The members of Aquilo leave the heavy-metal/grunge parking lot to explore their quieter side
In this era of urgent, accelerated technology, the gorgeous, piano-based ballads on Silhouettes—the debut disc from subtly soulful duo Aquilo—work almost like a nerve-soothing, pulse-calming panacea, the perfect antidote to instant gratification. You have to wait for flowery cuts like “Sorry,” “Low Light” and the finger-popping “You Don’t Know Where You Stand” to blossom and unfold, and it demands a decent amount of patience. What inspired such a delicate sensibility for co-vocalists/multi-instrumentalists Ben Fletcher and Tom Higham? They’re not certain because—in their little Lake District hamlet of Silverdale—they hail from the opposite sledgehammer end of the sonic spectrum.
The kids grew up as neighbors. But because the 25-year-old Highham was four grades ahead of the 21-year-old Fletcher in school, they never socialized. That is, until Fletcher’s growling grunge combo Cry Baby Aeroplanes started playing local club gigs alongside Higham’s sinister heavy metal outfit the Dark Con Of Man.
“And we were both frontmen, singers in those bands, and neither of us did covers—we both started out writing our own music,” says Fletcher, whose ex-musician father urged the pair to collaborate. “But we were pretty young and in a different headspace back then. So initially, Tom probably saw me as that little shit from across the road, then later as that younger musician who always supported his band.”
At 16, Fletcher began writing solo material. “And by then, I think Tom found that it was OK to hang around with me,” he says.
Getting quieter happened by default. When the pair started working on home recordings together, like Aquilo’s first single, “Calling Me,” they had no money and hardly any high-tech equipment—just a laptop, a microphone, an acoustic guitar and a drum machine. “So we just worked with what we had,” says Fletcher. “Our choice of sound was all very subconscious and quite minimal. And no, there is no metal version anywhere of ‘Calling Me.’”
—Tom Lanham
