Author: Sam Haughton

Categories
Music

Landshapes and their music ain’t square

The band ventured into the Cornwall woods to find inspiration for their album, Heyoon

In Montreal, most of our pivotal teenage experiences happen at various altitudes of Mount Royal.

You might’ve smoked your first joint at the tam tams, you might’ve made the climb at midnight and watched a crackling bonfire while sipping your first shaken-up cans of beer, or even better yet said no to drugs and gazed out at this weird city with everyone going about their private lives.

Whatever your experience, there’s undoubtedly some mystical sheen to that peak moment of your adolescence—something sacred and unutterable that comes from the conjunction of a tender emotional brain with a steadily growing sense of understanding of the world—and a lot of what makes these memories stick with such creatness has to do with where these memories were made.

If you grew up in Michigan, U.S.A., and were one of a select few, your youth might have been associated with a strange structure in the middle of the countryside. The Heyoon Pavilion was—and maybe still is—composed of wooden supports covered in a Teflon canopy. Teens from the area came there to do what teens do: be out in nature, talk about life and maybe do drugs. It was a space removed from the everyday and all their own—something Heloise Tunstall-Behrens of British indie-psych band Landshapes finds fascinating.

“[The Heyoon Pavilion] was discovered by local kids, word got around and they all started to visit. They got to know each other there—it was kind of a place of folklore. A secret space. We find that really inspiring, it reflects how we write our songs,” she said.

So much so that Landshapes named their second album for Bella Union records after their trip to the structure in Michigan. Heyoon neatly expresses that hot-blooded and thoughtful era of youthful experience. The opening track “Stay” sets the tone for the album. A walk with some friends through a dark and unknown forest at night, your heart racing and your senses alive. This is no accident, for the writing of the album, the four members of Landshapes: Luisa Gerstein, Heloise Tunstall-Behrens, Jemma

Freeman and Dan Blackett, retreated to a cottage in the middle of the woods in Cornwall and came back with a set of edgy, bristling tunes.

“We thought we’d make really serene tunes there. But it ended up being really rowdy. We got all of London out of our system,” Tunstall-Behrens said.

Brash and confident, raucous yet eloquent, Heyoon is what you get when you send four talented city slickers into the woods—there’s certainly a sense of cathartic release throughout the record, counterbalanced with an anxious, cool calm. The album’s highlight, “Moongee,” sounds like the combination of a bad trip in the London Underground with the wide open spaces of the rolling English countryside, and “Lone Wolf” is a groovy stroll in the foreground, with guitar effects and bad vibes in the far left and right channels. Unfortunately, the second half of the album fails to live-up to the energy of the first, and although there is some heavy experimentation going on—what sounds like a phone recording of a jam at the end of “Desert” being the most interesting, if you have a soft spot for weird transitionary tracks—it seems to be running over similar ground as the first. That being said, the album is well worth a listen, and brings a funky, intense dimension to the ubiquitous indie-rock sound of today.

You also get the sense that they’d be a terrific band to see live. The rhythm section packs a solid punch, and there’s some really crunchy, distorted guitars that can blow away a venue. Plus, there’s a sense of improvisatory communication on every song here, as if the members were speaking a hidden language all their own, which comes from playing music with a group of people for seven years.

“Say we’re jamming, it’s a supportive activity. Someone’s leading you somewhere and you can second-guess where they’re going next, or you try to be conniving and throw a wrench in it … keeps everyone on their toes. We learn to bring new ideas in and not relax too much on what we know,” said Tunstall-Behrens.

This love of originality garnered the group’s most well-known song to date. Colloquially known as the “Cups” song, “You’re Gonna Miss Me,” written when Landshapes were a much quieter incarnation known as Lulu and the Lampshades, became a smash hit on YouTube and and high school fad due to its unique exploitation of the percussive capabilities of plastic cups. In the original video—the one with 6 million views, as opposed to Anna Kendrick’s cover, which has about 240 million at the time of writing—Tunstall-Behrens and Gerstein stand side by side and match each other’s percussive movements blow for blow, while harmonizing to their expertise.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, when pressed for her favourite shape of land, Tunstall-Behrens said, “there’s a rock in the middle of the Cornish sea, it’s in the shape of a pyramid.”

Seriously though, why couldn’t Montreal have a semi-culty pavilion or a threatening rock instead of just a big boring hill?

Landshapes play on Oct. 10 at Bar le Ritz (formerly Il Motore). Tickets are $10 in advance or $13 at the door.

Categories
Music

Daydream with The Vaselines

The band fits smoothly back together after their 21-year hiatus with new album, V for Vaselines

Speaking from his living room on a stormy day in Glasgow, Scotland, Eugene Kelly tells me about the genesis of his band, The Vaselines. He sounds very relaxed, almost affable, and his tone does as much as the story itself to help elucidate the central spirit of the group.

“We were just barely out of school when Frances [McKee] and I met,” says Kelly. “We just started going to clubs in Glasgow and meeting people who were into the same kind of music. [We were] discovering things, discovering films and music, really for the first time … Frances and I just decided to be part of it … When you do something when you’re that young, you don’t really see it as the beginning of a career.  You put your heart and soul into it but you don’t really think ‘oh, this is gonna pay the bills,’ you just enjoy it as something that could disappear.”

That youthful ephemerality is one of the central draws of The Vaselines’ early work. It’s comforting in a way to hear what is essentially a few friends taking shots at each other and making dirty jokes (“Rory Rides Me Raw” stars a female-friendly bike seat, “Molly’s Lips” can be interpreted at least two different ways), all underscored with a Velvet Underground style of sunshiney pop that never strays too far from a simple two-chord structure. This sense of ephemerality was further cemented by the band’s breakup almost immediately after the release of their first LP, Dum Dum, in 1989.

A full 21 years would elapse before they released another one. In the interim, nearly every genre of music experienced massive changes, and in fact, a whole new one, known as hip-hop, became the central focus of both the mainstream and the underground. The Vaselines, meanwhile, experienced one of the luckiest breaks a band can really hope for—they were covered by one of the biggest rock groups in the world. During the early ‘90s, Nirvana performed and recorded three Vaselines compositions: “Jesus Don’t Want Me For a Sunbeam,” “Molly’s Lips,” and “Son of a Gun” bringing a level of renown to a set of songs made “mostly for a laugh,” that was completely unexpected. “I haven’t had a job for 20 years,” Kelly told me, which we both agreed was probably the end-goal of being any sort of artist, “the royalty payments from those [songs] really helped us through the early years.”

Both Kelly and McKee had bands in these intervening years. Kelly’s band Eugenius (formerly Captain America), was signed to Atlantic Records, and proved to be relatively successful, while McKee’s band Suckle, formed with her sister, recorded two sessions for John Peel’s BBC Radio 1. After playing a few promotional shows together in 2006, The Vaselines officially rejoined, and in 2010 released Sex With An X, an album that, though certainly the work of at least slightly more mature songwriters, maintain the friendly intimacy that turned Dum Dum and the Sub-Pop compilation album, The Way of The Vaselines, into cult classics. That said, Sex With An X is often more enjoyable than these works, mostly owing to some solid production that manages to make the music more aurally palatable while not sounding overly slick, and the simple fact that Kelly and McKee sound like they’re not straining themselves vocally on most tracks. The highlight of the album is “I Hate The 80’s” which is as catchy as it is bittersweet, closing with the nostalgic “Where did that boy go/ Where did that girl go.”

Last year’s V For Vaselines, is just further confirmation that The Vaselines can still put together a great set of songs, and it contains what I personally think is the hidden gem of their entire catalogue. “Single Spies” feels like taking a breezy jog at sunset, sounding very reminiscent of Fleetwood Mac’s brand of soft-rock with ‘60s handclaps thrown in for good measure.

The Vaselines play Bar Le Ritz (formerly Il Motore) this Sunday, Jan. 18. I’ve already promised to try to start a moshpit, seeing as Kelly vividly remembers a show in Scotland where “people were actually punching lumps at each other,” though I’m fairly certain that’s illegal.

Categories
Music

Ben Frost explores new realms

The artist’s ambient and eerie soundscapes will chill you to the bone

From behind the mast of a U.S. Naval aircraft carrier, an X-47b drone drifts like a slow blade through the clear blue sky. It is unmanned and unfeeling, a stark and minimalist act of geometry coming in for landing. It is the paragon of modern death, and comes accompanied by the vicious, unearthly sound of engines and steel piercing through the cold November wind.

Death Is Elsewhere is an entirely wordless 8-and-a-half minute documentary film hosted on Vimeo, depicting the aforementioned aircraft touching down in slow motion aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt on Nov. 10, 2013. It was created by director/producer, Richard Mosse, cinematographer/editor, Trevor Tweeten, and sound recordist, composer, and designer Ben Frost. Your level of enchantment with the awful sound the drone makes as it descends and, in general, with the theme and emotional impact of the video is probably a good indicator of the potential enjoyment you’ll derive from the artistic efforts of this last.

Broadly, Frost’s music can be defined as “fearsome,” much like the prospect of a computer-operated killing machine hovering noisily outside your window. His soundscapes are dense and dynamic, rolling seamlessly from stark, minimalist landscapes to towering, jagged symphonies of abrasive catharta.

Most songs find their logical centre only at the far bottom of the mix, coalescing around a warped, broken rhythm, or otherwise at the very top, driven — or rather kept stationary — by a calculated metallic blink in the middle distance. It is ambient music at its very best: moody and hypnotic when it wants to be. It’s also more than able to lever your soul into a state of sustained chthonic euphoria when the sounds at work seem to come to that consensus.

Because that’s just it, Ben Frost possesses that rare genius for letting the tools he operates make decisions; apparently at their own volition. This is especially evident on his newest LP. A U R O R A is a consistently phenomenal work that feels less like an album and more like a tour through an icy industrial wasteland on some as-yet unknown deliriant drug. “Nolan,” the second track on the album, kicks open the door with all the reckless animosity we might expect from a hyperconscious cyborg of that name. It settles down or flourishes like the whims of a diseased and ambitious psyche confronted with the insurmountable laws of nature. We are filled with dread but also with a strange hope, derived from an inescapable emotional and physical sympathy. The beat works on our muscle memory as the spirals of beautiful noise turn our gaze toward the conditional worlds of the dream.

Frost’s live shows usually consist of him behind a set of laptops and keyboards with two full-kit drummers on either side and extensive lighting. That alone is enough to foretell an insane evening. He plays this Wednesday, Oct. 22 at La Sala Rossa.

Categories
Music

An endless supply of Foxygen at Le National

Photo by Sam Haughton.

Foxygen and newly assembled Star Power band put a modern spin on classic rock influences at their Oct. 12 show

Seven years removed from their 36-track space opera debut, Jurrassic Exxplosion Phillipic– recorded when principal members vocalist Sam France and multi-instrumentalist Jonathan Rado were just 15–Foxygen still have an unrequited love for ostentatious quantities.
Bursting on stage with a minimum of warning, the nine members of the newly-gathered “Star Power” band roused the audience at Le National into a state of universal ecstasy; the irresistible throwback soul of the opener, “How Can You Really,” acting as the emotional blueprint for the whole evening.
Rado’s vibrant keys, the dual guitars of Jared Walker and Kevin Basko, a bombastic rhythm section composed of Shaun Fleming and Justin Nijssen, and the glitzily-garbed trio of backup vocalists, Jaclyn Cohen, Emily Panic, and Nina Joly, all appeared relatively sane and well-mannered compared to the frontispiece of the whole affair. Sporting only a five-sizes-too-small blazer, a pair of skinny jeans, and perhaps two fluid ounces of eye makeup, lead vocalist, Sam France, managed to convey the infectious energy of nearly six decades of extravagant music in just under an hour. He did this by leaping nimbly from monitor to monitor, wrapping mic cords around his neck, wrestling with audience members (the blazer a mere memory by this point) and decimating close to half a dozen mics in the process.

Photo by Sam Haughton.

All this stays true to the Foxygen sound, which attempts to bring a modern lo-fi approach to the history of rock music. The band was ridiculously tight considering the sheer number of stylistic changes that happen in the course of any given song. France’s vocals alone sounded like a Hunky Dory-era Bowie with a Lennon attitude and some Jaggery “awww yeah”s thrown in for good measure. The classic rock influences are close to infinite, and this was well-reflected by a distinct age gap in those attending: the crowd was made up of both people under the age of 25 and above the age of 40, and both categories seemed to enjoy the set equally, although with differing levels of mosh-pit participation.

The show as a whole was feverishly enjoyable, but left something to be desired in terms of emotional depth and cogency. Much like their albums, Foxygen did a lot of things very very well, but lacked a central “theme” to tie everything together besides sheer talent and bravado. After 20 or so relatively short and equally energetic songs there’s only so much sincere dancing you can do. All in all it was worth the price of admission, but didn’t reveal any dimensions of Foxygen’s music not present on their very fine records, We Are The 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace & Magic and Take The Kids Off Broadway, and made me less inclined to tell my friends about the show than excited to hear the fruits of their new big-band labours, on the forthcoming album, …and Star Power, out Thursday, Oct. 13.

Finally, some words should be spent on opening band, Dub Thompson, who variously impressed and confused the crowd with a unique though as-yet fairly uncertain blend of Check Your Head-era Beastie Boys and synth-heavy dub, which at times managed to be more interesting, rhythmically speaking, than the headliners

Categories
Music

Take a trip to the 90s with Solids

Solids’ music combines all your favourite post-Cobain bands

Forty shows in nine countries on two sides of the Atlantic Ocean in a span of three months is enough to render any group of human beings good and pliable. However, the critically-lauded hard-rock duo Solids are as sturdy and as vibrant as ever. Indeed, one could be forgiven for thinking they weren’t two musicians I was speaking with in a Cafe Express near Papineau Metro, but two Montreal-bred, industrial sized Rubik’s cubes, seated in the two comfy armchairs across from mine.

And the analogues don’t stop there: if we take the bright September sun streaming through the window as a giant stage light, Louis Guillemette (drums and vocals) and Xavier Germain-Poitra (guitar and vocals) are presently the spitting image of their live sets: Germain-Poitra is inclined a little forward, not demanding so much as politely requiring our attention, while Guillemette is more casual, taking more or less full advantage of the back of his chair.

G-P: We played [The London Calling Festival] in Amsterdam and at first it was weird…the drums were all the way far behind.

G: Usually I play [alongside him] up at the front of the stage, but it was a festival with really fast changeovers. So he was playing up front…totally alone.

G-P: Exactly, at first we were like “ahh this is going to suck,” but then it ended up being super wild. People got crazy.

One can imagine. The official London Calling website puts it best: the Solids guys have what is called “veel enthousiasme,” the kind that can’t help but rear its banging head. Their live shows manage to be visceral while remaining metronomically flawless, with Germain-Potra’s guitar running through a fairly massive guitar amp, a bass amp and a bass cab; achieving a wider range of frequency than most four-pieces can attest to. And who needs a four-piece anyway, when you have what can only be described as Quebec’s answer to Dave Grohl tearing through the measures beside you, the aural inclination is inevitably towards assault.

But that’s not to say Solids’ music is emotionless: listen to the first track on their debut LP, Blame Confusion, and it’s quickly apparent that you should really be listening to this on your Sony brand non-skip discman, traveling back to a soul-destroying, early-90s high school. In short, their songs have that beautiful dynamic of angsty introspection and cathartic exuberance that both characterized and dominated the post-Pixies alt set for most of the early ‘90s:

G-P: I’d say for our influences, of course, the bands that are always mentioned; Dinosaur Jr., Sonic Youth.

G: Because when we were in [our first band], Expectorated Sequence, we were listening to a lot of Breach and Converge and we still like that kind of style.

G-P: I think there’s a new Breach, eh?

G: A new Breach?!?

The Concordian: A new “Bleach”?!?

G-P: I think there’s another band, like, called Breach.

The Concordian: Oh… I thought you meant “Bleach” like, the Nirvana album.

Both: Ohh nononono!

G: The Swedish band.

G-P: Yeah it’s like a Swedish…noise-metal I’d say? Maybe?

The ‘90s are confusing, folks. But, returning to the matter at hand, one is inclined to ask whether Solids brings anything new to the table set by all the above-mentioned bands. The answer is yes and no. The remarkable thing is how Solids manages to be so much a synthesis of all the different strains of Cobainism – everything from My Bloody Valentine to Swans is traceable here – while still maintaining a certain individuality. Good vocals, heavy drums, and dense, detailed production are what make Solids’ album,  Blame Confusion, stand out from most of the other throwback bands currently making a resurgence.

Another thing that is immediately apparent both on Compact Disc as well as face-to-face is that Solids are having extreme amounts of fun doing what they do. Their primary focus is on hammering out fresh tracks as much as possible, hitting their fan base hard and often.

G: At first we wanted to do only EP’s so we could get something out every 6 months, always writing new jams and having new jams coming up, but doing an LP is a whole different process.

G-P: Yeah we try not to overthink but it happens anyway.

The Concordian: Do you guys prefer working in the studio or doing live shows?

G-P: We really enjoy both, it’s just that at some points in the studio the feeling can get lost. In the studio it’s more zen, but [sometime you hear] something so many times that you don’t know… “Is it even good?”

G: And now the only thing we do in life is play music. So for the next album for the first time we’ll really get the chance to work a fuckin’ lot.

That is, right after they finish another three months of touring. After performing at POP Montreal on Friday Sept. 19, Solids are heading west to Ontario and then down into State-land. They’ve set themselves the goal of having a new LP on the shelves by Fall 2015, which means having the recording done around February. They also offered the vague clue that they were planning to experiment a little more. So…Keytar, I’m assuming?

Exit mobile version