Alex J. MacPherson

Making Mythologies

Sat, 15 Jun 2013 09:01:03 -0600

It was 2004. Andrew and Brad Barr were on tour with the Slip, their experimental rock trio. The Boston-based band was playing an exuberant set of offbeat musical fusion in a small Montreal club when flames erupted backstage. Fans and musicians flooded into the street. As the venue was consumed by fire, Andrew Barr handed his jacket to a waitress shivering in the late-night rain. She gave him her phone number.

Within a year, the brothers, who grew up in Rhode Island learning rock and roll classics on cheap guitars and drums, were living in Montreal. Andrew tracked down the waitress, who later became his wife and one of the band’s managers. Brad moved into a new apartment. He soon met Sarah Page, the classically-trained harp player who lived next door.

“I didn’t really have any ambitions to start any music,” Brad Barr recalls. “I was working on a lot of classical stuff. Solo guitar pieces on a nylon-string guitar, and just sort of attempting to record some things on my own. At the time I met her, I had this repertoire of songs that were written in this instrumental vein, from a quieter place.” Brad and Page started playing instrumental music together, classically-oriented pieces that suited the odd combination of harp and guitar. “We found that we had a sort of common appreciation for instrumental music, and slowly started bringing in the songs that I was singing on.”

Brad Barr soon discovered that the harp, in Page’s capable hands, was more than just a classical instrument. “I remember when it dawned on me that the harp can be used as this cool melodic, percussive instrument,” he says. “It doesn’t have to be this beautiful angelic sound all the time; you can really get down and make a heavy trance rhythm. That was the revelation. That’s when it started to become a really interesting challenge.” That’s when the Barr Brothers was born.

Earlier this year, The Barr Brothers, the band’s debut album, was nominated for a Juno Award, alongside records by Kathleen Edwards and Serena Ryder. Brad Barr was surprised because it was already more than a year old. It had been nominated for the 2012 Polaris Music Prize and carried the band to New York, where they performed on The Late Show with David Letterman. “I thought our album had gotten all of the attention that it was going to,” he muses. “We’ve been so focused lately on recording the next record that I was sort of pleasantly surprised to hear that this one still had a little bit of mojo left in it. The little album that could.”

He was even more surprised because the band, which also includes Andrew and multi-instrumentalist Andres Vial, never intended to put out a record. The songs that make The Barr Brothers were written as an exercise in creativity and sonic expansion; at the beginning, nobody thought about releasing an album. “Pretty much all the tracks were recorded in the process of setting up the studio, and learning about some of the mics and gear we bought,” he says. “There was no real conception. They were being tracked how any album should be: for the creator’s own amusement and learning process.”

It was a fortuitous blueprint. Without the pressure of a looming deadline, the musicians were free to indulge their whims and fanices. They pluged Page’s harp into an enormous Ampeg and turned the gain up, just to see what would happen. They experimented with unusual percussion and violin bows. They played with microphones and recording techniques. They learned to make music together. “There were no parameters,” Brad explains. “Having the freedom and the time, and not worrying about how much we were spending because we really weren’t spending anything, gave us a lot of freedom to try whatever we wanted to.”

The Barr Brothers emerged as a twisting, turning, and deeply unpredictable examination of folk music. Although the song structures are familiar, the sonics are not. Drawing on influences as diverse as west African rhythms and Mississippi Delta Blues, the album sounds like it was designed to eradicate the lines between genre and style. “Beggar In the Morning” trains the spotlight on a simple acoustic guitar lick and Brad Barr’s buttery voice without letting the set, a swelling backdrop of organ drones and harp lines, fade into darkness. “Give The Devil Back His Heart” ventures into rock and roll: powered by a slew of electric instruments and analog percussion, the song’s hypnotic riff cascades into cacophony, held together by a faint trumpet line and a fraying gang vocal. “Let There Be Horses,” which closes the record, recalls the heroin ballads that defined rock music in the 1970s without abandoning the sonic tension that shapes each song that emerges from the band’s Montreal studio.

The album feels cohesive yet unrestrained. The sonics are expansive, and frequently threaten to devolve into chaos, yet the album is held together by the thread of an idea: a desire to challenge folk music, to push the boundaries of the form as far as possible. “I think it’s always our intention to be as forward-thinking – musically, instrumentally, sonically – as we can be,” Brad says, adding that this impulse drives most modern music, regardless of when or where it was composted. Michael Jackson’s Thriller blended compelling songs and new sounds, he says, before adding that he is not comparing his band to the King of Pop. “I guess that’s always the underlying intention: to get the songwriting to where we all feel really confident in it, and do what we can to make it interesting, to not try and not repeat history if possible, but rather to take these elements that are great and combine it with something completely original. It’s not always successful, but it certainly it is a good modus operandi.”

Listening to The Barr Brothers is a dizzying experience. From the aching strains of “Beggars in the Morning” and the manic slide guitar work that animates “Lord, I Just Can’t Keep From Crying” (a Blind Willie Johnson cover) to the rolling thunder of “Old Mythologies” and the menacing dissonance of “Deacon’s Son,” the album rises and falls in perfect time. The pacing, Brad explains, is the result of the band’s desire to create balanced, if not predictable, songs. “Even though we were making the songs on this record without the intention of having it get nominated for a Juno,” Brad laughs, “there’s still that commitment to making sure that these songs are still sitting a graceful place. That they’re all economical and expressive. That when they need to be fiery, they’re fiery; and when they need to cool out, they’re cool.”

It is tempting to think of the Barr Brothers as a sonics band, a group whose raison d’être consists of finding new ways to subvert folk music with rich textures and swelling dynamics. But to think of them as a sonics band is to overlook their songwriting. And in an era dominated by saccharine cliché and unapologetic kitsch, it is perhaps their strongest asset.

Brad Barr likes to write about big ideas. His songs draw on themes from nature and morality, and extract meaning from the poles that shape our view of the world. “I never like to say these songs are about this or about that,” he admits, “because it’s nice to know someone can listen them and find their own meaning, their own way of interpreting what this lyric means.”

But, he adds after a short pause, “there’s some dichotomies that exist in the world, whether it’s these things in nature – sun and moon, night and day – or these archetypes like heaven and hell, or ideas of wrong and write. And these things are necessary to keep the world going, and they are also necessary to dwell in each person.” The Barr Brothers is about reconciling these expansive ideas, which have for centuries outlined the arc of human history, with the meaning of an individual life.

“Never underestimate a small notion,” he continues, “whether it’s something that you’re playing on an instrument or a thought or a lyric. Never underestimate or discredit or write off a moment of inspiration, because they’re rare enough in this world. All of the songs on that record started as very casual lyrical or harmonic, rhythmic or melodic notions. Little offhand notions.”

Notions that swell over time to become stories, which grow into mythologies. Like the nightclub fire and the new apartment, our mythologies are woven into the fabric of life.

First published in Verb, 12 April 2013. Photo by Andre Guerette, courtesy of the Barr Brothers / Facebook.

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Wed, 12 Jun 2013 09:01:07 -0600

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Tue, 11 Jun 2013 17:57:49 -0600

How We Filled The Vault

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 09:00:50 -0600

Last summer, the MacKenzie Art Gallery staged an exhibition of artwork collected by Norman MacKenzie, the lawyer whose donation of paintings and sculptures formed the nucleus of the gallery that bears his name. Ruins To Renaissance: The Rise of The MacKenzie Bequest highlighted the depth of MacKenzie’s collection, which focused on works by Canadian artists and European masters, as well as many more exotic objects. How We Filled The Vault: Sixty Years Of Collecting At The MacKenzie Art Gallery picks up where Ruins To Renaissance left off. It features objects from the gallery’s permanent collection, a group of almost four thousand works donated to and purchased by the gallery since it opened in 1953. But How We Filled The Vault is much more than an examination of six decades of art in Saskatchewan: it is a look back at the people whose vision is reflected in the collection they helped build.

“The way the show is set up, it looks at the collection decade by decade: how did the various directors and curators go about building a collection?” explains Timothy Long, who is head curator at the MacKenzie. “It starts in the 1950s with the formation of the MacKenzie Art Gallery, which started out as a little one-room stucco building on College Avenue, and was later expanded in 1957. What you see at that point is the community enthusiasm for a new gallery.”

Among the most important early donors were organizations run for and by women, including the Regina Local Council of Women and the University Women’s Club. These groups were instrumental in drawing attention to art made by women, an early example of the gallery’s broad mandate. “They were very supportive of professional women artists working mostly in Ontario and other parts of Canada,” Long says, pointing to Mary Wrinch’s “The Fire Ranger’s Canoe, Agawa River, Algoma,” which he says stands up with work being produced by the Group of Seven at the time. “It reminds me of the important role that these groups played in keeping the arts alive in this city when there wasn’t an art gallery to provide the focus for that activity in the city.”

The gallery’s seminal years were presided over by Ronald Bloore, who served as director between 1958 and 1966. Although Bloore is best known as a member of the Regina Five, a group of painters who charted a new course for Canadian abstraction by aligning themselves with works emanating from New York, his contribution to the MacKenzie is no less important. “He really changed the face of the gallery, and established it as a force not just locally but nationally,” Long says. “I’m amazed to see the things he did here at the gallery during his tenure. It’s truly a record of accomplishment.”

It is a common misconception that art galleries are comprehensive and unbiased. They are neither. Public art galleries reflect the views and attitudes of the people who oversee them. Bloore was given a broad mandate to organize exhibitions and collect new works, and his vision is imprinted on the collection he helped build. A firm believer in Canadian nationalism, Bloore sought out pieces of art that rivalled works emerging from the United States and from Europe. Long refers to works by Guido Molinari and Greg Curnoe as examples of Bloore’s vision. “You can’t think of two artists more dissimilar,” he says. “Molinari the hard-edge abstractionist – very cool, very detached. Then you’ve got this wild-eyed young pop artist, Greg Curnoe, who is shaking things up in London, Ontario.”

But Bloore’s interest in iconic objects extended beyond big canvases. In 1959, he arranged to purchase “These Good Old Thrashing Days” by Jan Wyers, a stunning example of Saskatchewan folk art. “I think the board called it Bloore’s Folly,” Long says with a laugh, “but he wasn’t afraid to stick his neck out.” Bloore demonstrated this courage on more than one occasion. Perhaps his most important acquisition was the 1961 Cape Dorset Portfolio, a collection of prints produced in a tiny village on the southern tip of Baffin Island. “It’s been decades since we’ve shown it,” Long says. “We couldn’t get all eighty-three prints up, but we got about half of them up on one wall, hung five high. For me, it’s the highlight of the show. I think it’s absolutely stunning to see that work, how powerful it is, how every piece in that portfolio is a masterpiece. It’s just astonishing to see the flowering of Inuit visual expression.”

The gallery’s collecting actives took a sharp turn in the 1970s under the direction of Nancy Dillow. Unlike Bloore, whose artistic sensibilities favoured the iconic, Dillow was driven by more practical considerations. “She was very much about the professionalization of the institution, of setting up systems and education programs, integrating the activities of the gallery into university life in a scholarly way,” Long explains. “That’s reflected in the development of a print and drawing collection that focuses on European works on paper from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which she initiates as a teaching collection.” This collection, which includes pieces by Paul Gauguin and Pablo Picasso, traces the development of modernism through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. And seeing them creates the sort of frisson that can only produced by the feeling of intersecting with the great arc of history.

Dillow was also responsible for adding to the collection works by Joe Fafard, Vic Cicansky, and Marilyn Levine. Long has referred to “Regina Clay” as an important epoch in the development of Saskatchewan art, and Dillow sought out works by some of the most important ceramicists in the province. On the other hand, the influence of curator Terry Fenton led to the acquisition of Hans Hofmann’s “Capriccioso,” a stunning example of American abstract expressionism and proof that the gallery has always looked for truly great works.

Perhaps the biggest shift in the permanent collection occurred during the 1980s, under the direction of Carol Phillips and Andrew Oko. During this period, the gallery procured its first works by contemporary aboriginal artists. The MacKenzie had for decades been interested in acquiring indigenous art, but in the 1980s there was a recognition that contemporary aboriginal artists were making great works. “Indigenous artists are addressing often the same concerns, or the same concerns from a different angle, as other contemporary artists,” Long explains. “And that it needed to be looked at as contemporary art, first and foremost, and not always as this separate category, which can lead to a kind of ghettoization.” It is no accident that these works are integrated with, and not separated from, the rest of the collection.

How We Filled The Vault also includes many newer pieces, some of which have never been shown. Most were procured under the watchful eyes of Long and director Kate Davis. Works by Ed Pien and Aganetha Dyck are good examples examples of current collecting policy. The gallery acquired Pien’s “The Sacred Tree,” a massive ink-and-paper cutout, in 2011. It received several works by Dyck, whose experiments with domestic sculpture in the wider world hint broadly at the rise of second wave feminism, after an exhibition of her work last autumn. And the gallery continues to add pieces, and Long hopes he can bring more contemporary video works as well as fine craft works from Saskatchewan into the collection.

Ultimately, This Is How We Filled The Vault is not an epitaph; it is a work in progress. And while the exhibition does not develop a single theme or idea save the diversity of the collection, it stands as both a testament to the individuals who helmed the gallery in the past, as well as a blueprint for the future. “This collection is very broad,” Long says with a laugh. “You really can’t characterize it in a single word, style, or look. It’s just too diverse and wonderful.”

First published in Verb, 7 June 2013. Photo by Cydney Toth / courtesy of the MacKenzie Art Gallery.

An Elaborate Game Of Chance

Sat, 08 Jun 2013 10:40:00 -0600

The Besnard Lakes, a rock band named for a lake in northern Saskatchewan, released their first record in 2003. Spacious and unhurried, Volume 1 was widely ignored, mainly because its expansive and complicated songs clashed with the manic indie rock that was emanating from Montreal at the time. But in the decade since their debut, the Besnard Lakes’ intoxicating blend of rock aesthetics and spacey atmospherics has won fans and critical acclaim around the world. Today, they are touring behind their fourth studio album, the complex and deeply moving Until In Excess, Imperceptible UFO. Although it does not stray far from the sound established on 2007’s The Besnard Lakes Are The Dark Horse and 2010’s The Besnard Lakes Are The Roaring Night, the new record marks a departure for the Montreal-based group. But guitarist and singer Jace Lasek says making albums is never predictable. He likens the process to an elaborate game of chance.

“I don’t think we ever have anything in mind when we start making records,” he says. “We just start spitting shit out and whatever comes down at the end is what we’re stuck with.” The first sessions for the record that became Until In Excess were listless and meandering. Lasek attributes the band’s lack of direction to haste. Both Dark Horse and Roaring Night took three years to make; he wanted to finish Until In Excess in two. He and Olga Goreas, who plays bass and contributes her haunting vocals to the mix, and who is also his wife, struggled to generate good ideas. “We got into the studio right away, and quickly realized that if you don’t have any ideas you’re not going to have anything on the other end,” he says with a wry laugh. “We would go into the studio, be sitting there working, and come out with hardly anything.”

Until In Excess was, like Dark Horse and Roaring Night, recorded at Breakglass Studios, a suite of rooms hidden inside an industrial building in the heart of Montreal. Since it opened in 2005, the studio has hosted dozens of prominent musicians. It is also the band’s sonic playground: the place where they go to write songs, record sounds, and grapple with the big ideas bound up in their miniature symphonies. Having access to a professional recording studio is an incredible luxury in an industry where most bands race against the clock, gambling their careers against the promise of success every time the tape starts to roll. But this freedom can be daunting, too.

“Usually, bands come into the studio when they’re ready to record,” Lasek explains. “We go into the studio when we have free time. If we don’t have any ideas, we kind of feel like we’ve wasted the studio’s time. It can be really frustrating. You start to wonder if you’re ever going to write another song again.” This is what happened when the band, which also includes guitarist and arranger Richard White and drummer Kevin Laing, started tracking Until In Excess. Frustration mounted and a breakthrough seemed impossible. Eventually, they decided to quit. It was not a decision the group took lightly – along with six months worth of material, Lasek jettisoned his dream of finishing the record in less than three years.

But it worked. When the band ventured back into the studio, ideas started to flow and songs came together. After weeks of tracking and many long nights spent mixing, the process by which the elaborate sonic architecture that defines the record is constructed, Until In Excess was released on time – three years and three weeks after Roaring Night.

In many respects, Dark Horse and Roaring Night were variations on a theme. Both derived their strength from the tension between towering walls of guitar noise and the airy blanket of atmospheric noise and ambient synthesizers. Until In Excess is much denser. Instead of exploring the distance between poles, it pushes them together. From the opening salvo of “46 Satires,” a dreamy soundscape featuring gently propulsive guitars, swirling synthesizers, and the warm expanse of Goreas’s voice, Until In Excess feels more like a symphony in eight movements than a loose collection of songs.

“There’s a level of sophistication to it,” Lasek admits. “The songs are still pretty simple – that’s our writing style – but we investigated some things we’d never really looked at before. All of our records are something where you kind of have to dig in, and absorb yourself in it to really get it, but I think with this record you really have to lose yourself in it to figure out what’s going on. It’s not going to hit you on the first listen.” This is the product of experience. After years on the road, the band is better than it was in 2010, when Roaring Night was released. This is evident in the contributions made by Laing and White, who are talented musicians and getting better at disrupting the bouts of obsessiveness that threaten to destroy even the simples songs. “There were a couple of songs that were going to possibly scrap that they saved,” Lasek says. “They saw that outside perspective while we were locked in it, and they helped us dig out of it. That was awesome.”

The Besnard Lakes have always made records that sound important: the scope of their vision conveys an urgency and weightiness few bands can replicate. This feeling reaches its frenzied apex on Until In Excess, which was carried to new heights by collective purpose and some of the best songs the band has ever composed. From the slow build of “And Her Eyes Were Painted Gold” to the menacing delicacy of “Catalina” and towering coda of “Colour Yr Lights In,” each song fills its place on the grand arc, every sound beautiful and profound. Lasek’s signature pyrotechnical guitar work is, for the most part, gone, but it has been replaced with a much more cohesive vision: an album that transforms the band’s dramatic and expressive sound into a prolonged and meaningful experience.

“Oggy’s dad died while we were making this record, quite suddenly,” Lasek says, “and a lot of the songs on this record are kind of about her dad, her time with her dad, and the idea of loss.” The very real and very raw pangs of grief that are woven into the fabric had an unusual result, he continues. “The funny thing is once we actually felt a real sense of loss and started writing about it, instead of something fictitious like we’ve been writing about in the past, the album turns out to be one of the lighter, hopeful records – instead of the typical hopelessness that we usually do.” Whether this glimmer of hope, which is sometimes felt rather than heard, stems from the endless sun of nostalgia or the infinite possibility of life in the face of death is immaterial. In the end, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that Until In Excess pushes the band into new territory, a land where darkness and light are bound together, rather than locked in a perpetual shoving match.

Making records will always be a gamble, and Until In Excess proves that the Besnard Lakes are as susceptible as anybody else to the vagaries of chance. “But that’s why I built the studio,” Lasek says. “I need to be able to exhaust the options in order to find out what’s best for the song. We scrapped a whole bunch of shit because we were like, ‘we can’t put this out – we can’t be proud of this.’ In the end, I don’t care how long it takes to make a record. I just want to make sure I’m super proud of what I’ve done.” Until In Excess shows that Lasek is right to say making records is a game of chance – and how the Besnard Lakes have once again stacked the deck in their favour.

First published in Verb, 7 June 2013. Photo by Richmond Lam, courtesy of the artist / Facebook.

Like No Other Race

Sun, 02 Jun 2013 09:00:00 -0600

My breath comes in short, ragged gasps. The muscles in my arms are on fire. My hands ache from grasping the wheel. I can feel sweat running down my back. The air rushing past my helmet is a muffled counterpoint to the roar of the engine. I clench my teeth and turn into the next corner.

As I sweep past the apex, my wheels running up onto the red and white striped kerb, I loosen my grip and allow the kart to move across the track. Then I press down on the throttle. The kart, which consists of little more than a seat and an engine welded to a tubular frame, hurtles down the straight, the asphalt rushing by less than an inch beneath me. I glance at the timer mounted on the steering wheel: one minute and three seconds – almost ten seconds off the pace at the Martensville Speedway. The sweet surge of acceleration reminds me to think about the next corner, a difficult one hundred and eighty degree bend known as a hairpin.

I brake hard. Every fibre of my being screams that I’ve left it too late, that I’m going too fast, that I’m going to crash. I turn and hold on, hoping the little slick tyres can find some grip. Driving a racing kart is an astonishing experience – exhilaration and terror bound up with a shot of adrenaline that left me shaky for an hour afterward. It is a feeling Scott Campbell knows well.

Campbell, who is 34, has been racing karts for more than two decades. His father was a successful kart driver, and Campbell’s switch from racing BMX bikes to racing karts was inevitable. Then he started to win. “I was kind of at the front of the racing right here in the club right away,” he recalls. “I would even be fast against some of the senior guys when I was a junior. Then we started doing some of the regional races and I was still winning.”

The best racing drivers are united by their desire to win at all costs, a combination of innate ability and utter ruthlessness that manifests every time they get behind the wheel. Campbell is at a loss to explain where his competitive impulse comes from. “I think it’s really an extension of you,” he says. “You want to strive to be the best at all times. My wife doesn’t like playing board games with me, because I’m so competitive. It’s just this thing inside me.” This tendency emerged early. Campbell was at or near the front during his first races; he soon became so good that he was forced to seek out competition elsewhere. In 2003, he qualified for the Rotax Max Grand Final, the world championships for karts carrying Rotax Max engines – two-stroke motors capable of carrying the fragile contraptions well past seventy miles per hour.

Because all karts in the Rotax Max Grand Final use the same chassis and engine, raw ability is the only thing that matters. More than fifteen thousand racers around the world attempt to qualify; fewer than three hundred make the cut. “It was a little hectic,” Campbell says of his first attempt at qualifying, in 2002. His dreams were shattered when a racing incident left him struggling for pace near the back of the pack. He never had a chance, and left dejected – but determined to improve. In 2003, the qualifying sessions started badly and got worse. In the pre-final, which determines the starting grid for the final, Campbell was leading when his kart made contact with debris from an accident. “I hit it and spun out, off the track. The second-place guy hit the same thing, and he spun out and hit me. It blew my chain off, bent my rad, and I was done. I was just crushed.”

This incident forced Campbell to start from the back row of the grid. When the green flag dropped there were more than thirty karts arrayed in front of him, all piloted by drivers hungry for success. He put his head down and drove the race of a lifetime. “I drove all the way up to second place,” he says, a smile crossing his face. But his ordeal was far from over. A controversial penalty, for an incident behind him, cost Campbell a spot. He finished third, just outside the qualifying line. Once again, he drove back to Saskatchewan brimming with frustration and disappointment. “But then,” he says, “a month and a half later, the guy who ended up winning withdrew his spot because he couldn’t get a passport. And I was able to go to the world championships.”

Campbell’s first trip to the Grand Final, held at Sharm el Sheikh in Egypt, was an eye-opening experience. Karting has for years been dominated by Europeans. They start driving early, and the best drivers go on to race in Formula One. ““When you’re here and you’re the best in your country you think you’re going to be really fast,” Campbell says. “I went there and learned so much, even after I’d raced for so long.” Campbell qualified forty-first.

Between 2003 and 2009, Scott Campbell raced at the Grand Final, which is held in a different country each year. In 2010, at Muro Leccese in Italy, something astonishing happened. “I qualified on pole, I knew I was going to be quick,” Campbell recalls. “It was close. I had two guys right on my butt in that final, and it was all about protection – try not to let them pass me, don’t let them pass me.” As the karts screamed into the final corner Campbell knew he was going to win. The surge of emotion that accompanied the chequered flag was overwhelming. “When you come across that line, the emotion – I’d never had that emotion, the feeling of winning something like it.”

To experience the sensation of driving at high speed around a racing circuit, I borrowed a kart from Ty Campbell, who last year won the Briggs and Stratton Senior Four-Stroke Division. He was just 16 years old at the time. After a short briefing, I struggled into borrowed racing suit, strapped on a helmet, and followed Ty out of the pits. The kart made a big impression, and so did the young driver in front of me. My reaction times were sluggish and the sheer force needed to drive through the bends left me drenched in sweat and gasping for air. I drove as hard as I felt I could – and couldn’t keep up. But the thrill was immeasurable.

“If you’re not having fun, it’s not really worth it,” Scott Campbell told me when I drove back into the pits after what felt like several hours of pushing my body and mind to the absolute limit. “That’s one of the things about racing go-karts: you want to make sure you’re having fun at all times.” He ought to know. In a career spanning many hundreds of races, at his home track in Martensville and abroad, Scott Campbell has reached the pinnacle of the sport. In Martensville, home of the Saskatoon Kart Racers Association, he is something of a hero. Children entering the sport, many of whom are still in elementary school, admire him. And Campbell, who will make what he expects to be his last appearance at the Grand Final later this year, is happy to help.

“I try to now help out anybody that needs it, because I’ve experienced it all around the world,” he says, pointing out that karting is a relatively inexpensive community-based sport, where teams often include members of several generations. “Now, I just want to help out, do as much as I can to try and give someone else that opportunity. One of my ultimate goals would be if we had someone else on our team to go [to the world championships], just to have that experience. It’s like no other race you’ve ever been in.”

First published in Verb, 31 May 2013. Photo by Cody Schindel, courtesy of Scott Campbell.

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Sat, 01 Jun 2013 11:39:38 -0600

A Call To Sing Along

Tue, 28 May 2013 21:41:00 -0600

Matt Goud, who writes and performs using the moniker Northcote, had a difficult year. After touring behind his 2011 record, Gather No Dust, Goud moved from Vancouver to Victoria and settled into a period of listlessness and unease. He worked in cafés and as a janitor, supplementing his income by performing in bars and restaurants. The need to earn tips forced him to learn covers, familiar songs by artists like Tom Petty and Bruce Springsteen. He felt unsure of himself and uncertain about the future. “When I moved out to Victoria, I didn’t have a lot of success,” he relates, his voice throaty and raw, nothing like the powerful tenor that cuts through his songs. “I wasn’t feeling quite myself. I was a little bit lost and tired.”

Goud was born in Carlyle, Saskatchewan, and played in hardcore bands before deciding to reinvent himself as a singer-songwriter. Gather No Dust emerged as a promising mix of bright roots rock and sombre introspection. Goud wrote it in hotel rooms across the country; its songs focused on the gulf between home and the road, the end of one chapter and the beginning of another. Although the record earned praise in some quarters, Goud struggled to make ends meet. By the time he began thinking about writing another album, he was living and working in Victoria.

Because he didn’t have a rehearsal space, Goud retreated to the back of his van. It was the one place he could think and play music. The songs that poured out were unlike any he had produced before. “You know that band, the Hold Steady?” he asks, referring to the Brooklyn rock band known for writing about massive highs and crushing lows. “They have this album, Stay Positive. I was listening to Marc Maron interview [Hold Steady singer and songwriter] Craig Finn, and they were talking about how the album Stay Positive kind of means that everyone is going through a hard time. I mean, why would you say ‘stay positive’ to someone if things weren’t tough?’

Thinking about this idea helped Goud come to grips with his situation – and with his music. “Being late twenties with no degree, or any real plan or skill? With what I have to offer I have to get positive about it,” he says. “I just decided to be positive. I don’t exactly know how I turned that page, but I decided that right now is a good time to put out some really cool songs.” Those songs, which were released last month on Northcote, reflect Goud’s newfound optimism: they are big and brash, loud and anthemic, simple and effective. “I’m not trying to be a typical singer-songwriter,” Goud says, alluding to the tension between intimacy and raucousness that gives the album its shape. “I want to write good songs like those guys do and captivate an audience, but I like interactive shows. I like crowd surfing and hardcore music.”

Determined to create a record that bridged the gap between contemplative singer-songwriter material and the crackling energy of a rock band, Goud decided to follow his instincts. He rarely said no to an idea, no matter how outrageous it seemed at the time. Northcote emerged as a forty-minute exercise in intensity and dynamism – The River played on an acoustic guitar. The album’s big, open sound is, at least in part, a result of Goud’s decision to record it at Hive Creative Labs, a Burnaby, B.C. studio known for producing some of the best rock and roll albums in recent memory, including Japandroids’ 2012 masterpiece Celebration Rock.

The opening track, “How Can I Turn Around,” establishes the album’s trajectory with a chunky acoustic guitar riff played punk rock style and the anticipatory thud of a four-on-the-floor kick drum. The song builds as Goud’s voice and an arpeggiated electric guitar line enter the fray. The crescendo comes early: a series of gang vocal “whoa-ohs” point at Goud’s desire to create sounds that are bigger and more exciting than anything he has done before. “It’s not a fist in the air type of thing, but I wanted it to be a call to sing along,” he says. “I just tried to be a bit more direct on this record. I’ve done a lot of experimental-type writing, where I thought it was intimate or something. But I realized I might not be that good at that. I wanted to go more straight to the point.”

This approach is laid bare on “How Can I Turn Around,” which captures in fewer than twenty lines the perils of stagnation and self-reflection. Gone are the abstract ideas and complicated metaphors that animated Gather No Dust; the writing on Northcote is pointed and direct. Although his powerful and vaguely Springsteen-esque vocal delivery links the two records together, Northcote feels like a rebirth for an artist who spent a year languishing on the edge of obscurity. “In a way, I look at it as my first record,” Goud muses. “When I was trying to think of a title for the record, I had a few ideas – but I went to just calling it self-titled because it feels like such a new start. I think I was struggling a bit with what I thought of myself and what I was doing with my life and stuff like that. And I turned on the page on that, overcame it a bit, through this record.”

But Northcote is much more than a fusion of folk sentimentality and rock aesthetics. Songs like “When You Cry” and “Knock On My Door” show that Goud’s playbook is deeper than might be expected. The former is a subdued rocker that deals with the uncertainty of love, the latter a sprawling blues steeped in regret. Goud attributes these songs to his tenure as a restaurant singer, a period when he was eager to devise new and interesting sounds. Both show that his idealism is neither affected nor idealistic – a point made clear when the reverb-saturated coda of “Knock On My Door” gives way to the feverish jubilation of “Find Your Own Way,” Goud’s ode to youthful rebellion and the unalloyed power of rock and roll.

“I’m doing a blues, showing that I love the blues – trying to pull it off,” Goud says of “Knock On Your Door.” “Then it goes into this really youthful song. ‘Find Our Our Own Way’ is the seventeen-year-old punk song on the record.” This transition, a sweeping shift from introspection to unbridled enthusiasm, is a microcosm of the album – and the last year in Goud’s life. But the great beauty of recorded music is that albums are out of date weeks, and sometimes even months, before they are released to the world. Goud had his moment of anxiety during the mixing process, which was overseen by producer Colin Stewart. “I spent about six days at the studio, at the Hive in Burnaby, and Colin was working through the songs,” he says. “I would put it on my phone and go for a walk. I think that was when I realized, ‘Oh shit, people are going to hear this.’ You kind of just try to make something you think is good.”

Unlike the persona he projects onstage and on record, Goud is reticent and soft-spoken. Northcote became a lifeline, his attempt to overcome diffidence and isolation. “I was trying to go a bit bigger [on this record],” he says, “because a big thing for me right now is just not being too shy, you know?” Going big appears to have worked. Now all he has to do is take his band on the road and enjoy sharing his songs with crowds of people across the country. “One of the reasons I feel really positive about where this project is going is that I really do feel that it’s a unique thing in Canadian music,” he muses. “I mean, that’s really snobby to say, but I don’t feel like it totally blends in – and the people who get it are people who are like me. Or people who love the Hold Steady.”

First published in Verb, 24 May 2013. Photo by Jess Baumung, courtesy of the artist / Facebook.

National Agenda

Wed, 22 May 2013 22:26:00 -0600

National Agenda:

From Nicholas Dawidoff’s 2010 New York Times profile of the National:

Although Bryan says of Bryce, “Bryce has always been ambitious; you could light a cigarette off his ambition,” the truth is that all five live for the measure-by-measure rigor of building, tearing down and rebuilding four-minute songs. Their process often seems like a musical parlor trick since they delight in belittling their own work and can seem happier about rejecting another successful reinvention than actually completing anything. “Lemonworld,” for instance, had by now sustained upwards of 80 takes followed by upwards of 80 onslaughts of derision. Versions of the song had been fragged for being really annoying, really bombastic, really boring, really cheesy, too destabilized, really meatball, really saccharine, too sludgefest, too Dave Matthews swank and too all-fancy razzle-dazzle. At one point, Bryan worried aloud, “We’re throwing the baby out with the bath water,” to which Matt replied, “What is the baby?”

The Ties That Bind

Sat, 11 May 2013 10:46:00 -0600

“Sometimes, it would be easier to not be as good friends as we are,” muses Neusha Mofazzali. “But I don’t want that.” Mofazzali is talking about Young Benjamins, the rock band he founded several years ago. After releasing an EP and several singles, and carving out a home in the Saskatoon music community, he and his bandmates are preparing to release their debut album – a collection of eleven songs called Less Argue. The end of one chapter and the beginning of another has led him to reflect on the band’s greatest strength. “It’s easier to not be as close because then you can say yes and no really easily,” he says. “Now, whenever something’s asked, we care about feelings. We care.”

Most rock and roll bands are held together by little more than a collective desire to make music. The ties binding Young Benjamins run much deeper. Their personal lives and public personas are indistinguishable, the line separating art and life scrubbed clean by the deep bond of friendship. This is not surprising: the core band members were friends long before they decided to play music. Mofazzali went to high school with bass player Brynn Krysa, and spent six months hanging out with Kuba Szmigielski before learning that his friend was a talented drummer. As a musical project began to take shape, the group met Veronique Poulin at an open mic night. Her violin playing, a fusion of classical aesthetics and traditional grit, impressed Mofazzali, who invited her to a jam session. With the lineup complete, the band retreated to Mofazzali’s basement and set about transforming his songs into a fully-realized vision.

“It’s our life,” says Poulin, likening membership in the band to method acting, a technique used by actors that involves total immersion in a character. “Our emotions are so [invested] in the music. It’s such a reality for us, and it’s not like we can switch in and out.” Mofazzali agrees: “It’s not easy at all if something bad happens in the band. But I think it makes us stronger. Six months ago we really didn’t know where we wanted to be in the band, if it was semi-serious or serious. Now I feel like it’s something I want to carry on for awhile. We can go somewhere if we just keep that kind of mentality.”

The vehicle to which Young Benjamins have harnessed their dreams and aspirations is Less Argue. All art is condensed emotion, and Less Argue packs a lot of feeling into half an hour of music. The record, which was cut in just two weeks, charts a course through the stormy waters of heartbreak and the tempest of despair. Mofazzali, who sketches the songs before bringing them to rehearsal, says the peaks and valleys of his disintegrating relationship gave the album its shape. “At the time, I was going through an incredible heartbreak,” he explains. “Whether you’re in a relationship or not in a relationship, you have these high emotional levels, right? You’re either really happy and you’re in love, or you’re the shit of the earth. That affects so much of what you do when you’re recording. This whole album has a huge emotional factor in it. I can’t even listen to it sometimes.”

This potent combination resulted in “Young Argument,” an arrangement of melancholy chords, sparse percussion, and an airy keyboard coda that feels like an epitaph on the death of love. It is the lowest point on the album, a reflection on the night before illuminated by the unforgiving shards of morning light. Mofazzali wrote the song while attending the Ness Creek Music Festival, a weekend trip complicated by the presence of his erstwhile muse. “We were all going through the worst,” he says, “and all of our lovers or ex-lovers were either talking to us a lot – or at the festival we were at. I just sat down and wrote this song.” The high water mark of the emotional torrent that gave the record its distinctive contours, “Young Argument” captures in just a few lines the potency of young love. It is the emotional centre of the record, the point from which things can only get better.

Young Benjamins are often described as a math rock band, a term that refers to rapid single-note melodies. “It’s literally electro music put into rock music,” Mofazzali says, pointing to Foals and Holy Fuck as exemplars of the form. “Jasper, AB,” a raucous ode to an absent lover, and one of the strongest songs on the record, hints at the spiky architecture common in math rock circles. But Mofazzali isn’t convinced. “I don’t think we’re completely math rock,” he says with a grin. And he’s right. The combination of slinky violin interludes, choppy guitar chords, and hypnotic bass lines, create a musical depth that transcends genre and style.

Most rock bands work within a narrow band of frequencies, sounds defined by the combination of two guitars and a bass. Poulin’s violin, which takes the place of a second guitar, expands the range of available sounds considerably. By switching between soaring melodies and rasping harmony lines, she frees up everybody else to expand their own horizons. Less Argue shows Young Benjamins at their best, able to deploy a towering wall of sound without sacrificing the openness and sonic space that shape so many of their songs. “I feel like we’re trying to push ourselves in a way,” Krysa says, referring to specific arrangements but hinting at their trajectory into the upper echelons of Canadian music. “I’ve never played in a group with violin before. It’s a different experience.”

Most of the songs on Less Argue are edgy and angular. Defined by the interplay between Mofazzali’s guitar and Poulin’s violin, they move across the spectrum of contemporary music, from straightforward rock and roll to the edges of indie experimentalism. The band members are as comfortable playing alt-country stomps as they are dragging out each line of a reverb-drenched ballad. Mofazzali’s voice, ethereal and fey, is the thread linking these disparate ideas together. He enjoys jarring listeners by setting exuberant lyrics to plaintive melodies (and pairing devastatingly sad words with cheerful major chords), which heightens the tension created by the mixed instrumentation and clever dynamic changes.

This polarity, Poulin points out, is reflected in the band members themselves. “Because of the sounds and the depth of the lyrics, and what we were all going through, we became what the album sounded like,” she says. “There were theses really high moments where we were like, ‘This is awesome!’ And then those really low moments: ‘What are we doing?’ Why are we doing this?’” The answer is obvious. Young Benjamins play music because it is the only thing that keeps them grounded as the world threatens to spin out of control.

“I would have left this town,” Mofazzali says, suddenly serious. “I would have left this city if it wasn’t for my band. That’s how bad it was, with my emotions, my past, my breakup. It literally was my medicine. We’d play awesome shows, we’d tour, we’d jam. Once you write a new song you feel so good.”

In the case of Young Benjamins, the expression “leave it on the stage” is no exaggeration – it is the secret to their success. Instead of treating art as a representation of life, a new perspective gained by passing experience through the twin filters of time and distance, Young Benjamins weld the two into a heady mix of raw emotion and sophisticated musicality. By immersing themselves in the triumph and tragedy of young love, Mofazzali and his bandmates positioned themselves as an exception to the rule – and a band whose past and present point inexorably to a brighter future.

First published in Verb, 10 May 2013. Photo by Matt Braden Photography, courtesy of Young Benjamins.

Any Given Night

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 19:55:00 -0600

Rococode is at its heart the creative partnership of Laura Smith and Andrew Braun. Last year the Vancouver duo released Guns, Sex & Glory. An exciting and unpredictable blend of towering synthesizer and guitar riffs, and heartbreakingly delicate vocals, Guns, Sex & Glory attacked pop music from every angle – and positioned Smith and Braun as songwriters of considerable taste and talent. The pair recently released a new single, “Follow You ‘Round,” which builds on the achievement of their debut while further solidifying the band’s sound. I caught up with Braun to look back, look forward, and talk about how songs evolve.

Alex J. MacPherson: It’s been a year since the band released Guns, Sex & Glory, and now you’ve got a new single out. Does that mean another album is coming soon?

Andrew Braun: It’s sort of more of an in-between kind of thing. We recorded the record so long ago, and it took such a long time for it to come out, so even it being out for a year, it was already completely finished for a year before that – and the songs are much older than that even. We’re getting a bit anxious to get something new out there, and we had a little window of time and just banged out those two songs in about three days. Just kind of an in-between thing; it’s not a part of more stuff we’ve got on the shelf.

AJM: But that doesn’t necessarily mean a new record will take the better part of two years.

AB: Who knows. I mean, it’s easy to say that. I’m sure the perfectionists will take over. Hopefully it doesn’t get stretched out in the same way. Even though one of the songs that we just put out is an old song, it felt kind of nice to just record it, get it mixed, and literally put it out into the world the day after it was mastered. There was no hemming and hawing; it was just, ‘this is what we’re doing, and here it goes.’

AJM: “Follow You ‘Round” definitely shares some DNA with the record, but the sound feels more relaxed, more comfortable. Is this just you and Laura figuring out a sound for the band?

AB: When we made our record we didn’t really know what we were. Me and Laura decided that we wanted to record some songs. We weren’t a band; we hadn’t played anything live. We hadn’t done really anything. When we recorded those songs they were real baby versions of the songs. And that’s not a bad way to go, necessarily. But in this case we’ve been playing these songs for probably almost a year and a half on the road. They took shape in a more natural course than being crafted in the studio.

AJM: Given the success of Guns, Sex & Glory, and how many people embraced those songs, does that change the way you approach new material, either onstage or in the studio?

AB: I don’t think so. I don’t think that I personally, or Laura, would feel any kind of external pressure. We both just feel like we can do way better, and we’re kind of raring to go on that side of things. The pressure I personally put on myself far exceeds anything I would feel from anyone else. I haven’t got to the point of thinking about that yet.

AJM: As the songs evolved, and as the idea of what the band became more focused, were you ever surprised by the direction, or the way things developed?

AB: I always think that a recording is just a snapshot of a song. I don’t think it’s a definitive version, so the songs we’ve been playing definitely have come a long way from their conception, which was pretty much in the studio. I think they’ve all grown, and we’ve sort of figured out what they are – more so than we knew in the beginning. But I don’t know if I had any expectation as to what they might do, or what they might become. At this point we’re just being ourselves, and playing the songs as we see fit on any given night.

First published in Verb, 19 April 2013. Photo by Robyn Jamieson, image by Eli Horn, courtesy of the artist / Facebook.

Everything, Everything

Sat, 27 Apr 2013 10:13:00 -0600

One of the most durable clichés in popular music is the story of the guy who recorded an album in the wilderness. These stories exist because they are compelling. People want to escape their lives; they want to cut off the static, the relentless flow of information. Artists who retreat to the woods in search of truth and authenticity are regarded as saviours: bearded and flanneled messiahs whose commitment to honest creation is a counterpoint to the dissonance of the twenty-first century. The latest incarnation of this story is Everything, Everything, an album by Jim Kilpatrick, a songwriter from New Brunswick who performs as Shotgun Jimmie.

“I think it’s a natural instinct of the musician to want to be focused and put yourself in a situation where there’s less distractions,” Kilpatrick says from Sackville, New Brunswick, where he is taking a break after a string of successful shows in Ontario. “You have the freedom to just work on whatever it is – making paintings or making rock albums or whatever.” Last winter, Kilpatrick retreated to a cabin in Manitoba. He brought a bunch of instruments, a batch of upbeat pop songs, and his favourite four-track recorder. “I knew that it was a cliché. But I also knew that it would be really, really rewarding – and really fun. And maybe the experience of a lifetime.” He also knew that the wake left by cliché leads inevitably to truth.

Kilpatrick recorded virtually every sound on Everything, Everything himself. Most recording studios are in cities, or close to them, and extra instruments can be acquired on short notice. Kilpatrick did not have this luxury in rural Manitoba: he had to bring everything with him, to map out the sound of the album before the tape began to roll. “I had to pick the colours to put on the palette,” he says. “I had to decide what ingredients I was going to put in the soup before I knew what kind of soup I was going to make.”

Besides his usual arsenal of guitars, one of the most important ingredients was a Korg synthesizer. Kilpatrick rented it because he knew synthesizers can produce an wide variety of sounds. The fact that he had no idea how to play it was not a problem. “I brought it with me to the cabin in the woods because I wanted to learn how to use one of those things,” he says with a laugh. “And I ended up using it quite a bit.” Unusual as it may be for Kilpatrick to use a synthesizer – his records tend to feature strong guitars and percussion wrapped up in tight pop structures – the Korg is far from the strangest instrument on Everything, Everything.

The guitar solo that opens “I Will Climb Mountains,” the only song on the album that sprawls over the five-minute mark, features more than just an overdriven tube amp. Half the sound is a dumpster lid, played by Kilpatrick’s brother. “I took a break from the recording to go do some flooring at my parents’ house, and we rented this dumpster to throw all the old carpet and stuff in,” he says. “My brother noticed that this door was really musical. He got me out there and we recorded it.” Kilpatrick was surprised by how well the frequencies produced by the dumpster lid meshed with the frequencies produced by a screaming electric guitar. “It might sound like two guitars, or one guitar really going wild, but there’s actually quite a bit of dumpster in there,” he says. “They get all mixed up together, but you can hear the low sounds of the door. And the chains that were hanging on the door.”

Kilpatrick also spent hours trying to record the sound of the ice on a nearby lake. “It was freezing and cracking and making these strange martian sounds,” he explains. “I’d hear it in the middle of the night, drag myself out of bed, and put a microphone in the window. I tried putting a microphone outside. I tried everything to capture this sound of ice making this alien whale music, and I just couldn’t get it.”

These experiments with industrial containers and frozen lakes illustrate Kilpatrick’s commitment to sonic exploration, but they only tell half the story. Most people expect albums recorded on the fringes of society to be ruminative, if not downright gloomy. Everything, Everything is not. Its sixteen tracks, only three of which run past three minutes, are short and intense and chronically cheerful. “I think this record is not the sad guy going into the woods,” Kilpatrick says. “This album ended up being extremely positive in nature.”

The songs on Everything, Everything cover a lot of territory, from rolling acoustic pop to 50s-vintage rock and roll to lo-fi proto-punk. But they all follow a similar pattern. Rather than develop a riff over the course of several minutes, Kilpatrick leaves audiences wanting more. His songs present an infectious idea once, or maybe twice, before crashing to a halt. “I wanted to have short musical ideas and hooks that don’t necessarily reoccur, but maybe just happen once,” he says, adding that he considered titling the album Verse Chorus Verse Chorus Peace. “I really enjoy that on other people’s albums: when they have an incredible hook and you wait for it to come around again in the song cycle, and it just isn’t there.”

Besides keeping audiences interested, the songs on Everything, Everything – like the songs on its critically acclaimed predecessor, Transistor Sister – reflect Kilpatrick’s reality, the bulk of which is spent on the road. “I went into writing the songs realizing that regardless of how they were recorded I was going to have to perform them,” he says, explaining that most of his shows are solo, with little more than a guitar, a suitcase kick drum, and some effects for support. “And I know from performing that short songs suit people’s fancy. It’s easier to hit an audience with a bunch of short songs, and have all of them have a quick story or some sort of lyrical hook or melodic hook. I don’t want people to get bored.” After a brief pause he adds, “I would get bored.”

What separates Everything, Everything from the pop albums it borrows ideas from is Kilpatrick’s songwriting. Instead of writing about big ideas like love and loss, he sings about the things we take for granted. Everything, Everything chronicles the minutiae of everyday life: the ordinary, the uninteresting, and the banal. The record unfolds much like the moments that make up our own lives – sometimes pleasing, sometimes infuriating, always chaotic, always engaging. The theme is captured on “Growing Like A Garden,” which is reminiscent of the Shins: “An excellent example / Of the things you just can’t plan for / That just turned out to be true.”

Most people listen to music to forget their reality, if only for a few minutes. This is why stories about guys who record albums in the woods are so popular. But instead of producing an album that fuses big ideas to an expansive musical vision, Kilpatrick’s wilderness retreat spawned a picture of the life he sought to escape. There are stories about waiting in line, getting day drunk, going to Sappyfest, worrying about Skype dates – stories about the things we never think of presented in wrenching detail. In the same way John K. Samson’s “Sun In An Empty Room” devastates with its simple description of sunbeams arcing across the floor of an empty apartment, the songs on Everything, Everything cast new light on the most mundane moments.

Our lives do not follow a continuous arc. They are confused and messy, a collection of thousands of disparate events and interactions. Everything, Everything attempts to find order in chaos, to extract meaning from the shards of memory and experience. By drawing on all of his own recollections and memories, in music and in life, Kilpatrick created a mirror – a reflection of himself and of everybody else. Escaping the city to record an album in the woods might be a cliché, but finding art that casts new light on our own lives is not – and never will be.

First published in Verb, 26 April 2013. Photo by Kevin Betram.

Dispatches From Normandy

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 22:29:00 -0600

Dispatches From Normandy:

This short excerpt from Ernie Pyle’s 16 June 1944 newspaper column needs no introduction:

I took a walk along the historic coast of Normandy in the country of France.

It was a lovely day for strolling along the seashore. Men were sleeping on the sand, some of them sleeping forever. Men were floating in the water, but they didn’t know they were in the water, for they were dead.

The water was full of squishy little jellyfish about the size of your hand. Millions of them. In the center each of them had a green design exactly like a four-leaf clover. The good-luck emblem. Sure. Hell yes.

Close Talker

Sat, 20 Apr 2013 11:51:59 -0600

This time last year nobody had heard of the rock band Close Talker. Mostly because this time last year the rock band Close Talker didn’t exist. But in a career spanning just ten months, the Saskatoon-based band has made up for lost time: they released a powerful debut, played dozens of shows, built a not insignificant fan base in Saskatchewan, and heard their songs on national radio. Chris Morien, who plays drums in the group, attributes their success to earnestness, good timing, and a little bit of luck.

“I think fairly consistently we’ve been playing the music we want to play,” he muses. Jeremy Olson, whose muscular bass lines serve as a refreshing counterpoint to the band’s airy aesthetics, cuts him off: “We were just having fun playing music and hoping people would come watch. We’d tell our friends, and hope they’d tell a friend or two.”

It worked. What began as a diversion grew into a serious venture. The band’s debut, Timbers, was released – unintentionally – to coincide with Searchlight, a music contest sponsored by the CBC. The band reached the final eight; their song “By The Lake” was heard across the country before it was eliminated. Morien is thrilled that so many people have come to appreciate the record, but refuses to take anything for granted. “You want people to listen,” he says. “We’ve played small shows and a few bigger shows, and when people come to listen, it’s great. But it’s just been slowly building up.”

Close Talker was formed when Olson joined forces with Morien, Will Quiring, and Matthew Kopperud – friends who grew up in Saskatoon’s north end and spent years playing music together in various configurations. After writing a handful of songs, uncluttered tracks that fused experimental sounds with gritty rock guitars, the foursome decided to debut their material at an open mic night.

It was almost a disaster. Olson, who is often away on business trips, was on a flight home from Ottawa when a thunderstorm threatened to derail the show. “I was supposed to get back at ten, and we were on at ten-thirty,” he recalls. “I would be just in time for the gig. Then there was one of those crazy storms. We were above the clouds and the lightning was just nuts. I was like, ‘This isn’t happening.’” The plane landed on time, and Olson raced across town to the venue. The show was a success, the first of many open mic night performances that led, inevitably, to bigger rooms and bigger crowds.

Most bands take months to write and record an album. Close Talker didn’t have that much time. Because Quiring and Kopperud split their time between Saskatchewan and British Columbia, where they attend school, the band was forced to work in short bursts. Rather than put off the sessions, perhaps indefinitely, they decided to record over Christmas. “We had two weeks to work,” Morien recalls. “And then we had February break, and we decided to release it then. Which might have been, in hindsight, pushing the timeline pretty heavily.”

The band booked an album release party as a preemptive strike against procrastination and sequestered themselves in the studio. It was a new experience for Olson. “It’s definitely a weird feeling, playing your part by yourself,” he says. “You’re just standing there, playing by yourself, and there’s four or five dudes just hanging out, waiting for you to get your stuff right. And every time you make a mistake it costs money.” After a brief pause he adds, “We went through a lot of Jameson and Great Western. Well, at least I did.”

Timbers was released on time. The deadline was always a threat to open creativity, and made for a few tense days, but Morien says the band delivered solid performances as time ran out. The album was cut in just a few days, but it doesn’t feel rushed. Languid and luxurious, Timbers sprawls across the sonic spectrum, an inviting bed of rich textures and luscious sounds. From the cacophonous feedback that opens “Creatures” to the massive crescendo that carries the record to its conclusion, each sound on Timbers is calculated, part of a greater whole.

Broadly speaking, Timbers is a rock and roll record. It features crunchy guitars, pulsating bass lines, and jazz-inspired drumming. But it is much more than a collection of three-chords-and-a-dream anthems: Timbers reflects the band’s love of lavish sonics as well as their ability to craft songs that bend and twist and stretch until the tension is unbearable – and then release the pressure with a towering chorus that cascades back down into silence. The best song on the record is “To The Coast,” which builds for a full minute before Quiring’s ethereal voice finds a place in the mix. Blending a pair of entwined guitar licks and rolling piano chords with a dreamy soundscape, the song runs past six minutes without sounding tired or overblown. Unlike many long songs, which push a simple riff to the edge of meaninglessness, “To The Coast” layers new ideas on top of older ones, creating a sonic tapestry that unfolds like a novel: each sentence in place, each paragraph an integral part of the story.

Quiring’s lyrics, which tend to be either inscrutable abstractions or simple placeholders, are the most obvious indicator of the band’s relative inexperience, but the sound of his voice – plaintive, aching – is an integral part of the sound. This is the key to unlocking Timbers: by weaving a broad palette of sonic novelties into the the fabric of guitar rock, Close Talker create an album greater than the sum of its parts. Featuring a wide array of sounds, from droning feedback and swirling synthesizers to analog delay and the unmistakable sound of a reverb unit being abused, the album covers a lot of ground, pushing to the horizon and beyond.

Olson was sitting in a Philadelphia hotel room when the mastered copy arrived in his inbox. “They had one of those iPod docks and I had a few hours to kill,” he recalls. “I just put it in and listened. I was like, ‘Holy smokes! We made this thing?’ I was pretty impressed with how it turned out.” Morien is more pragmatic: “The one thing I’m proud of is that we never sacrificed anything we wanted to do, even with the time constraints we put on ourselves,” he says. “We had decided if it really wasn’t ready at all for our deadline, it wasn’t worth it to rush it. By the end of it everything was coming together, and in our last couple days at the studio we were knocking things off and everything was flowing really nicely.”

Unlike countless thousands of records which never get a chance, Timbers had help. Just before the album was released, the CBC announced Searchlight, a competition to find “Canada’s next great musical act.” Close Talker submitted “By The Lake” on a whim. Within weeks, the song, a cheerful exploration of sounds popularized by bands like Hey Ocean! and Said The Whale, was selected to represent Saskatchewan in the final twenty-four. Morien and Olson had reservations about the competition format (“It [measured] your ability as a band, but the main part of it was your ability to market yourself,” Morien says), but both agree the contest was an invaluable resource. “It was huge for us,” Olson says. “It helped people hear our record, who never would have, and it got our music out across the country.”

Music contests are not universally adored. Although unknown bands can reap extraordinarily benefits from competitions like Searchlight, many people think elevating artists who have not “paid their dues” is unfair. Morien thinks this is ridiculous. “In the music business there’s no process to get big,” he says. “All the bands that are big now, they’re big for a reason: because they’re amazing musicians and because they’re bringing something new to the industry. But if there was a set process to do it, everybody would be doing it, and everybody would be famous. It’s all a matter of luck, and it’s all about who’s taking a chance with you.”

And because so many people took that chance, Close Talker’s songs have been played in homes, businesses, and bars across the country. But Morien and Olson aren’t savouring their success. They are planning a second album and a series of concerts over the summer. They want to keep working hard, to keep making great music. Which is what they set out to do in the first place. And, contest or no contest, it will be interesting to see where Close Talker is ten months from today.

First published in Verb, 19 April 2013. Photo courtesy of Evan Neufeld Photography / Facebook.

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Tue, 16 Apr 2013 22:43:34 -0600

A Sound That The World Needs To Hear

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 21:57:44 -0600

Émile Zola was a French novelist and political activist. He is best known for a series of twenty novels published in the last decades of the 19th century, and for writing “J’Accuse,” a fiery denunciation of the French government. One of the most famous open letters ever published, “J’Accuse” became the bellwether of the movement to exonerate Alfred Dreyfus, who had been falsely accused of treason. Vancouver musicians Zachary Gray and Tom Dobrzanski didn’t know much about Zola when they set out to start a new band. But they needed a name.

“We recorded our first album just for the fun of it,” Gray writes in an e-mail, referring to 2009’s Tic Toc Tic, “before the Zolas even existed and we still couldn’t agree on a name or an album title or album art. Tom and I never agree on anything. Eventually our indecision was actually holding back the release date of the album.” To settle the matter, he and Dobrzanski went to an all-you-can-eat Indian restaurant. “We had a summit,” he recalls, “and drafted the no-compromise compromise. I named the band and Tom named the album and chose the artwork. Ironically we both ended up liking the other’s choices.”

Although he claims they never agree, Gray and Dobrzanski have been friends for years. They met on a choir tour of the Netherlands. “Tom and I met when we were 14,” Gray writes. “Then by fluke our voices broke at the same time and we suddenly couldn’t sing anymore. We bonded over mutual puberty.” Dobrzanski was a talented piano player, and Gray taught himself a handful of guitar chords. They spent hours recording themselves on Gray’s father’s tape recorder.

“This sounds a lot cooler than it was,” he admits. “I only had an acoustic guitar so we were playing folky songs with cabaret-feeling piano and Nirvana-like chord structures. I can’t think of a more unappetizing description for music and I hesitate to even mention Nirvana because that suggests some amount of edge. We’ve never had any edge.”

Edge or not, Gray and Dobrzanski eventually formed a band called Lotus Child, which later collapsed only to be reborn in a cheap Indian restaurant.

According to the band’s website, the basic premise of the Zolas involves writing classic pop songs and then fucking them up, until the hooks have to fight to get out. “When we get together we naturally make pop rock music,” Gray writes, “but pop rock has been done to death so you have to mutate it with other kinds of music you like. The best pop songs always manage to trick you into thinking you’re hearing something new.”

Ancient Mars, which Gray and Dobrzanski released in October, sounds not unlike a pop rock record. The instrumentation and song structures will be familiar to even the most musically illiterate listeners. Gray’s guitar licks are simple and pleasing; Dobrzanski’s piano lines rise and fall like a heaving chest. But it isn’t exactly a pop rock record. Ancient Mars is packed with surprises, and its straightforward structures are wreathed in unconventional sonics and subtle textures. From the cacophonous, vaguely detuned coda of “In Heaven” and the distorted vocals in “Knot In My Heart” to the Stevie Ray Vaughn-style guitar lick that kicks off “Strange Girl” and the theatrical chorus of “Observatory,” the songs are familiar enough to draw in listeners and interesting enough to make them want to stay.

Gray and Dobrzanski wrote the songs, but neither had any idea how the album would sound. “Once Tom and I had put together enough songs for an album we looked around at all our friends and just asked our favourite drummer and bassist if they were free,” Gray explains. Ancient Mars features Michael Jordan of Royal Canoe on bass and drumming by Johnny Walsh, who plays in several bands. Gray and Dobrzanski also asked Chuck Brody to produce the album, and he traveled to Vancouver for the sessions. “We all got together and started arranging the songs,” Gray recalls. “For us, the most exciting way to make an album is to work with our favourite people at each instrument and not try to micromanage anyone. You don’t know exactly what it’ll sound like, but it’s a lot more fun.”

Ancient Mars is a record about time. Gray and Dobrzanski have a flair for the dramatic, and their songs weave common experience (“I bet she’s rail-thin like a heron / over the phone she talks and I just listen in”) and sweeping metaphor (“We’ll never meet until it’s just too late for us / you’re the Euphrates and I’m the Tigris”) into evocative yet relatable stories. This fusion of raw emotion and epic myth reveals not only the band’s talent for capturing the stark contrast between abject isolation and faint hope, but also their fascination with the subtle dissonance produced by the collision of time and memory.

“I think about heydays a lot,” Gray writes, trying to explain the album’s broad theme. “How short they are. How we don’t realize we’re having one until it’s on the decline, or until years later. How a group of people can mean everything to you, and then two years later you run into each other at a grocery store and have nothing in common anymore. How friends you think will be in love forever still sometimes break up. Entire worlds spark and evaporate every day.”

These references are never obvious, and it’s not clear whether the songs on Ancient Mars are drawn from experience or the darkest recesses of Gray’s mind. But the grand theme of the record is impossible to ignore. Gray and Dobrzanski are getting older, and their awareness of time and its passing becomes more acute each day. Ancient Mars is their attempt to extract meaning from the short sweep of the clock. They acknowledge the scope of history (“Several billion golden years ago / I lost a planet that I loved to the cold”) without clinging to its lifeless reaches. Instead of descending into nihilistic torpor, the Zolas use time to remind us that the moment is what matters (“Civilization blooms and then it erodes. And that’s it / Oh my ancient Mars”).

Gray is less philosophical. “I just write about what grabs me at the time and hope it makes sense when it;s all out together in an album,” he writes. “Usually it does. I think about the same things everyone else around my age thinks about, so it usually comes across like a good cross-section of life.”

In the years since the summit that birthed the band, Gray has read several works by Émile Zola. “Out of due diligence,” he writes. “I liked them, but not tremendously. [Zola] was this classic turn-of the-century artist, living with no money with other artists (Cézanne was his roommate) in shitty coldwater apartments in Paris. He was doing something a bit revolutionary, though: writing stories about low-class people – prostitutes, grimy mining towns, etc. – and selling them to the upper classes. His books were considered pulpy and salacious and rich people scoffed at the publicly while secretly devouring a copy of Nana every night before bed. It was like the Teen Mom of the era.”

The public eventually discovered him. Today, his novels – and especially “J’Accuse” – are common in homes and on campuses across the world. Gray yearns for this kind of success. “Actually,” he confesses, “we kind of expected to be this successful years ago. It’s taken forever.” Everything takes time, but Ancient Mars is a quantum leap forward for the duo. It is a rallying cry, a call to abandon the normal and embrace the interesting, the offbeat, and the downright risky. To take classic pop songs and fuck them up, until the hooks have to fight to get out. “I think the secret is to just stop caring and focus on the music,” Gray writes. “That’s pretty much all people care about in the end anyway. Just make a sound that the world needs to hear right now.”

First published in Verb, 29 March 2013. Photo courtesy of the artist / Facebook.

The Rolling Stones at Villa Nellcôte

Sun, 14 Apr 2013 18:01:05 -0600

The Rolling Stones at Villa Nellcôte:

In 1971, Keith Richards and Anita Pallenberg rented a mansion called Villa Nellcôte in the town of Villefranche-sur-Mer. That house, now in private hands, remains one of the most iconic homes in rock and roll history, and not just because the bulk of Exile On Main St. was recorded there:

Today, the most famous house in Villfranche-sur-Mer remains cloaked in mystery. While he was making Stones In Exile, director Stephen Kijak asked to visit Nellcôte, but the current owners declined to let their property be filmed. In a way, it’s a fitting end to this chapter in the Exile On Main St story. Everyone has their own take on what one might be going on inside. The truth, though, is behind closed doors.

The Art Of Fiction No. 151

Sun, 14 Apr 2013 08:00:50 -0600

The Art Of Fiction No. 151:

Martin Amis on writing sentences:

I would say that the writers I like and trust have at the base of their prose something called the English sentence. An awful lot of modern writing seems to me to be a depressed use of language. Once, I called it “vow-of-poverty prose.” No, give me the king in his countinghouse. Give me Updike. Anthony Burgess said there are two kinds of writers, A-writers and B-writers. A-writers are storytellers, B-writers are users of language. And I tend to be grouped in the Bs. Under Nabokov’s prose, under Burgess’s prose, under my father’s prose—his early rather than his later prose—the English sentence is like a poetic meter. It’s a basic rhythm from which the writer is free to glance off in unexpected directions. But the sentence is still there. To be crude, it would be like saying that I don’t trust an abstract painter unless I know that he can do hands.

The Art Of Fiction No. 204

Sat, 13 Apr 2013 09:22:00 -0600

The Art Of Fiction No. 204:

David Mitchell on recycling characters:

I grow fond of these characters I bring into being. In my adult life I have spent more weeks in the company of people such as Timothy Cavendish or Jacob de Zoet than I have with my own flesh-and-blood parents or brother. Letting them dissolve into nothingness feels too much like abandoning an inconvenient cat by a reservoir. There’s a practical reason as well—the example I use is Falstaff, though it works just as well for a character like Captain Jack Sparrow: because Falstaff exists in the history plays, our perception of him in The Merry Wives of Windsor is different and enriched. We invested emotions in him during his time with young Hal, and these emotions are still there in Windsor. Belief in a character and his milieu is retentive and transferable. This is why sequels exist.