HUSKY (AU)

Husky is an Australian quartet led by front man Husky Gawenda and keyboard player Gideon Preiss, cousins who grew up together and discovered their love of music, together. Though the four band members have disparate tastes, they share a passion for classic sounds, rich harmonies, and artful songwriting. Yet while Gideon took easily to the life of the performing musician, playing in myriad bands throughout his teenage years, Gawenda, who spent years writing songs alone in his bedroom, shied away from the spotlight. “I was actually terrified of performing,” he admits. “It took a lot of will power to start singing my own songs in front of anybody, but I was determined to do it, because I always had the dream of playing music as my way of life.”

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Augmented by bassist Evan Tweedie and drummer Luke Collins, whom Preiss met on the Melbourne music scene, the foursome began playing small local shows in late 2008. From the outset, the band’s primary goal was making a record that would bring their songs to full fruition. In a junk-filled bungalow behind Gawenda’s rented house, using borrowed equipment and siphoned electricity, they cobbled together a studio to record their debut, Forever So. “We wanted to have complete creative control over everything on the record,” says Preiss of their D.I.Y. approach. What they lacked in practical experience, they made up for with enthusiasm.“We weren’t trying to achieve an engineering masterpiece," adds Gawenda, "but the heart and soul of the songs are in there.”

In a pleasant, somebody-up-there-likes-me twist of fate, Husky was propelled from Gawenda’s backyard to national prominence at just the right time. Late in the creative process, feeling that the album was still missing something, Husky coaxed forth “History’s Door,” a sun-dappled reverie of hushed vocals, crisp drums rolls and acoustic strumming. This last-minute addition to the set would prove their golden ticket, after they entered it in a contest conducted by Australia’s Triple J radio network to find the nation’s next great-unsigned band—and won! Before they even had a manager, Husky’s finely-wrought music was being promoted from coast to coast.

Seeing their commitment to Forever So through to its finish, Husky eventually took their recordings to Los Angeles to be mixed by Noah Georgeson (Devandra Banhart, Joanna Newsom, The Strokes). “The recording had been such a labor of love, and we had grown so attached to the songs, it was difficult to imagine handing them over to someone else to mix them. But Noah’s sensibility and musicality really complimented the songs,” says Preiss. The final result is a full-realized, long-playing album that holds up start-to-finish, from catchy opener “Tidal Wave,” with its hum-along harmonies and surprise psychedelic midsection, to the understated, intertwined brass parts that conclude “Farewell (in 3 Parts).” In the syncopated rhythms of “Hundred Dollar Suit” or the reverberating piano strings and laid back bass that underpin “The Woods,” you can sense fingers moving over instruments and lungs giving breath to voices, the unfolding of ephemeral ideas into fresh yet fully realized songs taking forth before your very ears.