Fortress of Youth

 

 

 

It’s often said you can’t judge a book by its cover. When it comes to music, you can’t judge a band from its album cover. Take Protest the Hero’s new record Fortress—in the foreground is a female goddess, arrows piercing out from her shoulder armour, her long flowing hair blowing out from under a helmet adorned with antlers. In the background, two symmetrical rams’ heads face away from each other while a glowing sun illuminates the entire scene. Most people would assume it’s some sort of punk or metal record, filled with crunching riffs and screaming vocals—and they’d be right.

Still, Rody Walker, Protest the Hero’s lead singer, defies the stereotype of the dark metal mind or the spit-and-venom-spewing punk. “I’m a big fan of Trek of all kinds,” says Walker from the band’s tour bus. Admitting the sci-fi series’ role as a tour time-killer, he says, “I feel like a real dork…”

TV habits aside, Walker and company (guitarists Luke Hoskin and Tim Millar, bassist Arif Mirabdolbaghi and drummer Moe Carlson) are like so many of Canada’s best punk and metal bands these days (think Billy Talent from Streetsville) in that they hail from suburban Ontario—in Protest the Hero’s case, Whitby.

Shortly after forming, and while still in high school in 2003, Protest the Hero released a debut EP, A Calculated Use of Sound. The band came to Halifax immediately after grad and gained a reputation for kinetic live performances and the hard political stances they took in their lyrics. The band’s debut full-length, Keiza, was released in 2005 on Underground Operations Records and soon caught the ear of Rich Egan, owner of mega-indie Vagrant Records, which released the album stateside.

The group has largely stopped writing about politics, lately favouring more literary-inspired concept records. Walker says the time he and his fellow band members spend on the road takes their attention away from global events. “We don’t have the right to preach a uniform political message,” he says. The singer also acknowledges the maturation of the band’s worldview following A Calculated Use of Sound. “There’s a common saying,” Walker begins, “when you’re 16 you’re a communist, at 20 you’re a liberal and at 45 you’re a conservative.”

When it came time to record Fortress last summer, Walker says there was “no plan…strictly action” in the studio. But he concedes there was some structure to the recording sessions. The starting point was the same as before—the dense lyrical concepts bass player and chief lyricist Mirabdolbaghi created. Once he penned the rough lyrics, the whole band wrote music around them. Walker came up with the (often screamed) melodies. Following this, the lyrics were reworked before the song was finished.

A new twist to the template came when Vadim Pruzhanov, of English power metal band Dragonforce, provided keyboards for the song “Limb from Limb.” The track inspired the band to start, according to Walker, “picking around with some synths” in the studio. Everyone felt the keyboards created an underlying fullness to the record and decided to include them on many of Fortress’s tracks.

While many aspects of the band have evolved over the past few years, Walker’s onstage interactions with his fans have remained constant. He’s become well known for fostering an antagonistic relationship with audiences. During a gig in Utah, opening for Christian metal band As Cities Burn, Walker repeatedly told the crowd the headliners were in the back slaughtering goats as sacrifices to their heathen gods. The singer says it was his way of coming to terms with “the obligatory nature of the record industry.” He says that he can’t bring himself to do the typical “hello St. Louis” rock star thing, so he toys with the audience instead. “I’d rather have an entire audience mad at me.” But even Walker admits he can go too far. The last time Protest the Hero played Fredericton, for example, Walker took exception with the way some of the crowd was dressed and verbally abused them for it. And while he knows it was, perhaps, an error of judgement, if he has any regret he isn’t showing it. “Hey. Shit happens when you party naked.”

This story originally appeared in the February 14, 2008 issue of The Coast.

In-Flight Solo

 

Diana Ross. Michael Jackson. Gwen Stefani. They’re all artists who achieved success within a group and then leveraged that success to catapult themselves to superstardom.

In-Flight Safety’s Daniel Ledwell is about to join the ranks of these performers. He drops his first solo record, Two Over Seven, on January 29, with a show the next night as part of In the Dead of Winter festival. But where the above artists made conscious decisions to step out of the shadows and into the limelight, Ledwell is taking a more casual approach to his solo career. Call it the back-asswards, Phil Collins route to fame and fortune.

“It’s weird because over Christmas, I had to basically fabricate my solo career,” he says. “So basically right now all my press shots were taken by my brother, and my sister wrote my bio. It’s a big family affair.”

Ledwell had only played on his own a few times prior to documenting his compositions. “I decided to record the songs I was doing at home, and it’s turned into this.” He sent a secret internet link to mp3s of his songs to friends. One of them was singer Emm Gryner, who quickly saw the potential in the understated folk-country tunes and convinced him to release the songs on her label, Dead Daisy Records.

It might come as a surprise to some people that Ledwell is a formidable songwriting force. In-Flight Safety has always come across as the sum of its parts, with no one member standing out as the creative centre. This probably comes from the band’s rather all-inclusive writing style, in which members bring riffs and ideas to the group that are then worked out and arranged by the members. Lead singer John Mullane is really the only one who breaks this pattern when he pens lyrics and melodies to go with the music that’s already written.

Ledwell’s songs stand in marked contrast to the outward-looking, grandiose nature of In-Flight Safety’s work. “My songs are about simpler things than In-Flight Safety. They’re little heartbreak songs,” he says. “They’re written in a simpler way, more in my closed bedroom with my acoustic guitar.”

The seven-song EP is all Ledwell. He played every instrument on the record and, like with In-Flight Safety’s The Coast is Clear, designed the cover himself. “Unless it’s Rose Cousins singing, it’s me,” he says. All the songs are embellished stories from his own life, with the exception of “I Have Made You a Mixed Tape.” The stand-out track—which feels like a lost song from the Beautiful Girls soundtrack—examines themes of past glory and the sense of aimlessness many men have in their late 20s. “It’s just a story that I created about a broken-hearted guy who’s still living in the high school world,” says Ledwell. “His first girlfriend, he’s still chasing after her, even after all these years.” Ledwell seems somewhat apprehensive to discuss the more personal origins of his other songs.So with all focus squarely on him, is Ledwell worried about striking out on his own?”It was weird because I didn’t really plan on having it as a big release. I just wanted to make it. And now that there are interviews and things going on around it, I am kind of freaked out,” says Ledwell, adding that after playing in a group for the past two years, there is a sense of being musically naked while on stage alone.”It is weird because even when you’re up on stage you do feel more out there on your own and you do have to call all the shots. There’s no sort of support system.” Despite his fears, Ledwell is positive. “I think it will be a fun change.”While Ledwell’s solo career is just taking off, he’s already got his sights set on his next project. In-Flight Safety are getting ready to leave The Coast is Clear behind them. They’re currently working on new material for their next album, though Ledwell refuses to give any timeline. Hopefully returning to the fold will quash any diva-like behaviour Ledwell picks up while out on his own.

This story originally appeared in the January 24, 2007 issue of the Coast.

 

Holy Smokes

Holy Fuck are an unorthodox band. There’s the name, the lack of lyrics, the improvised studio sessions and the revolving-door rhythm section (which has included members from stylistically divergent groups like Blue Rodeo and Wintersleep). And somehow, the band, playing Saturday at the Marquee, even found themselves touring as underground rapper Beans’s backing band.

Though it seems an odd fit, Holy Fuck mastermind Brian Borcherdt was thrilled by the opportunity. “The eight-year-old in me was really excited,” he says. “The first style of music that I ever got excited about was rap and breakdancing. I was a shitty little breakdancer.” As kids, Borcherdt and his brother would visit their grandparents in Delaware, where Friday nights they would listen to a hip-hop radio show broadcasting out of Philadelphia. “We’d stay up late with our cassettes armed and ready in the ghetto blaster,” he says. Hip-hop was still mostly an underground movement at the time, and despite the Borcherdt brothers’ fervour for the genre, back home in Nova Scotia, other kids in school didn’t share that passion. “All the kids in school would tease us and make fun of us, but we were like, Just you wait.’”

Bortcherdt had aspirations to make rap records, but as he got older, he began to find the entire rap game a bit daunting—”I didn’t think I was cool enough for it”—and began to move towards the more rock-oriented sound that would characterize his earliest musical projects. After a stint in By Divine Right, Borcherdt took up the Holy Fuck moniker and began playing shows on his own. He was soon joined by Graham Walsh, who would become the only other consistent member of the band. “It’s a bit of a blessing and a hindrance at the same time,” says Borcherdt of Holy Fuck’s ever-changing rhythm section. “We get into that situation simply because the people we’ve been lucky to work with are in other bands.” Borcherdt says that if Holy Fuck demanded its players be exclusive to the band, he never would have had the opportunity to play with so many talented people. “These people are all really exciting to work with and every time we play with them they bring something new to it.

“I really don’t see how people could be satisfied doing one single thing,” he says. “It’s kind of like, You can only play one board game.’ Man, I got stuck with Boggle for the rest of my life? I want to play Scrabble!” Holy Fuck spent three years on the road, establishing themselves, then promoting their self-released, self-titled debut. Early in 2007 they released a new EP—Borcherdt describes it as a demo intended to attract label support. It did, and this fall, the group put out its sophmore effort, LP, on Young Turks. “That’s really exciting,” says Borcherdt. “It’s the first thing I’ve ever done that has been supported outside of my own means.”

The record consists of greatest hits from studio, radio and live recordings from the past year. “We still didn’t sit down and make an album proper,” where the band goes into a studio and comes out with a record a week later. “We still haven’t had that opportunity and I’d like to,” says Borcherdt. The band worked with different musicians and producers, including Mr. Final Fantasy, Owen Pallett. After he wowed them with an onstage collaboration, the band invited him to cut their song “Lovely Allen” in a studio. The resulting track sounds like the most premeditated thing the band has ever done. Not so, says Borcherdt. Pallet works incredibly quickly and the whole thing was done in a day. “It gives the illusion because it has more of a pop style or melody,” he says. Though they’ve come to it in a rather haphazard fashion, Holy Fuck are now well respected in Canada and abroad, fitting “somewhere in line between weird German experimental music and breakdancing.” The new record recently hit number one on CBC Radio 3. So, would an eight-year old Borcherdt be happy? “All I need is to fly the Millennium Falcon and I’m done.”

This story originally appeared in the January 17 issue of the Coast.

Sixtoo Life

Let it be known, asking Sixtoo to explain all of his alter egos makes you sound like when your dad asks you, “What’s with all this hippity-hop music I keep hearing about?”

Like the Ryan Adams of hip-hop, this guy just keeps coming up with new projects. He dropped a new Sixtoo LP in September, spent the summer throwing remix parties under the Megasoid pseudonym and does DJ shows under the name Six Vicious. To further confuse the situation, he’s found an online home for each of these projects at weaponshouse.com. WTF? To his credit, Sixtoo, AKA Robert Squire, is kind enough to humour questions.

“The stuff that I’ve been doing with Megasoid is really quite different from what people would expect from a Sixtoo record,” explains Squire, which is why he decided to create the weapons house site. “It’s a place where I could have all my creative outlets under one umbrella,” he says, “whether that’s graphic design stuff, art projects or musical stuff. Obviously I’m not trying to confuse anybody, or anything like that. Really it’s just an extension of what I’m doing.”

Squire says that as the nature of the music industry has changed in recent years, so has his music.

“For whatever reason, my aesthetics and tastes have changed,” he says. “I wanted to be working on live remix shit and just going back to having fun with it.

“I think in some ways, what people consider to be ‘underground music’ isn’t necessarily the same thing. It seems that that moment in music has passed and the people that I think are doing really good underground stuff right now are actually really good club producers. Most of the dudes that are in the same genre of music that we’re making with Megasoid all come from that same place of being indie hip-hop producers, but they’ve just switched gears and have decided to do new sounds. I think this is really a big part of what Sixtoo and my personal philosophy about music is, that you should be moving forward.”

This wouldn’t be the first time Squire has bucked trends and veered left when everybody expects him to fly right: back in 2003 he made a conscious decision to stop rapping and concentrate on his production work.

“It’s only recently, once I started working with my friend Hadji,”—Bakara of Wolf Parade—”who I do the Megasoid project with, that that sort of interest has come back to me.”

A desire to do new things is probably the best way to sum up Squire’s career. He started right here in Halifax and gained fame with Buck 65 as Sebutones with their record 50/50 Where It Counts. After living in California for several years as a member of the Anticon Collective, Squire relocated to Montreal and settled with mega-indie label Ninja Tune, which has released his latest record Jackals and Vipers in Envy of Man, an instrumental record in 13 parts. The easiest starting point to describe it is DJ Shadow’s “Endtroducing,” with its bass-heavy beats and ambient sounds. But there’s an indistinguishable quality that makes it a Sixtoo record.

“With the new Sixtoo record I really tried to put together the best Sixtoo record that I could,” says Squire. “I think really I’ve accomplished that in a lot of ways, especially considering it’s an edit-based record.”

While Montreal may seem more cosmopolitan than Halifax, Squire sees both cities isolated from the outside world—Halifax due to geography and Montreal due to its heritage.

“I’m an anglo in a francophone city.”

While he understands the resentment that some people feel when artists leave town for greener pastures, Squire feels he contributed enough to the local scene to justify his move. He and his girlfriend were also back in Halifax early this year looking at properties out around Lawrencetown. The ocean is a big draw when you’ve grown up with it.

As for his show here Saturday night, Squire promises something for both Sixtoo fans and for the people that want to get crazy.

“I’m not going to be checking my email up there or anything. I just hope lots of my old friends come out to the show.”

This story originally appeared in the December 20, 2007 issue of The Coast.

Band in Real Life

“You should print the phrase “big, big titties’ in there.”

Mike Bartlett says this between mouthfuls of muffin, intending it to be his parting words. Bartlett and his bandmate Brent Geikie are sitting in Second Cup on Spring Garden Road for an interview to hype the group’s Montgomery Moth show for their new record, Go Crazy, Saturday night at Gus’ Pub. When asked why he wants it in the story, Bartlett deadpans, “It’ll piss some people off.”

In a period in music where everything about a commercially successful band seems calculated—its sound, image, which company its songs are licensed to—the pair are refreshingly down to earth. Today, many bands are more conscious of press image than ability to write and perform. But if Geikie and Bartlett are the least bit media savvy, they don’t show it.

Geikie’s heavy metal-length red hair, matched by an equally lengthy goatee, would even tip off your grandmother to the fact he’s in a band. It’s difficult to imagine him in any other line of work. A military-surplus jacket, adorned with several rock-band buttons on the lapel, covers his stocky frame. Bartlett’s short brown hair and goatee, baggy shirt, worn jeans and beat-up Doc Martens-style shoes allow him to blend in with the clientele, though neither look seems particularly pre-meditated.

Montgomery Moth was formed four years ago by Geikie and vocalist Jeremy Donovan here in Halifax. The band started life as a three-piece and Geikie says they wanted “to be a rock band without sounding overly aggressive.” Drummer Bartlett and second guitarist Brad Luknowsky joined two years later. “When we added Mike and Brad everything got way tighter and heavier,” says Geikie.

The band was heavily influenced by The Pixies, he says, but never set out to mimic the legendary band. Instead, they’ve tried to incorporate their love of The Ramones, Guided by Voices and Ween into one sound. To say Montgomery Moth sounds like the 1990s is an understatement. Their straight hard-rock sound is so far removed from any of the subgenre-tedium that dominates today’s music scene that they sound like the freshest thing going. Without a hint of any retro-kitsch, it’s like the last decade of music never happened.

“Yeah, seriously, man,” says Bartlett. “We’re caught in a fucking time warp.”

The band has been flying particularly low under the radar for the past year. Donovan, an animator, moved back to his native New Brunswick to take a job at Fatkat Animation Studios in 2006. “We don’t really operate as a band,” concedes Bartlett.

Over this period, Montgomery Moth tries to play a show every three or four months, getting together the day before the gig to rehearse. Fresh ideas are tossed back and forth over the internet, but Bartlett admits that from a songwriting standpoint, the situation is frustrating. “We’ve had some [written] but it’s kind of like [Donovan] would come and say, “OK, I have this riff,’” he explains. “We’ll go over it and build a song around it, but then he’d have to go so he leaves us to play with it.”

Geikie, Bartlett and Luknowsky each play in other bands, helping to excise the creative dearth that hangs over Montgomery Moth. Luknowsky plays with new wave rockers Hotshotrobot, Bartlett with old-school country band, The Whiskey Kisses, and Geikie in Dead Red, who are opening for Montgomery Moth on Saturday night. It’s the band’s only gig on the horizon, but Geikie and Bartlett say Donovan is expected to return to Halifax sometime next year, at which point the pair hope Montgomery will become a “real” band again.

But what can we say about the band until then?

“You can talk about how cool we are,” says Bartlett.

Would he like to elaborate?

“No,” he says, “It’s better left to the imagination.” He then reaches for his sunglasses and puts them on. “The sun’s not out. I don’t even care.”

He crosses his arms against his chest and looks away from the table. “Whatever, man. Deal with me.”

This story originally appeared in the November 15, 2007 issue of The Coast.

Say What?

Say Party! We Say Die! is a hard band to nail down. In its short lifespan, the group has been called dance-punk, party-rock, noise-rock, art-rock and pretty much any sub-genre in between. In fact, You Say Party! We Say Die! is one of the few bands that truly has to be seen live to be fully understood.

“People call us dance-punk, and I think a band like us, cause it’s always exciting and there’s exclamation points and it’s always like “Woooo!’ all the time, it’s easy to dismiss us,” says Stephen O’Shea, the band’s bass player and founding member.

Perhaps most often lost behind the wall of dance-happy riffs and dark visual imagery is the band’s sense of humour.

At a 2005 Christmas gig in Vancouver, lead singer Becky Ninkovic donned a giant box wrapped up to resemble a Christmas present with head and leg holes cut in it. Then she hit the stage and sang the first three songs of the set while wearing both the box and a beaming grin.

“When people complain about us they’re like “What a stupid band with a stupid name,’ and like “Bunch of pretentious scenesters,’” says O’Shea. “They don’t even know us, we’re the farthest thing from it.”

After releasing the Danskwad EP in 2004, YSP! WSD! burst onto the indie scene with 2005’s Hit the Floor LP. At first, the record sounds like it’s made by another dance-punk band fronted by a Karen O wannabe. But subsequent listens reveal a much more dense and intricate sound. Beneath the dance grooves you can hear fully formed songs and Ninkovic’s politically charged but personally filtered lyrics. These elements were purposely accentuated on the band’s latest record, Lose All the Time, says O’Shea.

“We don’t want to be stuck as this dance-punk band and everybody thinks we’re just a bunch of scenesters that throw two minutes into writing a song and then its like “OK it’s done. Perfect. Next song,’” says O’Shea. “There’s actually a lot of thought that goes into what we do.”

When it came time to record Lose All the Time in January, the band was very conscious of the pressures heaped on a sophomore release. O’Shea thinks most bands overthink their second record and end up making something stale.

YSP! purposely recorded as quickly as possible in order to keep the spontaneity that was such a huge element of Hit the Floor. “We knew that our songwriting was a lot stronger and so we put together the best album that we knew we could make at the time,” he says.

Still, O’Shea thinks they’ll never be able to capture the true essence of the group on record. But he also says that he doesn’t really care.

“The whole point of the band…was to get on the road and tour,” he says. Making records was just the best way to get word out to people about the band so they would come to the shows.

“I’d seen so many shows where there were bands playing and people just standing there,” he says. “There’s that bubble that you can’t pop up front. Man, I want to be in a band and I want to see shows where the crowd and the band are interacting and having a good time.”

O’Shea realized his desire to do this while hitchhiking across Canada, prior to forming YSP!WSD! In Charlottetown he witnessed a Wolfnote show that refocused his goals.

“It was that night that I realized that travelling is a lot of fun, but travelling and playing a show every night is even better,” he says. “I think that all five of us have the travel bug in us and we really love to be on the road, playing shows and meeting new people.”

Though the band has never played a show in the Maritimes (they’ve had them booked, but a blown brake system in Ontario got in the way) O’Shea spent a week here on his trip and he’s been anxious to get back ever since.

“There’s something about being close to the ocean,” he says. “As a Vancouverite, that’s something you just don’t get once you leave when you go across Canada.”

This story originally appeared in the September 27, 2007 issue of The Coast.

Third Time’s a Charm

After five years and two albums, you could argue that Wintersleep has become one of the most critically acclaimed outfits in the country. Now the band is set to broaden its reach when its third and most cohesive album, Welcome to the Night Sky, drops on October 2. Drummer Loel Campbell gave Ian Gormely the scoop on all the band’s news: new record, new label, new producer, and new member.

IG: Was there any plan in mind when you went into the studio?
LC: We actually had quite a bit of material [going into the studio], more so than any of our other records. We’ve been playing a lot of these songs live too, so we were fairly comfortable with them all and fairly happy with them going into it. We’re working with a producer by the name of Tony Doogan (Mogwai, Teenage Fanclub, Belle and Sebastian) and he kind of put his own take on things, making sure we don’t do anything that we might regret. He basically became a sixth member.

IG: There seems to be more fluidity to this record. Is that something you were aiming for in the studio?
LC: I guess we did aim to do it, just by actually making a record as you should make a record, because we’d never done that before. We had all the material ready and we went in, blocked out a month in the studio, and just worked on it every day. We finally had the opportunity to make a record the way you used to hear about bands making records.

IG: Did you feel a bit more pressure this time around?
LC: I guess so. You always hear about bands having pressure on their second record, but we’re kind of funny. We only started working with a label well into the release of our second one (2005’s untitled album). Labwork Music re-released our first two records. I guess our third record is kind of like our second record. But there wasn’t really any pressure at all. We all write a lot of music and that’s what we do every day, just work on music that we’re excited about. Obviously there’s the pressure that you want people to like it. But we can’t really worry too much about that. We’re just doing our thing. We’re becoming more and more relaxed. When we’re sitting in the studio, it’s exciting but it’s not like a Christmas Day kind of feeling, like when you’re first starting to play in bands and the first time you go to record. It’s just part of the work now. I think we’re a little bit more in tune with that whole atmosphere. I think we’re ready for whatever is thrown at us.

IG: All the members of the band contribute to songwriting. How does the writing process work for Wintersleep? Do you each bring in your own songs?
LC: Not really. We’ll all have ideas, like myself or Tim (D’Eon) or Paul (Murphy) might have something really cool on the guitar, or any instrument for that matter. We’ve been jamming at my parents’ house in Stellarton a lot lately and we just kind of go on these retreats and we bring up an idea. If it goes somewhere, it goes somewhere. Like the last track on the new record was kind of like our ideal situation for a song to come about. It was just me, Tim, and Paul, and it was just completely finished in one day. The way you hear it on the record is the way you heard it in the rehearsal space. It’s almost like a scatting beat. Sometimes it’s just far too easy.

IG: The band did some pretty extensive touring for the last album. Is there a big tour planned to back this record?
LC: We do like playing a lot because it’s just more time to spend together and work on new music. And obviously it’s pretty darn fun playing to an audience that knows your songs and that’s into them. We’re definitely pretty excited. But we toured Canada five times for that last record so that’s a little much. We had a ton of videos for that last record so we kept getting these new gusts of wind in our sails, so we had a lot of excuses to do it. Hopefully our next tour will be broader and we’ll put a bigger foot forward and try to bring some more production value to the show. I think that maybe we’re in that kind of position now, where we can bring the kind of moody record that it is and play it in an appropriate manner. But definitely looking to expand upon what we can do on the tour for the audience and for ourselves.

IG: Touring as much as you do, is it hard to maintain relationships with friends, family, and girlfriends?
LC: It is. We haven’t been touring too much in the past few months, but it’s almost like you’re put in a freezer for a few months and you come back and it’s like, “Oh, I guess you’re my friends again.” It’s a good way to find out who your real friends are. We’ve all just known each other for a long time, the people in the band and the other bands that we play with. And we’ve all got a lot of really old friends. You just get a lot of insight doing it too, so you really know what you want in a friend. It’s definitely hard—we’re all still learning to juggle. But nothing totally tragic has happened. As long as we can keep our communication lines open. We keep using our tour manager’s Blackberry. In Canada it’s fine, but when we’re overseas it’s harder to make that phone call—you don’t know about the neighbourhood. The last time I was in Atlanta, I went out at night to make a phone call and ended up getting hustled. That’s not cool.

IG: Did they take anything from you?
LC: I didn’t want to get hurt so I gave them some money. I thought playing drums was more important.

After independently releasing two successful records through their own label and quasi-music collective, Dependant Music, Wintersleep signed a deal with Labwork Music last fall. A joint venture between Hamilton mega-indie Sonic Unyon and major label EMI Records, the deal gave the band the opportunity to re-release 2003’s Wintersleep and the untitled 2005 album to a wider Canadian audience and to get American shelf space for the records for the first time.

IG: What does your new label Labwork offer you that your own label Dependent didn’t?
LC: Dependent was kind of our own thing. We didn’t get a lot of funding but we did have distribution, so we could actually get our records in stores and if we were touring enough, we could justify that. But Labwork sees some potential in our band. It’s kind of like this joint venture between Sonic Unyon and EMI. Everybody we deal with is based in the Sonic Unyon building, but EMI is going to help put the first single out to radio because they like it. I think it’s a pretty good position. And they gave us a budget for the record and we were able to work with Tony, which was amazing because we’re big fans of everything that he’s done. It sets us up to be what we could be and what we hopefully are.

IG: How did the idea of reissuing your first two records come up?
LC: Labwork wasn’t even thinking about the new album. The reissues came up to give them a proper release in Canada, so we put some bonus tracks on those. And part of the deal was for the U.S. release too, so that was a big initiative for us to go ahead with that. We really wanted to tour in the States more and have the record out down there.

IG: What has the reception for the band been like in the States?
LC: We’ve had it kind of easy. Well, not easy, but just playing to people is good. All the shows we’ve played have been with the Tragically Hip, so they have an audience down there already. A lot of them are Canadians, but nonetheless people are still living in those cities. It was a great run. I think the big push will be for this next record, so I think we’ll do a lot more touring down there. Things seem to be going quite well. We get a lot of feedback from different areas down there, people asking us to come to their towns.

IG: You mentioned your music videos earlier. The band tends to have very striking images in both its album art and videos. Is that something that’s important for the group?
LC: We just try to paint a picture of the music. We all are quite keen on the music that we make, so we just do it appropriately and work with friends of ours that we think really get it. The artwork for the last record was done by a friend of ours. You can imagine yourself getting a copy of that record, but instead of conducting an interview for it, making a painting or collage on wood that’s trying to portray the emotions and feelings that are in the music. So yeah, it definitely is very important to us and we don’t want to do anything cheesy and kind of ruin ourselves, but that gets harder and harder.

IG: How is it getting harder?
LC: Just things getting bigger. I don’t think we’ve done anything cheesy yet. It’s like when ads come out that people don’t run by you. What I’m referring to actually is a specific [music magazine] Exclaim! ad that came out. There’s one in the new issue, and it has the album cover art on it, but we didn’t actually want that to be released yet. We wanted to reveal that on our website slowly. So there it is, all out in the open. And we only knew when we picked up the magazine. And underneath “Wintersleep” is “Canada’s Favourite Indie Band.” It’s kind of this self-proclaimed looking thing. So that’s the kind of thing that I’m talking about. We’re just trying to keep a good eye on our business.
Founding bass player and lifelong friend Jud Haynes announced his departure from the band in June. Haynes remained with the group long enough to write and record the new record and still plays an integral role in the behind-the-scenes workings of the band.

IG: Was Jud’s departure from the band amicable?
LC: Yeah, absolutely. It just came to a point where we needed to do different things with our lives. Because it’s not just a hobby, it’s everything that we do. We just needed to clear the air. But we’re still working together because Jud’s an amazing artist. He’s still working on our website and stuff like that behind the scenes and he’s happy in that role so far. And Mike Bigelow, who I’ve been playing with since I was very young, is playing bass with us now.

IG: He toured with Wintersleep previously, didn’t he?
LC: Yeah, he was on keyboards and he plays in another band with all of us called Contrived and he was playing in Holy Fuck with me too. So it was a pretty easy choice and he’s pretty excited about it and we are too.

IG: Do you think Jud’s departure is going to affect the band’s sound?
LC: No, it’s not going to at all. I don’t think anything is going to really noticeably change to the listener. I don’t think it’s going to be a big change, except you won’t see him onstage, you’ll see Mike. He’s a great friend. We’ve all become such great friends and we’ve been through so much together. Obviously it was very hard to take—it was weird to know what to do with myself for the first week. It’s pretty heavy because you’ve been together through so many things and you put yourself in the line of fire so much with these people. It’s hard to not get very nostalgic and not think about the last Seinfeld episode. Oh, see? I did it, cheesy—there it is.

IG: Do find that as you get older you have to start making those decisions?
LC: Oh definitely. That’s the thing, it’s all very much life decisions that we’re dealing with here. We need to be happy and we want to be doing this 10 years from now. We have to make sure that everything is in our best interest to make that happen, make sure that we’re all going to be happy in a year. And touring is a big part of that.

IG: Jud said in an interview a couple years ago that the goal of the last record was to get the next one. If that was the case, what’s the goal for this record?
LC: I guess it’s the same thing really. We’re going to make music regardless. Either we’re going to make 100 copies of it or we’re going to make a lot more copies. But you definitely need to make records and you need to tour those records and it’s like this circle. Obviously we’re hoping for the same thing, that this won’t be the last record. We’re just excited to get out and tour it, be inspired, make more music, and do it again. It’s funny to think about. It’s this large, very odd routine, but it’s very enjoyable for all of us.

This story originally appeared in the September, 2007 issue of Halifax Magazine.

 

 

 

 

Golden Ticket

“Hey!” Dave Azzolini shouts to someone in the room. Azzolini, on the phone from Toronto, is trying to spend the afternoon relaxing. “My brother’s in town,” he explains. “He’s filming me, making me feel uncomfortable…and I’m only in my underwear so it’s even more embarrassing. Leave me alone!”

That evening, Azzolini is attending a friend’s wedding, where he’ll take off his hat as lead singer of The Golden Dogs and sing Dean Martin’s “You Belong to Me” for the bride and groom. It’s a song he’s never sung before. “It might be that I’m Italian that he’s asking me to do it,” he quips.

The Golden Dogs, Azzolini’s regular gig, is the culmination of the last 40 years of rock and pop music filtered to perfection. Even the most casual listener could pick up the Brian Wilson harmonies that compliment many of the songs on the band’s latest, Big Eye Little Eye, but Azzolini’s ability to acknowledge his heroes while remaining true to his own voice as a songwriter is reminiscent of early Elvis Costello and Joe Jackson.

“I think the first album was more about the influences,” he says of Everything in 3 Parts. “For this album, it was written in a phase where we were just playing live a lot. The band formed them as they went along.”

The record was produced and recorded over the course of 21 days last year by Paul Aucoin who, says Azzolini, essentially became part of the band. Aucoin is well-known in Canada for producing bands like Cuff the Duke and the Fembots, as well as his own group the Hylozoists. (Some Haligonians might be more familiar with his Grinch-loving younger brother Rich). The Golden Dogs’ Nova Scotian connection doesn’t end there —with the help of Chris Murphy, Sloan’s US record label Yep Roc just released Big Eye Little Eye in the US.

The group is the brainchild of Azzolini and it wasn’t until the Big Eye recording sessions that he was able to solidify a lineup of musicians. Throughout the tumultuous early years, Azzolini continued to operate under The Golden Dogs moniker because, he says, The Golden Dogs isn’t actually the name of the band. The way he sees it, The Golden Dogs are the collection of songs that the band plays.

“There was a dream I had about this invisible dog and every time I’d pet it, it would make this amazing sound. I woke up and wrote a story about it,” he says. “I always kind of pictured that the golden dogs were the songs that we did. We brought them alive when we played live and on record, we kind of created these little beasts.”

Six months after the dream, Azzolini needed a name for his fledgling musical project. Jessica Grassia, his then-girlfriend, now-wife and bandmate, suggested using something from the story he had written. The story’s title, “The See-Through Yellow Dog,” was briefly considered but, as Azzolini notes, that name had a lot of “piss connotations,” and so The Golden Dogs was chosen.

The group’s biggest exposure so far came when they licensed the track “Birdsong” to the same Zellers ad campaign as Joel Plaskett’s “Nowhere with You.” Azzolini thinks licensing songs for commercials is a natural reaction to the musical landscape of the moment. People don’t look to the radio to find new music the way they used to and music channels like MuchMusic are no longer focused on actually playing music videos.

“It’s the necessary evil at this point until something gets figured out on the other side,” he says. “For me, it’s like this means we can get a van and things that let us be a band.”

Azzolini admits that it’s a bit of a strange time to be in the music business, but he’ll do whatever it takes so that he can continue to write and record songs in whatever form they may appear.

“I just kind of decided a long time ago that this is what I want to do,” he says. “If I have to dig trenches to make music, I’ll do that for now.”

This Story Originally appeared in the August 30, 2007 issue of The Coast.

The Two Joels

The Joel Plaskett Emergency is set to go on stage in five minutes. Outside, at Alderney Landing in Dartmouth, roughly 3,000 fans wait patiently in the unseasonable chilly July fog. This is the band’s first hometown gig in support of its latest record, Ashtray Rock, a semi-autobiographical album of teenage love and music set in Clayton Park.

It would seem that the stakes are high for this show but backstage, you’d never know it. The Joel Plaskett Emergency—singer-guitarist and songwriter Plaskett, bassist Chris Pennell and drummer Dave Marsh—appear mellow and relaxed. With them are Plaskett’s father Bill; opening act, multi-instrumentalist and longtime friend Peter Elkas and Gordie Johnson, Emergency producer and former Big Sugar frontman.

The small group is thoroughly impressed with Johnson’s black Stetson and are trying to decide what chapeau styles each of them could pull off.

The Monday before the Alderney show, there’s a palpable buzz about Plaskett’s homecoming gig. He has three interviews scheduled this afternoon, and the announcement this week that Ashtray Rock is shortlisted for the Polaris Prize further fuels anticipation for the show and raises Plaskett’s profile around town.

“I would sooner try and exist in a small place and know everyone,” he muses, sitting in the Economy Shoe Shop on Argyle Street. “Like, just to have met everyone, so at some point they all just wave. That’s it. They don’t feel compelled to introduce themselves anymore. Everybody just waves to each other.”

It’s an interesting sentiment from Halifax’s most recognizable musician. And with his down-to-earth charisma, one gets the impression that he could actually follow through on his off-the-cuff remark. At the same time, a natural bashfulness comes through. When asked if he can speak about growing up in Lunenberg, Plaskett’s only stipulation is that his high school graduation photo isn’t printed with the story. “I just don’t like it,” he says, laughing.

Speaking with him in the Economy Shoe Shop, two sides to Plaskett’s personality become visible—the Plaskett who doesn’t want to offend, who wants to talk with each and every person that stops him on the street, and the Plaskett who values his privacy, his friends and his time with his wife Rebecca.

But the dichotomy of Joel Plaskett doesn’t end with his personal life. Ashtray Rock, which he describes as a “party record,” is probably the slickest, most commercial of the five albums he’s released since Thrush Hermit disbanded in 1999. At the same time, it’s artistically his most ambitious, a quality supported by his Polaris nomination alongside less mainstream fare like Junior Boys and Besnard Lakes.

Perhaps the record’s most direct comparison is British grime artist The Streets’ 2004 album A Grand Don’t Come for Free. “That’s a record,” he says, “when you listen to the whole thing, you follow the narrator and everything’s happening to him, it’s wicked.”

				photo Catherine Stockhausen | April 4, 1996 (click for larger version)

Sound familiar?

Despite its success, Plaskett says Ashtray Rock has polarized his fans. Some love the diverse array of songs and the emotional depth of the story. Others resent the frivolity of songs like “Drunk Teenagers.” (Detractors should rest easy though. The band made serious efforts to get Tone Loc to sing the breakdown of “Fashionable People.”)

“Music should be fun too,” he says. “So much stuff right now is so fucking melodramatic.”

Onstage at Alderney, Plaskett turns his homecoming gig into a party for his friends and family. The band comes onstage, mops in hand, wiping down their instruments before launching into a beefed up version of “Absentminded Melody” from La De Da. The Emergency is augmented by Johnson, beefing up the band’s sound as a second guitarist, and Elkas on keyboards.

In the wings is guitar tech Phillip Zwicker, guitarist for Air Traffic Control and a friend of Plaskett’s since elementary school in Lunenburg. Zwicker was playing guitar long before Plaskett and Bill points to him as a direct catalyst for his son’s interest in the instrument.

				photo Shane Ward | May 17, 2001 (click for larger version)

“He could do pyrotechnics on guitar,” says Bill of Zwicker’s playing.

Plaskett’s mother Sharon is in the audience, as are drummer Dave Marsh’s parents. “All my friends are in one place—I can see them both from here,” Marsh quips from the stage.

Bill joins his son on stage for two numbers, “Absentminded Melody” and “Love This Town.” Bill played guitar in a Cliff Richards and the Shadows cover band in England before immigrating to Canada in the 1960s. In the late ’70s he rediscovered his love of playing through British folk and, in the mid-’80s, helped found the Lunenburg Folk Festival.

Though this isn’t the first time Bill has joined Joel onstage, he’s flattered and honoured each time he’s asked. “What can I say?” he says. “It enables me the privilege and surreal opportunity to observe the following he has.”

Plaskett physically resembles his father—he’s tall, lanky and “a loper” according to Sharon. Both father and son apologize for their circumnavigational answers during their interviews.

				photo Scott Munn | June 5, 2003 (click for larger version)

“For me,” says Joel, “when I want to aspire to play something in [the folk] genre, actually having him on board irons out my idiosyncrasies a little because I’m a lot more flighty as a guitar player.”

Plaskett’s upbringing was similar to the party he’s created onstage. There were always kids around the house. “I don’t think he was all that great on his own when he was little,” says Sharon. Plaskett was the kind of kid who loved to answer the phone when it rang.

“You might be surprised to know that he was quite a chubby baby,” says Sharon. “Joel at six months was the same weight he was at a year and a half. He just stretched out.” She says that before his sister Anna’s birth, she and Joel had what she calls “a very intense relationship.” When Plaskett was two-and-a-half years old, a friend of hers came to visit from Vancouver. “I think he was quite taken aback,” she says, “by my drawing my attention away from him.”

Plaskett’s music always comes across as very personal, and Ashtray Rock feels like his most personal record. But in interviews, Plaskett has made it clear that the record is not a literal translation of his adolescence. “I write autobiographically, but life is not cut-and-dried,” he says. “You can write something at a certain point and feel entirely different about it the next day. I want to present the actual real-life balance to the listener by putting it in a story.”

Sharon takes it a step further. “Ashtray Rock—he never drank in high school,” she says, laughing. “Joel was a pretty clean-cut kid in most respects.” His mother says that as a child, Plaskett was obsessed with rhyming and nursery rhymes. “I listen to his lyrics,” she says, “and I see his playing around with words as coming from way back then.”

Plaskett’s wife Rebecca Kraatz also finds her way to the stage this night. Wearing a yellow-and-orange rain jacket, she stands next to the sound board at stage right and watches the band rip through “Instrumental,” waiting for her spoken monologue.

A graphic artist, Kraatz is responsible for the covers of Plaskett’s In Need of Medical Attention, La De Da and Ashtray Rock. Although the two only married last August, they first met on the set of Thrush Hermit’s “French Inhale” video shoot in 1994.

“I think she got a kick out of me and I was just really smitten with her,” he says. They struck up a long-distance friendship and eventually began a courtship that would last more than a decade. “She’s an amazing artist and really, really, funny, beautiful, idiosyncratic person,” says Plaskett.

“I think they complement each other in different ways,” says Sharon. “I’m very fond of her. She’s one of a kind.” Plaskett says his wife is “not a socialite.”

It’s apparent when Kraatz takes the mike. She remains in the wings, her back turned to the audience as she reads over the music. When she finishes, Plaskett touches his hand to his lips and then, extending his long arms, blows her a kiss from centre stage.

“They’re quite devoted to each other,” says Sharon, “and I like that.”

In the city where he has lived on one side of the harbour or the other for 20 years, Plaskett’s profile has been on an upward trajectory since he began playing Led Zepplin covers in his friend Rob Benvie’s garage with their pal Ian McGettigan in junior high school. Originally called Nabisco Fonzie, by 1992 they were gigging around town as Thrush Hermit.

Now, things are starting to break through to the masses. It’s not to say that fame is eclipsing Plaskett’s music or that he has screaming girls chasing him down the street. But things started to change after last year’s Juno Awards ceremony, held in Halifax.

“We played that outdoor Parade Square show and I had the Juno nomination and there was lots of press and stuff,” he says, “and it just seemed like all of a sudden that many more people knew who I was.”

Plaskett says that at last month’s White Stripes gig at the Cunard Centre, he was only able to watch half the show because people kept coming up to him, touching him, putting their arms around him and wanting photos.

As a music fan, Plaskett understands the desire to speak with someone whose work has connected with you, but at the same time, it’s difficult to deal with, especially when he’s with friends and family. He hopes that by talking about his growing celebrity that he can deconstruct it to the point where it’s no longer an issue.

“I’m trying to embrace that and demystify it as much as possible because I want to live here,” he says. “I don’t want to retreat but I kind of hope to demystify it a little bit or go, “Look, it’s not that big a deal, you’re going to see me again.’” But he’s also realistic about the situation. “It’s a small town,” he says. “You do anything long enough and everyone knows who you are.”

Peter Elkas met Plaskett at a Sloan gig at Concordia University in Montreal. Thrush Hermit was the opener. Elkas, 17 at the time, and his bandmates in the Local Rabbits were impressed with the young Haligonians and connected with what they were doing.

“They were four guys from the suburbs of Halifax and we were four guys from the suburbs of Montreal,” he says from his Dartmouth motel room. “They were so much like us. It was like looking into a bizarro mirror.”

Last year Plaskett had mentioned to Elkas that it was getting harder for him to walk down the street in Halifax. “You’re full of shit,” Elkas thought. But when Elkas played Keith’s Fest last October with the Emergency, he couldn’t believe the reception the local hero got. “He’s like Springsteen,” says Elkas.

He says that on the east coast there is a higher reverence for local talent, whereas in Montreal, his hometown, it’s the complete opposite, since “it wouldn’t be cool.” As for Toronto, everyone there is from somewhere else. “Sometimes I wish I was from here,” he says.

The Alderney show is a smashing success for the Emergency. Teenage girls rush to the stage during the power ballad “Tears Roll Down.” The crowd is filled with families. (One kid turns to his accompanying adult during “Nothing Left to Say” and reports, “He just said “fuck.’”) There are as many spiky-haired heads hiding behind popped collars as there are moppy-haired indie kids. But everyone is focused on the stage where Plaskett holds court.

The show ends with two encores. In the second, the band rips through the high school ode “Come on Teacher,” from 2003’s Truthfully Truthfully, one of the many Plaskett tunes which blend heartfelt nostalgia with idiosyncratic silliness. Just as they reach the bridge where Plaskett says “make it heavy metal now,” the band breaks into Big Sugar’s “Diggin’ a Hole,” which in turn morphs into Van Halen’s “Hot for Teacher.”

Like most things in Plaskett’s music, the song straddles the line between joke and homage.

“A lot of people who like my music like the superficial elements of it and some people really like the heartfelt elements,” he says. “I kind of want to embrace both.”

This story originally appeared in the August 2, 2007 issue of The Coast.

 

 

 

 

Rise’s Shine

Tim McIlrath remembers the advice Alexisonfire gave him two years ago: go to the Maritimes and they’ll love you forever.

“They get ignored and it’s not fair,” the band told him.

It’s something his band Rise Against experienced first-hand when the two groups toured here in the spring of 2005. “We met some really cool fans,” says McIlrath. He wants to make sure they keep coming back.

The Chicago hardcore outfit has reaped the benefits of touring Canada. Rise Against recorded its major-label debut Sing Sirens of the Counter Culture in Vancouver and the album eventually went gold here. Last year’s The Sufferer and the Witness went platinum.

The band was supposed to play the Flip the Switch festival at Alderney Landing in Dartmouth this week, but for reasons unknown to pretty much everyone, the show was cancelled at the end of May. That’s not stopping the band from rolling into town with Silverstein and Comeback Kid, hitting the Cunard Centre on July 2. Rise Against has toured with both bands in the past and lead singer/guitarist McIlrath enjoys the company a package like this one affords.

“It couldn’t be a better tour,” says

McIlrath on the phone from Philadelphia.

Unfortunately, New Jersey’s recently re-formed Lifetime—set to headline Flip the Switch—appear to be skipping Halifax altogether. “I saw Lifetime back in the day,” says McIlrath, “but I missed the boat.” He likes the melodic hardcore sound the band pioneered but he never really sank his teeth into its records during its ’90s heyday. (His bandmates did, however, and the group recorded a cover of “Boys No Good” as a European bonus track for their latest album.)

Melody is an important element in Rise Against’s music. McIlrath barks the vast majority of the band’s lyrics but somehow manages to find melody in the band’s no-frills sound. The songs are straightforward, to the point and, most importantly (and these days, most surprisingly), they stick in your head. It’s what separates the group from many of its hardcore brethren and most likely what helped attract Dreamworks Records in 2003. Although influences include usual punk luminaries such as Black Flag, McIlrath has an unabashed love for more tuneful pop fare. “From Journey to old Bon Jovi, Queen and Skynyrd,” he says.

Rise Against formed in 1999, but its members trace their musical origins back to the 1990s Chicago punk scene. McIlrath played in several bands with notable Chicago-area musicians, including current pop-punk poster boy Pete Wentz of Fall Out Boy. Bassist Joe Principe and Rise Against’s original drummer Mr. Precision formed the rhythm section for 88 Fingers Louie. After releasing two albums on mega-indie Fat Wreck Chords, Rise Against signed with Dreamworks. Inner label reshuffling eventually landed them with Geffen, which released Sing Sirens of the Counter Culture in 2004.

Band members were well aware of the major-label horror stories experienced by bands in their position. But McIlrath says the transition has been easy for the group, perhaps a symptom of the changing landscape of the record industry.

“The lines between major and indie labels are blurring,” he says. “There are independent labels that are as big as a lot of majors and the business practices of some indies are no better than their “corporate’ counterparts. Being on an indie doesn’t make you more ethical than a band on a major.” He admits he’d rather be associated with a major than certain unnamed indies.

People get the impression that bands on majors are constantly surrounded by a buzzing network of assistants, stylists and label execs, but this couldn’t be further from the truth, says McIlrath.

“We deal with a handful of people on an everyday basis,” he says. “It’s a very intimate relationship.”

Rise Against head to Europe with The Used in the fall. After a break in 2008, McIlrath says they’ll probably get down to working on a new record. Until then they’ll continue to tour North America through the summer.

“Thanks a lot to all our Canadian fans,” says McIlrath. “We can’t wait to get up there and play some shows.”

This story originally appeared in the June 28, 2007 issue of The Coast.