Forty Birds: Metal for the masses

For those who missed out on Mosh Core’s annual metal bash at Club Soda a few weeks ago, you’ve now got a chance to discover another alliance of hard rockers. Quintet Forty Birds took flight so to speak in a Greenfield Park basement sometime in 2001.
Composed of guitarists Kevin Marple and Dave Dos, bassist Dave Uno, drummer Cory Lacombe and vocalist Matt Pelletier, Forty Birds recently released their debut album Shotgun Therapy, a sonic mixture of dissonance, thrashing and heaviness.
“An intense practice regime finally led to the [album’s] emergence,” said Marple on those jam sessions of yesteryear. The musicians all come from different projects and backgrounds, but eventually settled on a somewhat unified vision of what they wanted to create, never discounting those who contributed if only in passing, “All of the musicians that have been a part of this band, from the beginning to today, contributed in some way to ‘Shotgun Therapy,'” said Marple.
Once in the studio, when “everything was going better than it had ever gone,” their drummer quit mere months before the launch. “Even though we had a lot of problems, our drummer leaving at [this] point really shook our foundation,” not to mention having to re-record the strings three times in two different studios.
The appearance of current drummer Lacombe however, allowed them to “emerge stronger than before,” and all things considered, “the tough times and unwelcome surprises served to make the moment we saw that plastic-wrapped CD for the first time a lot sweeter,” said Marple.
He also admitted it helped to have co-producer Louis Martin (Studio Sanchez), keep them grounded, too. Ruminating on the current status of music in Montreal, Marple commented that the city is “rich” in talent, but sadly that talent doesn’t really go anywhere, “I think that this city has some pretty awesome music. Every time I think I have seen it all, some band pops onto my radar and convinces me that I have a lot more to discover. However, considering the amount of talent, there are not a lot of resources to support it, and therefore, I think a lot of bands remain undiscovered, unless they start venturing out of Quebec.”
Along with the album’s advent, the band is looking forward to evolving and gaining new fans in the process. “Being a successful band entails being able to constantly produce new and different material that challenges the musicians’ creative ability, while providing insight into the writer’s psyche; to stop doing this would be the death of self-expression, which is the reason we all started playing music,” said Marple. “That for me would be failure; for others, it’s a pay check.”