AUSSIE GROUP PRIDES ITSELF ON VERSATILITY

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, February 26, 1992                   TAG: 9202250207
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: 1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: TRACIE FELLERS STAFF WRITER
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium
AUSSIE GROUP PRIDES ITSELF ON VERSATILITY
Baby Animals, a young rock band from Down Under, plans to get down and dirty when it opens for heavyweights Van Halen tonight.
"Van Halen has been a big influence lately," Baby Animals lead guitarist Dave Leslie said in a phone interview from Birmingham, Ala. "It's really loud up on stage these days," he added with a chuckle.
But ear-splitting volume isn't the only thing the Aussie quartet wants its audiences to hear. The group, which hails from Sydney and Perth, Australia, also prides itself on versatility.
Suze DeMarchi, the Animals' lead singer, has a husky voice well-suited to the band's hard-edged tunes. But her voice also can be sultry and sweet, as in the almost-jazzy first half of "Make it End," a song from the group's debut album.
"The band likes to play a lot of different musical styles as well," Leslie said. For instance, listening to a Sex Pistols song at the spur of the moment inspired "Ain't Gonna Get," the last track on the Animals' album, he said. "We thought, `Yeah, let's do a punk song. Nothing else sounds like that on the album.' " Yet, at the same time, "we play a pretty mean country-and-western once in a while."
The band has drawn on its experiences - from playing the Australian pub circuit to touring with Bryan Adams and now Van Halen - to develop its sound. "You can pick up certain elements of other bands," Leslie said. "We've put that in our melting pot."
Since DeMarchi started putting the Animals together in late 1989, "the band has got a lot tougher and grungy guitar-oriented than we first were," Leslie said. And since earlier this month - when Baby Animals began touring with Van Halen - "we've adjusted the set so that we've dropped some of the slower, dreamy stuff and put [in] more of the straight-ahead stuff."
Leslie is the first to point out that opening for Van Halen isn't exactly the easiest assignment. But it's been fun so far, he said. "Van Halen doesn't place any restrictions on us, on what we can and can't do on stage. They're a great bunch of guys, too."
When Leslie and DeMarchi had trouble with their amplifiers during a recent stop on the tour, Eddie Van Halen lent them a couple. "He's a really nice bloke," an impressed Leslie said.
Baby Animals will be on the road with Van Halen through the first week of March. Then they'll do some gigs of their own in U.S. cities, including Boston and New York, and club dates in Europe. By the end of the year, the group plans to return to Bearsville Studios in Woodstock, N.Y., where its debut album was recorded.
The group didn't anticipate the success of that album, released last August and now No. 1 on the charts in Australia, Leslie said.
"The fact that it's sort of taken off and [been] reacted to so well is really a surprise. My mom's going berserk."
The Animals are still writing songs and putting ideas together for the next album, Leslie said. But when they're ready to return to the studio - which has become something of a legendary spot in the rock business - they hope the creative juices flow as freely as they did the first time.
"The whole vibe of the place was great and very conducive to creativity," Leslie said. "The day before we went in there, I think R.E.M. had just finished recording `Out of Time,' so good vibes were floating around, definitely."

by Bhavesh Jinadra by CNB