If there was a checklist of things that will guarantee airtime on Triple J, some sort of twisted music industry bingo sheet, Fox and Fowl would be bringing home the meat plate tonight. Let’s go through it.
Band name: Before we even listen to these guys, we know what they’re gonna sound like. The name Fox and Fowl is an absolutely, positively, no doubt JJJcore indie name to trump all JJJcore indie names. There’s a cute animal in the name. There’s alliteration. The name objectively as a sentence makes no sense – in what circumstances would a fox and a fowl be hanging out?
Single name: Jungle Punch. Jungles are for some reason the most indie thing in Australian music – Jungle Giants, Jinja Safari, Jumanji by Glass Towers… is it just a fun word to say? Hardly. The jungle influence here is made apparent through tom-heavy drumbeats, a bit of a Paul Simon influence and tribal sounding flourishes on vaguely African instruments – xylophones, marimbas and the ilk.
Album Cover: Fox and Fowl’s Fox and Fowl album art has all the pastels and beachy vistas of travel posters from the 1950’s, with a healthy serving of weird geometric shit in the background. Throw a quirky white typeface over the top and BAM – FasterLouder album of the year. It’s an album cover made wholly for the web – I can’t imagine it looking any good as a vinyl sleeve, but boy does it look good in thumbnail form on your Instagram feed.
The Demographic: Brisbane? Check. White males aged 20-ish? Check. Unpretentiously well dressed? Check. Fox and Fowl are hitting the nail on the head with this one. Chicks on bass are out, vaguely anglo-indian or eurasian drummers are so 2012 and long hair is for hippies with too many guitar pedals.
The Sound: Arguably the least important thing in getting on Triple J these days, their music is about as straight up as a guitar band can get. Polished fender sounds, a slight touch of natural valve compression on the lead, the aforementioned exotic flourishes and the Vampire Weekend vocal melody all come together to solidify this band as the sound of Australia’s airwaves.
This article might come across as a little sarcastic* and unpleasant, and certainly a departure from what I normally write about on Happy. But this band are important, and I wanted to share their importance with you. Fox and Fowl seem to have sprung out of nowhere, armed from the get go with a sound and a look that fits the mold so completely that they might be a defining act of the JJJcore movement.
And their single sounds pretty good! Jungle Punch is actually a refreshing listen, especially when I have to write all my articles in an office that pumps FBi all week, an institution that has become equally entrenched in their own obsession with a constructed ‘underground’.
The band will be up in Sydney pretty soon playing MUM at The World Bar (where else!) and then down in Melbourne for a show at The Toff in Town. Go on, give Jungle Punch a guilty spin before they become another one of those faces plastered all over Tonedeaf and Themusic.com.
TOUR DATES
FRIDAY 23RD MAY – MUM at WORLD BAR, SYDNEY
Plus Deepspace Supergroop and Miners.
SATURDAY 24TH MAY – TOFF IN TOWN, MELBOURNE
Plus Young Maverick.
*Ed – Is this a bad way to fire you?
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