Music: Swiftly evolved

The Vines' quick ascent continues with second album

By Mike Prevatt

In 2002, Australian rock act the Vines had the rare distinction of being huge before its debut album, Highly Evolved, had even been released. As early as late 2001, the hype-prone-to-a-fault British music magazines were tipping the sometimes-raucous, sometimes-psychedelic quartet to surpass the buzz and popularity of the Strokes, the White Stripes and the Hives--all garage rock-oriented acts fervently championed by the U.K. press earlier that year. (Longtime weekly NME had suggested that the Vines could become more significant than Nirvana.) As soon as American journalists were convinced of the Vines' greatness and Highly Evolved was released, an onslaught of international coverage ensued. Rolling Stone put them on the cover and declared "rock is back."

If the Vines outdid Nirvana in anything, it was how quickly they attained their mythic status and were expected to live up to it.

"It was only in hindsight that I thought it be strange we were in so many magazines all at once," says Hamish Rosser, drummer for the Vines. "I don't think it wasn't fair, but it sort of becomes almost a self-perpetuating thing when people start getting interested and then it makes everyone wants to write more articles as well. I don't think it's affected us as a band."

Clearly not, or the band's recently released follow-up, Winning Days, might've sounded more desperate--or more like its predecessor. But it doesn't. Though Highly Evolved showcased a variety of pop-structured rock tracks, from the famously Nirvana-esque first single "Get Free" to the Beatles-perky "Factory," Winning Days is a more nuanced, eccentric and even experimental effort. Amid predictably rockier radio bait like the single "Ride" and "Animal Machine" are harmonized, daydreamt strummers like "Autumn Shade II" and the title track. For all the verbiage devoted to how the Vines are first and foremost studio musicians, this is the first effort where the band backs that claim up to some degree.

"Part of it, I guess, was the finalization of the band, as well as the fact we'd all been playing together continuously for the past two years," says Rosser, who joined the band in 2002 along with guitarist Ryan Griffiths after the recording of Highly Evolved. "During the [recording of the] first album...they were a fairly new band, even though they'd been together for six of eight years. They just hadn't been playing tons of shows. And that's the difference you're probably gonna hear.

"Rob [Schnapf], our producer, he looks at it more as making an overall album than individual songs," he adds. "So that went into the choice of which songs to use, because we had more songs than we needed."

It's impressive that Winning Days was the more carefully crafted work, considering how hurriedly it was started after the band's exhausting 18-month world tour to support Highly Evolved. The band's publicity bio proudly states that right after the Vines played their final gig of the trek in London, they boarded a plane to New York and promptly began recording at Bearsville Studios, located in Woodstock.

Given how the Vines emerged with Winning Days barely two years later, it would seem they're a band that literally (and perhaps figuratively) can't catch a break. That's not exactly true--the band snuck four months of Sydney summer in between the album's completion and the start of its "Aussie Invasion" tour. But any restfulness should disappear once the promotional campaign begins. "It'll wear us out eventually!" says Rosser. "It always does."