Bellusira
By:
Taking their name from the Latin term meaning “beautiful anger,” Bellusira are the latest rock sensation to emerge from Melbourne’s renowned music scene, with the four piece act having already built up a huge following in preparation for the launch of their debut EP toward the end of June.
Prior to the big night, I caught up with vocalist Crystal Backman to talk about the band’s hard work in the studio, their determination to take their music as far and wide as they can and the details behind the EP launch in the coming week. But first, I had to find out exactly what happened to Fallacy, the name the band first started out with.
“Fallacy was made up of me, guitarist Richard Dalbeth, bassist Mark Dalbeth and drummer Marty O’Shea. We started out around four years ago, and lasted up until January. Fallacy was a completely different thing to what we’re doing now. Our sound was aggressive and angry, and pretty much an acquired taste, in a way that we really only appealed to a certain group of people. But after three and a half years, O’Shea decided to leave the band. He was playing with us, and two other bands (including The Eternal) at the same time, so it was getting a bit hard to co-ordinate the timing to be involved with all three bands at the same time. In the end, while he’s a great drummer, we ended up going our separate ways. So the three of us decided it was time to do something completely different. It was a change in everything. We had to get another drummer, so that’s when we hooked up with Ryan Wall.
“So we figured that since our sound had changed, we would change everything. We thought we would change our image, our name and everything. We just needed to start something that was fresh. We had a whole change in feeling and attitude when we became Bellusira. We’re not in the same place where we were with Fallacy. Fallacy was more aggressive and angry, where as Bellusira is more uplifting and positive. We’re still aggressive, but it comes out in a different way. It’s delivered in a way that more people can understand and relate to. I think everyone can relate to how this band sounds. I don’t know how to explain it, but when we made the change to Bellusira, we had arrived in a different place from where we started.”
The change in name and musical direction certainly paid off for the band, with their song “Wide Awake” attracting attention both far and wide.
“The reactions have surprised us quite a lot. Initially, we decided to do this one song, and use that to generate a bit of publicity and discussion amongst people about this new thing that we’re doing. We really had to start from scratch, because we had a change of name and the music was something new for us. So we knew that our first song had to be an absolute killer. We didn’t want to just advertise ourselves on our MySpace page; we actually wanted to physically get our stuff out there to people. So we had a couple of thousand copies of the one track promo made up so that we could give it out for free and help advertise the band. We spent whole nights standing outside big events handing out CD’s and things like that. And the response had been really good.”
Aside from the one track promo, Bellusira have also been getting themselves some television and magazine coverage as well.
“We’ve been on Channel 31’s Asylum and Noise TV shows a couple of times this year. It’s seems like a lot of people had heard us through those appearances, and that’s great. Another good gauge for us is our MySpace page. We’ve received a lot of contact from people through our site, and we’ve had a lot of people make us friends through their sites. So we’ve built up a bit of a fan base through that. We’ll also have an interview in this month’s Blunt Magazine as well. So we’re really excited to see what comes out of that. We’re hoping to get a bit more attention with that sort of exposure. All up, I think it will be really good for us.”
|
