling out and parts of the song were quickly rewritten, I still have a hard time listening to this song as I can hear in my voice how hard it was to sing for her, but I am so proud and think she would be too.
Owen: This is a song made with love. My favourite sounds from the album are the distant harrowing trumpet within ‘Peaceful’; played by our dear friend and part-time band mate Billy, who also contributed synth, it is his beautiful wife that the song is written for and it breaks my heart every time I listen to it.
RIPPLES
Owen: Tribal drums, loops, drones and what I hear as Beck’s own interpretation on the Hindustani vocal style – this is one of our more alive songs and if Vapour Trail was released on vinyl ‘Ripples’ would be track one of Side Two.
At the time of writing the song I was very open other people’s auras and felt like I was being surrounded by their ripples. Wanting to remove myself from society and connect with the Earth, ‘Ripples’ is an open letter to the natural environment asking to speak to us, show us its beauty and set us free.
BREATHE
Owen: ‘Breathe’ is intended to be somewhat of an interlude within the overall album. Some nights we would just jam for hours; Chris with loops and feedback, me making layers of drone, Mark creating a groove and Beck singing her melodies over the top.
We would make songs flow and morph without needing to prompt one another – being such close friends we were always very in sync with each other and though each improved song may go for 20mins or so they always felt very alive to us. It was very therapeutic after a hard week of reality.
WATCH THE WORLD GO DOWN
Beck: I remember the birth of this song so clearly. Owen had just got a new guitar (aptly named Severin) and he was just strumming away, toying with the bend, and then suddenly this melody started forming. I was lying on the floor of our cold, decrepit house following a series of horrible uncontrollable circumstances, all we wanted was that breath of fresh air and some silence but only found new problems. “I know that I’ve been told that Light will seek out Light. But how can you tell when the Darkness takes on it’s on life”.
As I lay there the lyrics and vocal melody started to pour out, getting all of those emotions off my chest, feeling so out of control that all we could do was sit back and watch everything self-destruct. We were trying so hard to stay positive, to meditate on bringing those vibrations into our lives but the negativity just grew.
Musically, I believe that everybody in the band, including all guest musicians, were perfectly on point. I love the silence between the notes, I love the layers of violin and cello that tear your heart in half, I love the way the feedback screams the same way your thoughts do, I love the way the drums breathe and drive. Thankfully, all this is behind us now, but I will always call this song our “Golden Child” as it was therapy and I think I got everything I needed to say out in ‘Watch the World Go Down’.
MANTRA
Owen: “Stare at the Sun till the pain goes away” and “Breathe”; this advice I would repeat to myself until I was in an almost meditative state. Lyrically this was my chance to express myself during a black period of our lives and this song is very much intended to follow Watch The World Go Down. Live we always play the two songs together as one. It was almost a call and response by Beck and I on how we dealt with and helped one another while life was out of our control.
ONE MORE WINTER
Beck: We like to think of this as the albums secret-song, much like the custom of the records we grew up listening to. We were about a month off going in to record the album in its entirety when Owen and I were walking around our local markets and we spied a battered and bruised harmonium sitting out in the rain. I had fallen in love with the instrument when the talented Eilish De Avalon had played for us on ‘When She’s Bored She Dies’ so I immediately snapped it up.
