KEY POINTS:
If you want to sing like Scott Frantz, step up to the microphone with a beer in one hand, a cigarette in the other, and let rip.
Not to condone smoking or anything, but that's part of the 19-year-old's recipe for having a voice that's a mix of Janis Joplin's rawness with the velvety drone of Jim Morrison from the Doors.
His band, White Birds and Lemons, are a meeting of those two acts too - a psychedelic blend of blues and wild rock'n'roll.
The young Auckland four-piece launch debut mini-album Who Says You're Free? with a show at the Rising Sun on K Rd tomorrow night. White Birds and Lemons' music is a weird and wonderful trip - within a song like Starry Eyes they move from searing blues riffs, to a quiet stripped-back interlude, and onto a throbbing bass and drum-driven part.
While they say they've "had a few trips in our time", the transcendent nature of their music is more to do with the journey it takes you on.
"When you get to the end of it you feel like you've gone to a few different places," says guitarist Matt Wilson.
"But it's not so experimental like the Mars Volta where you go, 'Wait, what's happening?"' laughs Frantz.
"I reckon," he continues, "it's just the fact while we're playing our music we're completely involved with it."
Wilson adds, "And it's partly to do with the music we listen to, like Hendrix, Pink Floyd and Radiohead, who have that thing going on."
The band, made up of Frantz, Wilson, bass player and keyboardist Dom Dipple, and drummer and vocalist Rob Dickens, has its roots at Takapuna Grammar, the school that spawned the Checks and the Electric Confectionaires.
Similar to those two bands, White Birds and Lemons formed when Wilson, Dipple and Dickens started jamming together at school during lunchtimes. Then they met Frantz, who went to school just up the road at Rangitoto College, at a Checks gig in November 2005.
"We just became friends and started a band pretty much. It all fell into place," says Frantz.
Wilson says the first time he heard Frantz sing was when the vocalist was still in his old band that played "cheesy anthemic American powerpop".
"I knew his voice was amazing but I didn't like the music so I was listening to it and seeing the potential of it."
So why is the North Shore a breeding ground for blues-inspired bands?
Wilson's not exactly sure why, but all he knows is that the lunchtime sessions at school were almost always "blues jams". When he started there in seventh form he played guitar but had never played the blues.
"But these guys would start playing, and I'd never seen this before, and they'd be playing for 10 minutes and it was all improv. I was blown away so I started trying to learn how to do it and it's just that really simple blues change that we all got fascinated with," he says.
"But the blues is something that's really easy to learn but impossible to master. So, we spent a lot of years just playing blues and trying to get that feel of listening to say Janis Joplin when the solo kicks in and it really hits you here," he says, hitting his chest.
"We were trying to get that smoky room, dimmed-lights feel, and that became the basis of our music."
That's the mood they capture on the mini album, which was recorded and produced by Kody Neilson from the Mint Chicks, with songs like sprawling highlight Starry Eyes, the reckless Secret Drug and the lilting Stella, on which Wilson hollers his lungs out.
The pair say a lot of the band's songwriting is based around improvising.
"But not all the songs work like that," says Wilson. "There are other songs where all the parts are pre-written and Rob usually comes to us with a whole song and says, 'Here's your part'. That's where the more structured songs come from."
But, similar to their live shows, there's always room to move and manipulate the songs.
"It's like ebb and flow, I guess," says Wilson.
"I just want people to put it on and get a sense of what the album's like as a whole, what it's like as one thing, instead of eight things."
Performance
* Who: White Birds and Lemons
* What: Crazy psychedelic blues rock from the North Shore
* Where & when: Rising Sun, K Rd, Auckland, tomorrow night; Yellow Submarine, Hamilton, July 19; Kings Arms, Auckland, July 27.
* New album: Who Says You're Free?, out August 6 and available at shows.
