Guineafowl – Hello Anxiety

I'm rather curious. Who decides to adopt a name like Guineafowl for himself as well as for his band? I received a copy of this five track EP recently and, though again here's a recording that's outside of the original remit of this blog it's something that I enjoyed and wanted to highlight. Well, someone who comes from a highly creative background – we learn from his press release that his mother, stepfather and brothers are all successful visual artists who are able to live off the financial rewards of their work, while his sister is a film producer and his father a fashion designer with his own boutique. So while none of those connections necessarily confer a successful creative gene, it's clear that our musician here has at least been exposed to the environment where creativity is more than just its own reward but can repay hard work and inspiration in financial terms as well.

"My family, particularly my brother, showed me that art is about capturing stories," he tells us. "Although I'm not a painter, that's how I've always seen my songwriting – another way to translate a story."

He's from Sydney, described as having captured his first recordings in "a small dwelling above an antique store near Bondi Beach" with "merely his laptop, its in-built microphone and a soda water at his side," and from there Hello Anxiety started to ferment and brew into its current form, and from which Guineafowl has developed into a full band line-up, bringing the songs to audiences and challenging the main protagonist who notes that "In choosing my band there was only one rule: they had to be better players than me."

Across the EP is the development of the artist. 'Botanist' represents the lonely starting point as it contains an original vocal delivered into that laptop microphone, but, that aside, and I guess aside also from the demo 'Mothr', the other tracks, 'In Our Circles', 'Little Fingers' and 'My Lonely Arms' are full-band studio affairs. They're not all easy listening – 'My Lonely Arms' has an aggressive lyric and there is a sense of pent-up emotions coiled tightly within these songs. But they are most definitely intriguing songs with resonance and depth that capture a range of feeling and emotions, circumstances and frustrations.

Guineafowl Myspace

Dew Process Records