Next Music From Tokyo Vol. 4 ft. ZAZEN BOYS, group_inou, Charan-Po-Rantan & Praha Depart @ The Waldorf

Next Music From Tokyo Vol. 4

featuring ZAZEN BOYS, Group_inou, Praha Depart, and Charan-Po-Rantan.
May 24 @ The Waldorf.

Real Live Review by Fraser Dobbs

  Next Music From Tokyo, a tour that brings Japanese bands to Canada every year, is always the highlight of my musical year. The event, this time held at the Waldorf Hotel, seems to attract a growing number of Japanophiles everytime, and it was their unbridled enthusiasm that helped make this one of the best, if weirdest, shows in recent memory.

  Praha Depart opened to a packed house. It’s not often that the Waldorf is so full so early on a Wednesday night, but music nerds were wedged shoulder-to-shoulder as the band launched into a crazy, psychedelic amalgamation of screeching shoegaze and tiki-metal. It’s an odd combination, with furious splintering guitar riffage leading into improv cowbell breakdowns, but bassist Mai Yano stole the show with her impressive vocal range. Even to an audience that couldn’t understand a word she was saying, Yano ran the spectrum from freakish chanting to spurious screaming match and back to droning, stoner-metal sing-along.

  Returning to the sweltering Waldorf basement, I did a double-take to the next act: seven ladies in matching Girl Scout-esque outfits, armed with a full horn section, an accordion, and a beautiful singer clutching a stuffed pig. While Charan-Po-Rantan’s performance was nothing if not hilariously campy, it was hard to dismiss the amazing talent of the ensemble cast. The group played bizarre takes on Klezmer and gypsy tunes that wouldn’t sound out-of-place in a carnival tent in Fantasia, but they did so with such professionalism and grace that made the entire performance captivating. It’s not often that such amazing musicianship is paired with such bizarre, cabaret-entertainment lunacy, but Charan-Po-Rantan made it work.

  Group_inou is a brilliant fusion of chiptune, IDM and hip-hop with a crazy amount of kinetic energy borrowed from the duo’s time in hardcore and post-punk bands. It was the perfect storm for a dance party, with the packed basement erupting right alongside emcee CP and beat-maker Imai, both of whom refused to stand still like their North American contemporaries. Whenever Imai wasn’t dialing in a chiptune beat his arms were flailing faster than the crowd’s, and it was rare to see a musician enjoying his own music so much. CP’s rapping was a little lost on the English-speaking audience, but his energy definitely wasn’t, as songs frequently veered off into “I’m doing the robot because I am having so much fun” territory. I’ve never had so much fun dancing to lyrics I couldn’t understand.

  When ZAZEN BOYS, who are legendary overseas, started playing, it only took a few minutes for the crowd to realize that what they were watching was less music than it was musical genius, but if you asked the 300 people there what made ZAZEN BOYS one of the most important things they’d ever seen on a stage, you’d get 300 different answers. To say Mukai Shutoko (vocals, guitar, keyboard) led the band would be an understatement, as the other three musicians waited on him as a conductor, with the intense concentration of three hunters waiting to see which way a lion might jump. The extremely complicated funk/math/prog-pop experiment was wild and totally free of the constraints of modern music, like time signatures or tempo. Instead, the band was hinged on Shutoko’s every riff, and the musicians oftentimes were left staring at their conductor mid-stroke, waiting for the exact time to start the next piece of the puzzle. Yoshida Ichiro may be one of the best bassists I’ve ever seen, turning crazy slap-bass rhythms into something beautiful, scary, and intangible. ZAZEN BOYS’ performance was dharma in every sense of the word.

Hermetic w/Chung Antique & Movieland & Artbank

Hermetic

with Chung Antique, and Movieland.
May 4 @ Artbank.

Real Live Review by Fraser Dobbs

Movieland | | photo by Audrey Alexandrescu

I’ll always be amazed how many people can fit into the Artbank. By 9:30 p.m. the place was packed like rats in an attic, this time to support Hermetic’s new LP, Civilized City. Movieland started things slowly, easing into a candy-coated pop rock set that only got better as the night progressed. Once the cobwebs were shook off and confidence restored to the quartet, the band made good use of shared vocal duties and fun, carefree two-minute tracks. While most of their songs were sweet on the tongue, bitter closer “He Cares More If You Forget About Me” left the best taste in my mouth.

Chung Antique | | photo by Audrey Alexandrescu

  It’s not often that I’m blown away at a show: usually, I go into things well-informed and get pretty close to what I was expecting, but Chung Antique’s out-of-left-field performance blew me out of the water. The meek three-piece, who hail from Seattle, didn’t say much before launching into a furiously catchy instrumental performance held together by metronome-tight drum fills and amazingly groovy math-rock riffs. Guitarist Charlie Zaillian was profoundly humble, taking the time between tracks to profusely thank the crowd for gathering. By the time their last jam finished, there wasn’t a head in the cramped room that wasn’t moving/headbanging in time to the rhythm. Pay particular attention to Chung Antique if you’re a fan of local math bands like Man Your Horse or Polarhorse. I couldn’t get the grin from this performance off my face for the rest of the weekend.

Hermetic | | photo by Audrey Alexandrescu

  Eric Axen creates the kind of rich lyrical fodder that punk and emo bands for the last 20 years have been trying to master, from Jawbreaker to Rites Of Spring. Behind the reins of Hermetic, Axen and drummer Bart Newman have a catchy, sing-along-friendly monster in their hands. At the Artbank the duo were surprisingly loud, and the extra helping of grit on Axen’s baritone guitar helped fill out each song, a difficult challenge without a bassist. Fitting, because it was their party to begin with, but Hermetic outdid all of their past performances with terrific sound and an attitude that made it obvious they were having fun. Newman is a seriously entertaining drummer to watch, and he played his drum kit with the same carefree abandon that a kid might have playing with his new bike. Although Hermetic ended at the stroke of 11 p.m., cheers for more kept on well after the mics were cut.

Weed

Weed

“Being on the road is super sweet… More bands need to get down with that.”

Interview by Fraser Dobbs

Weed | | photo by Flip Sandy

A year ago, interviewing Weed would have meant a one-on-one with Will Anderson and his tape deck, when the name was applied to his d.i.y. solo cassettes. Today, he’s flanked by Kevin Doherty (second guitar), Hugo Noriega (bass) and Bobby Siadat (drums), who have melded Weed into an epic lo-fi, guitar-sludge quartet. Anderson couldn’t be happier about the change.

I’m catching them at Budgie’s Burritos as they prepare to release their new EP, Gun Control, next month. The excitement of going on tour to support it is bursting from their collective seams, and the conversation is a reminder that underneath the grabby moniker is a band with serious ethos.

 
Discorder: This will be the second record you’ve pressed to vinyl as opposed to releasing on tape.

Will Anderson: Yeah, With Drug/Eighty was the first. We self-released it. I came up with this dumb phrase, “Cruising USA” and I decided that’s a record label. CUS-02 is With Drug/Eighty, Gun Control will be CUS-03.

D: You toured for With Drug/Eighty through the west coast and the mid-west, and you are touring for this release all the way to the east coast. Not many bands here do that. Why are you doing it where others aren’t?

WA: I have to ask why other bands don’t tour.

Hugo Noriega: It’s scary playing outside of your town. Locally, all bands have connections.

D: What was your connection to the cities you’ve toured to, like Portland or Seattle?

WA: We didn’t have any. Our first show in Seattle was a disaster. The first show in a new city is never good. There were three people there, but we met them and talked to them and they helped us get our next show there.

Bobby Siadat: We met a girl from Baltimore. We’re going through there but we didn’t have anything scheduled. She knew all these people and places to play.

WA: A big point for us is traveling. That’s what it’s all about.

BS: Being on the road is super sweet. It’s the best way to travel. I couldn’t see a more fun time, being together and traveling around. More bands need to get down with that.

Kevin Doherty: It’s an excuse to go places, and it’s an inherently social environment.

HN: We’ve got rules for interactions, though. Like, don’t talk to Will after shows sometimes. Just leave him alone.

WA: Especially when we play with bands that I really respect, I just feel unworthy. And I just like to go into the van and sit by myself for a bit.

HN: One time, in Olympia, after a show in an old youth insane asylum, Will didn’t talk to anyone for three hours.

Weed | | photo by Flip Sandy

D: There’s a significantly different sound in your older tapes than on the two new records you’ve released on vinyl. Why is that?

WA: Before those, it was just solo experimentation. It was about me getting something on tape, I didn’t know what I was doing. Still don’t, really.

How does it feel playing with a band after those releases?

WA: Way more satisfying. It’s what I really wanted in the first place. All my friends were in bands and I asked “why don’t they ask me to be in any bands?” and so, fuck it, I’ll do my own tape. What I really wanted was to have a band to go on tour with, and now we have that. There’ll be a day where I want to do more stuff by myself, but not for a long time.

D: Despite keeping the same name, do these new releases feel like they’re by the same band?

WA: No. I would have changed the name if I didn’t think it was the most brilliant name of all time. It’s totally different now.

Weed | | photo by Melanie Coles

D: You’ve got to be the least-Googleable band in history. Why “Weed?”

WA: Well, it’s easy to remember. It attracts a lot of attention, for sure. The word weed, when you say it out loud you think of one thing. But it can mean to weed something out of your life. It’s also something that won’t die, that’s resilient.

KD: I think we like the sensationalist aspect of it, too. It gets attention.

D: Weed records are incredibly lo-fi. Why?

KD: It’s more of a means thing. The last record sounded great, but we recorded it in Seattle.

WA: We knew this one was going to be a little hairier. We could have recorded in a studio again, but there was something important in having us do almost everything.

HN: It was a completely conscious decision. We wanted to do it ourselves.

KD: Chris Gilling [a friend of the band] recorded everything and did a lot of the mixing too, along with me. If my part was anything, it was to muck up the recordings a little. Chris got everything sounding crispy.

D: The list of venues you’ve played at is eclectic: cramped house shows, even more cramped art spaces, and the like. Is there a reason for that?

WA: We’ll only play shows open to minors. It forces us to be creative about where we play. There are a very limited amount of all-ages venues in town. I think that music is for everyone: it wasn’t that long ago that I couldn’t go to shows unless I had a fake ID. Like there’s a magic age where you can drink alcohol, so now you can enjoy music? I’m not trying to say our band is inspiring to kids or anything, but a lot of kids can be inspired by bands when they’re 15, 16 years old. It’s really convenient to just play bars—to tour the bars of America. We won’t do that.

Weed kicked off their tour at The Lion’s Den, May 3.

Glass Kites—s/t

  Glass Kites’ first record is the perfect album to enjoy gazing out of a rain-slicked window on a dreary day. Just like toggling between watching the weather and your own reflection in the glass, instruments fade in and out of focus seamlessly; it’s a hard record to avoid getting lost in, which isn’t to say that it’s easy to ignore.

  The first half of the EP plays like a progressive-jazz record coated in heavy oil: seamless and polished to a mirror sheen. Standout track, “Terra,” is magnificent in its complex arrangement and deeply-layered instrumentation, replete with guitar solos caked in ’80s space echo that sound straight out of a Super Metroid theme song. This song is also the best example of singer Leon Feldman’s crooning and deeply introspective vocal delivery, which cascades dreamily through much of the song.

  The record, in a word, is lush. Shimmering keyboard pads hang in the background of each song, drawing attention at once towards and away from each intricate layout. Clocking in at 10:12, “Mirror Me,” is easily the longest on the record, but uses its time wisely to build towards a piercing crescendo that, much like Feldman’s lyrics, is powerful and emotive while restrained by the ever-changing mix of instruments.

  The attention to detail on Glass Kites pays off on repeated listens and reflective moments.

Dirty Spells Article

illustration by Alex Stursberg

 
“Make more laser sounds!” I’m sitting in a swivel-chair at Watershed Productions, a recording studio overlooking Victory Square. An hour earlier, I met Greg Pothier and Doug Phillips, the two figureheads behind Dirty Spells, and instead of asking me where I wanted to interview them, the first question they pitched was how much time I had to work with.

  Before long, I found myself on the other side of a soundproof booth listening to a violin mimic blaster rifles. Dirty Spells are anything but orthodox. Along with Emily Bach, Bryce MacLean, Graeme and Ryan Betts, and Eric Campbell, the recording studio was bursting at the seams.

  “We asked, ‘what if we put two bands together?’” Pothier tells me later over a plate of nachos at Foundation. Boasting both dueling drums and guitars, bass, violin and sax, it’s easy to get caught up in all the sounds going on in Dirty Spells’ first EP, released at the end March.

The band, which shares members with the likes of the New Values and Sigourney Beaver, are “building a wall of noise, and each instrument is a brick,” says Pothier, but it would be a mistake to dismiss the psych-rock collective as cacophonic. “We don’t want to sound like seven different people playing apart,” Phillips notes, “We’re taking these jazz and classical instruments and totally misusing them, trying to find a way to incorporate them without standing out.”

  Back in the studio, producer Hayz Fisher, also of the New Values, gives me the abbreviated tour of the recording equipment and gear. There’s the usual assortment of pristine soundboards and antique effects racks, but what makes this space so easy to relax in is the sense of history: every guitar, every book, every framed picture or propped-up card has a story behind it. There’s no beer-stains here, but you can tell just by the chips of paint on the ledge of the sound-booth, and the worn patches on the hardwood floor that this place has seen many a pilgrim. It’s been a long two days for the musicians and their producer, but the warm environment doesn’t feel like a prison one bit.
 
<a href=”http://dirtyspells.bandcamp.com/album/greetings-from-hangover-city”>Greetings from Hangover City by DIRTY SPELLS</a>
 
  On this, the final day recording, I arrive just in time to watch Bach lay down her parts on violin, which were more space-rock than chamber music. “I’ve [been] playing classical music since I was three: really stodgy, up-tight [and] structured. It’s great to play in a band where I just get to make noises instead of reading sheet music. I feel like it’s an evolution… or a devolution?” Bach’s contributions to the psychedelic “UFO” (written with an eye to Pothier’s childhood growing up near the Franconia Notch, an infamous alien hotspot) are bold slabs of paint on an already-colourful canvas; watching her experiment on her violin to etch out the right frequencies is a bit like how I expect Foley artists operate, albeit with fewer observers.

  Everyone on my side of the glass was either gesticulating wildly, making laser sounds with their mouths, or enthusiastically nodding their heads when the perfect pitch was attained. The result needs to be heard to be believed, lying somewhere between Jimmy Page’s more druggy Zeppelin moments and a guy-wire being snapped in slow-motion.

  Graeme Betts’ performance was equally mesmerizing, as he contributed saxophone tracks with a notable twist: he was feeding his sax through a whammy pedal, which he used like a trucker on speed, changing the pitch of his instrument with freakish irregularity. The end result was a psychotic blend of bluesy horn hits and what MacLane called “demon-brass,” like the sound of a steam-engine train in a tunnel thrown through a blender. “I feel pretty good about jamming in a psychedelic band,” Betts says, “[I] kinda get my growl on”. Or, as Phillips aptly puts, “It’s a saxophone, but it sounds like a synthesizer.” The group had recorded guitar, bass and drums the previous day, and most of the vocal work was done early in the studio, before I arrived. They assured me that I wasn’t missing much though, noting how tedious it was to get all of those instruments just right.

photo by Victoria Johnson

 
  As time in the studio dwindles to an end, everyone sets up to shout out gang vocals for the track, “Hangover City”. This event had been mentioned often throughout the course of the day as sort of a milestone moment, both for signifying the end of the long day and as something genuinely fun and relatively easy that the group can relax on. The song itself is a pretty straight-forward rock tune to the sound of late-’60s Rolling Stones, and is one of the only pieces on the four-track EP that I could discern a notable influence.

  The lines we were shouting, “Hangover City!” and “That girl was pretty!” were just silly enough out-of-context to make giggling between takes nearly impossible to avoid. The track, less psych than Americana, has a distinct “Johnny B. Goode” feel with its walking bass line and thick guitar chords. And unlike what the name suggests, the track is filled with the kind of songs-for-summer optimism that predates a morning-after headache.

  “Hangover City” also ties in to the band’s methods for getting their music heard. “The EP is entirely to put together a Sonicbids page to be able to apply for [music festivals such as] Music Waste, Olio, Rifflandia, [and] Sled Island”, Pothier explains. “We’re going to be printing postcards with the Bandcamp link and ‘Greetings From Hangover City’ on them. Postcards are cool, right?” The catch-phrase, which started as a joke between Ryan Betts and the rest of the band, seems to fit the lunatic positive energy that possesses the entire group.

  “The only thing that sucks about this band is the parking tickets” bemoans MacLean as we exit Watershed to a fresh batch of paper slips on their vehicles.

  It’s likely that in the future, Dirty Spells will have an elaborate and impossible-to-verify backstory regarding the formation of their band, possibly with oblique references to the supposed alien abductions of Betty and Barney Hill, that inspired Pothier to write “UFO.” Maybe they’ll claim that the seven of them came together during a witch-hunt or while searching for the elusive Ogopogo, but the reality is a lot simpler.

photo by Victoria Johnson

 
  “Doug and I were in a short-lived band [called] Shot Royalties,” recalls Pothier. “I had a bunch of gigs that I [was committed to playing]; I didn’t want to play solo so I asked my friends if they wanted to join up, and it worked great… [but] it’s still in its embryonic form.”

  So how likely is it that the incarnation of Dirty Spells I talked to will be the same that is playing shows a few months from now? According to Phillips, it’s hard to say. “It’s an old idea that Greg and I had, to have a rotating cast of people coming in and contributing on certain songs. It built from there, even if our setup is more permanent now.”

  Over the sounds of us digging into nachos and beer, there’s the noise of a band in flux. With an EP out the door and the prospect of festival spots in the headlights, Dirty Spells has all the positive energy it needs to do something remarkable. Spending a few hours talking about music, art and space aliens, I realized that their passion and warmth is contagious. If their live sets are anywhere near as friendly and interesting, Dirty Spells will have a lot of fun in Vancouver, even if it is Hangover City.

Half Chinese w/Chris-a-riffic, Lunch Lady & OK Vancouver OK @ Artbank

Half Chinese | | photo by Audrey Alexandrescu

  I love the Artbank: Standing room for maybe a hundred people, and located right next to the railroad tracks on Powell Street, if the bands you’re there to see don’t play loud enough you’ll be feeling the vibrations of train cars rumble through every five minutes. Anyone that needed a break from the hot music space just stepped outside and let the rain soak into their t-shirts for a few minutes.

  Jeff Johnson is a constantly-morphing musician, and it’s hard to draw parallels between any of his sets, except to say that he’s usually playing a guitar and goes under the moniker OK Vancouver OK. Backed by a bass, a tiny drum kit and a tiny keyboard, Johnson played a simple but thoroughly enjoyable pop set. Johnson is a beautiful lyricist, delivering emotionally charged songs with terrible weight and causality, like a bard describing his life in sparkling prose. Each tune was delivered with the same heartfelt earnestness that made OK Vancouver OK an installation in the city’s east side for years.

  After a quick intermission, the crowd was heralded back to the stage by Lunch Lady’s singer, who was yelling nearly incomprehensibly about getting the party started. There was no such thing as musicianship in the band; the trio could barely play their instruments and their frontwoman routinely gave up trying to play her guitar in the middle of a song to focus on shouting Suicidal Tendencies-esque vocals–but that didn’t matter one iota. If Deerhoof’s Satomi Matsuzaki was a drunken punk-rocker, this would be her music.

  For a band with obvious jitters, Lunch Lady quelled the butterflies in their stomachs with energy and abandon. The crowd went ballistic for the firecracker delivery of each super fast punk jumble because the group were having such obvious fun performing. Jumping on top of stage props and snarling at the crowd, Lunch Lady weren’t musical genius, but were damn good entertainment.

  Chris-a-riffic had a surprisingly tough act to follow. He set up his signature keyboard (”he can’t crowd-surf like Nardwuar with that thing”, someone piped in beside me), and then blew our minds. Chris Alscher is a Vancouver icon for a reason, and playing the longest set I’ve ever seen him perform (at 20 minutes) was a maelstrom of emotional highs and lows. Alscher played a more kinetic performance than I’d seen from him before, often bursting into screaming and shouting from behind humble piano symphonies that made the crowd gasp, then move closer. His set left me feeling like I’d witnessed a fight between friends.

  I didn’t know what to expect from Half Chinese: to me, they were that band I’d always meant to see but never had the right chance, so when they started playing exciting, mesmerizing avant-garde rock music I knew I’d been seriously missing out. There’s so much about Half Chinese that’s fascinating that it’s hard to discern just what makes them so enjoyable to listen to: whether it’s the double-drum-kit ratatat, jazzy musings or crescendoing, joyous instrumentation, or the humble, nearly-monotone poetic lyrics, it was impossible to absorb everything at once.

  Built out of what seems like every corner of the East Van musical community, borrowing members from Slight Birching and SSRIs to name a few, Half Chinese were jaw-droppingly exciting to listen to. This isn’t the kind of music people usually associate with Vancouver, but it damn well ought to be. The crowd parted ways taking cover under freshly-minted Half Chinese LPs.

Wintermitts w/ Kingsgate Chorus and Aunts & Uncles @ Interurban

Wintermitts | | photo by Audrey Alexandrescu

  Vancouver really likes “cute”. While adjectives like “beautiful”, “ravishing” and “foxy” might get thrown back into the cityscape dictionary as unusable, the nonthreatening “cute” was the fourth word out of everyone’s mouth at Interurban on this particular Friday night. As the sizable gallery approached capacity, I got pretty sick of the idea of describing any music with such a throwaway term, but then, cue the Kingsgate Chorus.

  To call the Kingsgate Chorus a handful would be an understatement; somehow, leader Jenny Ritter managed to cram herself, an acoustic guitar, and 30 singers onto the stage, and I felt a bit like I was in kindergarten again watching the choir march single-file into position. This was no elementary school affair though, and the choir busted out easy covers of Talking Heads, Leonard Cohen, and crowd-favorite Pixies (”Where Is My Mind” with grinning girls singing the guitar lead? Yes please). The group was anything but stationary, mingling on-stage like the performance was more party than song–and to a large extent, that’s what it was. Unfortunately, the crowd was never respectful (i.e., quiet) enough to get the full effect from the choir, but such is a weekend night.

  Aunts & Uncles did a phenomenal job of taking the optimism and energy of the previous set and churning it into something meticulous, artistic and erratic. Frontman Joseph Hirabayashi (SSRIs) has a very distinctive songwriting style that warrants attention when removed from his other project’s thrashy surroundings; combined with Adrienne LaBelle’s violin skills (and the occasional, regrettable inclusion of a “cute” ukelele) it’s hard to narrow down what makes Aunts & Uncles tick, or just why they’re so much fun to listen to.

  They ended their set backed by the Kingsgate Chorus (and how all 30 of them fit on stage again is beyond me). Hirabayashi expressed heartfelt appreciation for having so many people be eager to learn his song “Fire Hydrants” for the performance, and his sincerity added depth to their collaborative finale.

  Wintermitts are an interesting animal. Their recorded material, including the LP Océans which they released at the show, is the kind of well-crafted orchestral pop that fits perfectly in the background of bicycle rides and seawall adventures. Live, having Wintermitts at the front of the show instead of painting the scene for something more grandeur, was a mixed bag. The band, dressed in mariner attire replete with a deep-sea-diving bassist and the ensemble decked in sailors’ hats, seemed contrived and gawky, even when it was obvious the group was enjoying the dress-up routine.

  Constant and seamless instrument transitions kept things interesting, as a seemingly endless number of new instruments, including an accordion, were brought into the mix. Even though I wasn’t enamoured with some of their antics, like frontwoman Lise Monique Oakley asking for “six strong men” to help her crowd-surf at the end of their set, there’s no doubt that Wintermitts put a lot of effort into making their performance unique. I could have skipped the contrived encore “Birds” (although it gave another chance for the Kingsgate Chorus to chime in from the front of the crowd), but it was a thoroughly cute way to end a thoroughly cute evening.

Apollo Ghosts w/Jay Arner & MOVIELAND

Apollo Ghosts | photos by Steve Louie

  It seemed like everyone at the Zoo Zhop knew someone in upstarts Movieland. It wasn’t that hard; the all-girl four-piece have their hands in a lot of honey pots, like Aunts & Uncles, Thee Ahs, Kidnap Kids! and Narwhal. Fast, catchy songs give nods to Plumtree and even a younger Sleater Kinney. Like so many bands at their first show, Movieland suffered from lack of confidence and it was only towards the end of their set that some louder, raunchier tracks (particularly “He Cares More If You Forget About Me”, which is about one-night stands) got the girls moving with just enough riot girl bite.

  Moving from cute, angry girls to lush pop, Jay Arner and his as-yet-untitled backing group knew how to draw a crowd—more people had been turned away at the door due to capacity as the band got ready to play. This time around, Arner was in front of a distinctly ’60s affair, filled with jangly guitar hooks. While I was stranded behind several rows of heads, the group played a tight and mostly well-orchestrated set, replete with between-song banter as Arner and his keyboardist traded off guitar duties. It may be too much to ask for a second guitar, but it seemed a little silly trying to watch a six-string change hands on the small, crowded stage.

  The quick break between sets let the crowd gulp down some fresh air outside the air-tight venue. I’ve got a confession: I’d never seen Apollo Ghosts before. Yes, I’d heard the buzz after every one of their sold out shows and I’d listened to Mount Benson when it was long-listed for the 2010 Polaris Prize, but fate had always conspired against me when it came to seeing them live.

  Thankfully, despite being packed like sardines the crowd responded so enthusiastically to everything Apollo Ghosts did that their set, collaboratively, was nearly perfect. Frontman Adrian Teacher skillfully blended art-rock, punk and a little introspective pop into something beautiful and beautifully entertaining.

  By far my favourite part of the show was the deceptively opaque lyrical content, simply delivered but full of poetic meaning, and the band blew my expectations out of the water without blowing my eardrums. Standout track “For What They Do, They Do” was lightning-quick but lovely, encased in shimmering guitar riffs and alternating smooth-sung and shouted verses. Even when songs threatened to spill over into lunacy, the band showed a marked level of restraint, choosing to end their set by enlisting the crowd to sing the chorus off a song on their upcoming LP instead of blasting everyone away in a wall of guitar rhythms. Suffice it to say, I won’t be missing another Apollo Ghosts show, even if it’s stuffed to the rafters.

Sizzle Teen Label Launch Party w/Man Your Horse, Diamond Dancer, Previous Tenants & We Are Gaze

Man Your Horse | photo by Steve Louie

  Sizzle Teen Records’ label launch show at the Railway was a bit like stepping into a poor man’s time machine: while there were a few times during the night that I felt the tugging of 2012, for the most part I spent the evening snug in the nostalgia of the ’90s, listening to bands that sounded like as much a part of my childhood as Pokémon and Saved By The Bell.

  We Are Gaze opened the festivities with a solid round of pop-punk songs that would have fit into MTV’s music rotation right after Blink-182. The trio were pretty radio friendly, rooted firmly in a triangle pattern on stage and getting progressively fuzzier as the set went on. It’s hard not to draw direct comparisons to the bands of my youth, and frontman Robert Watt’s vocal delivery has a lot of Billie Joe Armstrong (of Green Day for those who were too old/too young for Dookie) riding behind it, even if the lyrics were more about girls than getting high.

  Keeping with the “music-I-listened-to-when-I-was-14″ trend, second act Previous Tenants played straight-up skate-punk with exceptional energy behind their guitarist Joel Tong, who pulled off mid-breakdown scissor-kicks with aplomb. Trading vocal duties with Jesse Gander on bass, songs bounced between anthemic, full-steam-ahead punk tributes and chaotic, treble-heavy thrash tunes. Previous Tenants played what could be described as a messy set as, in stark contrast to the openers, the three musicians were covered in sweat (and flinging it into the audience, on occasion) by the end of their session.

Diamond Dancer | photo by Steve Louie

  Diamond Dancer are a complicated band to write about. Although self-described as dream pop, I saw a lot more in common with fledgling emo bands Rites Of Spring and Sunny Day Real Estate, if those groups had incorporated a female keyboardist and one of the tightest drummers I’ve ever seen. Fairly straight-forward melodic verse/chorus combinations were broken up with long instrumental flourishes that demonstrated a shoegaze/post-rock musical proficiency, and it was these breakdowns that really set Diamond Dancer apart.

  The night capped off with an intimate set by Man Your Horse — if you want to call setting up on the floor, inviting the crowd as close as possible, then smashing their eardrums in with pummeling volume “intimate”. Julian Marrs is an exceptional guitarist, and finding the drummer willing to keep pace with his mathy, time-signature-destroying riffs in Scott Petrie must have been a feat, especially in “So Bronze It’s Gold”. The dynamic duo played with massive grins on their faces, and even as those at the front ogled the crazy technical skills of the two, the entire crowd was smiling just as wide and trying to keep time to their loop-based madness. Although Man Your Horse didn’t exactly keep with the 90s theme, they ended the nostalgic night in style.

Sleuth Interview

illustration by Mark Hall-Patch

  As I’m sitting in the Brickhouse with Sleuth on an early Saturday night, patrons waiting in line give us and the three tables we’ve occupied dirty looks from time to time. Regardless, we and the microphone planted in the centre table are left largely to our own devices. Fish swirl in a tank next to where I meet the band: Julian Bowers (drums, guitar), Oliver McTavish (keyboards), Jesse Easter (bass), and Jainy Lastoria (guitar), who refers to herself as “The Lion In Love.”

  Their names, staged or otherwise, are pretty indicative of the wealth of personality that lies bubbling on the surface of the rookie ensemble. The band, a distinctively jangly affair, have been floating in Vancouver’s music scene since 2010, but they speak with an outsider’s perspective. The emotions and energy that keep our conversation going into the night are things that I can sometimes forget live inside of most musicians — a genuine sense of innocence, like new skin being exposed to cold air, is a refreshing thing to feel during our interview.

Sleuth | photo by Victoria Johnson

  The group is still reeling from their recent victory in CiTR’s annual battle-of-the-bands, SHiNDiG. Though they took the top spot from Tyranahorse and From Birch To Yew, the indie-popists didn’t enter SHiNDiG to win it. As McTavish explains, “We never expected to make it past the first round. A chance to pick up a fan or two, that’s it.” The friends still sound overwhelmed and I can tell that the memory of their name being called by the judges is framed in their collective consciousness like a still from Rocky III.

  Despite the win, the group took some flack post-SHiNDiG from critics who were unimpressed with their performance. “I’m not sure how receptive Vancouver is to our kind of music. I think we’re more inside the indie-pop realm, which I don’t think [is very popular] here,” Lastoria muses. She speaks with a quavering confidence that the rest of her band doesn’t emulate, which isn’t to say that their sudden exposure has swelled their egos.

  Easter, who speaks with level-headed sincerity, tries to elaborate on the last SHiNDiG performance: “If you were going to plan a gig with those three bands, you wouldn’t put them in that order [with Sleuth playing last, after Tyranahorse]. If our job was to take what Tyranahorse offered and expand upon it, to be as high-energy, as aggressive, to take their direction and move it further… if that’s what we’d needed to do in order to win, then anybody that believes we failed in that would be justified in thinking we shouldn’t have won. The criteria [for the judges] was a bit different.”

  “The whole idea of a battle-of-the-bands is really uncomfortable anyways, because you get hostile towards each other,” Lastoria adds. “I’m more interested in a musical community, where you have shows together and you can be friends with people, but during a competition you get into that spirit and people become jerks.”
 
  Sleuth’s first EP, Brave Knew Nothing, is an interesting outing. Packed with a respectable six songs and filled to the brim with jangle-pop and shoegaze hooks, the instrumentation stands in stark contrast with most of the lyrical content, delivered alternately by Lastoria and Bowers. “Apocalypse, Please Sign The Release Form First” couples a cutesy hummed pre-chorus with dark talk about the end of the world, while “We’re Not Friends Yet” delivers bright, twangy guitar-plucking and a cautionary ode to new acquaintances.

  “Brit-pop has a lot of melancholy—sad lyrics alongside bright, unapologetically happy instrumentation. It’s a good juxtaposition,” Easter says of Sleuth’s influences, while Lastoria adds, “It’s one of those specifically British pop tropes. It’s just what I grew up listening to.”

  Brave Knew Nothing is a smirk of an album, with The Lion In Love’s beautiful voice dealing equally in cute doo-wop choruses and dour apocalyptic prophecies. The mixed messages are definitely intentional, and tend to leave listeners stuck somewhere between swing-dance and moody contemplation.

  While available on their Bandcamp page, the EP also came out on cassette tapes. “It’s admittedly an odd decision because not many people have tape players, but they’re neat little objects.” relates McTavish, and neat little objects they are. Of the 66 copies printed (including a 16-copy reissue), each one is hand-crafted with love and attention to detail. Copies of Brave Knew Nothing come with a hand-coloured sleeve, are individually numbered and worded and (according to their Bandcamp, anyway) include “a drawing of some kind.”

  “We want to refer to ourselves as an art collective as much as a band,” McTavish continues. “We wanted to make each cassette tape be individual so listeners would have a more personal connection to the item itself, as a work of art, as well as an EP.”

  “And,” Easter pipes in happily, “as long as they come with download codes, there’s no risk of it seeming contrived! In a culture of copying, personalizing the experience is really important. There’s something really nice about creating something so personal.”

  Part of Sleuth’s band-battle plunder is 20 hours of recording time, and the group wants to waste no time getting into a local studio. “We’re probably going to do a single. I’ve already contacted Colin Stewart at the Hive,” Lastoria explains, but putting tracks down isn’t the only thing keeping these young pop artists busy in the new year.

  A potential shot at the North By Northeast music festival in Toronto, as well as a confirmed spot at the NYC Popfest, are big gigs for a band that have only released one cassette. That said, those tapes have been shipped all around the globe, according to The Lion In Love. “Our initial run of cassettes sold mostly outside of Canada: Japan, Germany, a couple in England. We even sold a tape to Singapore. Longest address line I’ve ever seen!”

  Leaving the now-crowded bar to say our farewells, I feel like I’ve glimpsed exactly what the judges liked so much about Sleuth: a strong, charismatic yet oddball group of musicians with a growing idea of what they’re doing and how to go about doing it. As Easter told me in parting, “a band is a cross between a polygamist relationship and a sports-team: it’s goal-oriented but very emotionally volatile. Learning how to run a business, and setting aside your egos, is hard. But we have what it takes to prioritize. Being your own harshest critic is bad for your stress level, but really good for your creative output.” While I don’t think this description suits all bands, it fits Sleuth like a glove.

Animal Bodies—Kiss Of The Fang

Bel Riose, Man Your Horse & The Barcelona Chair @ The Biltmore

I get the feeling from talking to Vancouver natives that the Barcelona Chair don’t exactly maintain a consistent lineup—the last time I’d seen them was as a four-piece, so it was an initial disappointment to learn that their violinist had moved back to Hamilton, ON. I was skeptical that their brand of mathy post-rock could survive as a trio, but I was blown away by the sounds that persevered. Their guitarist can seriously shred, and the rhythmic convulsions of his body as he played was like a weird conductor’s dance. The trio conjured a lot of Japanese shoegaze like Sgt. and Mass Of The Fermenting Dregs, but the overall sound was rooted firmly in atypical time signatures, stop-start rhythms and dissonant chord structures. The dozens of pedals strewn about the stage made each song stand clearly on its own with thick delays leading into heady fuzz-based jams, and not once did my head stop to think about the fact that they were “down” a man.

  Man Your Horse didn’t waste much time between songs, rarely stopping for more than a moment before launching into yet another high-energy tune. Their tracks didn’t really feel like complete, thought-out structures—more like loose jams organized around a batch of complicated riffs. Guitarist Julian Marrs gets bonus points for playing through both guitar and bass amps, creating a funky low-end harmonic that helped provide substance to his performance alongside bandmate and skinsman Scott Petrie. Rarely have I seen someone as excited as Marrs to be behind a six-stringed instrument, so I felt a little disappointed whenever he let his hands fall to deliver uninteresting lyrics caked in echo.

  On the advice of a friend, who described closers Bel Riose as coming across “like icicles being driven into your eardrums by sheer volume” (in a good way), I took a defensive stance half-way to the back of the cabaret before they began. I was a little let down, then, when my ears didn’t start to bleed half-way through their “rock concert.” I really, really wanted to like Bel Riose, who are an unapologetically straight-forward rock ‘n’ roll duo, but I just couldn’t get into the traditional verse-chorus-bridge structure that all of their songs adopted. After the previous guitar-wizard-driven bands, seeing frontman Ryan Dolejsi pound out relatively simple songs on a supremely overdriven bass guitar was somewhat of an anti-climax. The brother outfit (sibling Geof plays drums) were sweating bullets by the end of their set, but I was still left scratching my head as to why they were playing with bands that had such a strong focus on technicality. I’d love to see Bel Riose again, but on a bill better-suited to their hard-up crunchy tones.

Lost Lovers Brigade, Shimmering Stars & Kellarissa @ Interurban Gallery

The Lost Lovers Brigade’s Elisha Rembold
photo by Audrey Alexandrescu

  “No one really pays attention to the CiTR booth”, a friend told me as I unfolded the table I’d be stationed at, giving away magazines and trying to sell t-shirts for Discorder’s Fit To Print art show. Thankfully, this meant I had plenty of time to check out the collection of Discorder contributors’ illustrations and photography collected at the Interurban Gallery. The art adorned a small stretch of real estate in the otherwise empty spot, but early birds made the space feel as alive and vibrant as much of the artwork did with pastel colours and collage layouts.

  Kellarissa started the musical portion of the evening right on time, just as the flux of Friday night hipsters reached its peak. Though alone on a big stage, Larissa Loyva did her best to fill the tremendous space with lucid synths and airy, transient vocals. Her performance, however, was washed out and lacked definition – each track’s steady tempo and unchanging tone melded into the next. I kept myself busy selling records (I’d somehow taken on full merch responsibilities by this point), but every time I tried to be overwhelmed by Loyva’s far-reaching and harmonic voice, I got the feeling of deja vu instead.

  Shimmering Stars played an equally passable but no more extraordinary set. Jangly surf guitars lent themselves well to what was definitely a dream-pop ensemble, but it was hard to get beyond their innocent ‘50s doo-wop sound and into something more interesting. Lyrics occasionally hinted at a darker and more cynical bent to their shiny tunes, but it never really expanded into something I could grasp onto.

  The Lost Lovers Brigade were the most dynamic band of the evening, with a full-band (including Kellarissa’s Loyva back on keys) really making the most of the big stage inside Interurban. Singer Elisha Rembold knows how to write a good pop song, and, with a talented group of musicians at her side, she did her best to keep the crowd guessing who she’d worshiped on her Walkman growing up. While many songs played out with a distinctly country-esque twang, a few whispery tracks conjured up old R&B and put Rembold to work on serious, dang-that-girl-can-sing vocal duty. An endearing a capella encore won the crowd over, but I scrambled to pack up my gear before the DJ sets started.

Sex Church—Growing Over

Sex Church is a ridiculous name for a band. Growing Over is ridiculous too, but in the way that a surreal psychedelic drug trip on familiar beaches might be. Each track, wallowing in lo-fi reverb, comes off like a disillusioned smirk, depressed and harsh and dissonant.
This is definitely a garage record, and it’s almost impossible to make out any coherent lyrics underneath guitar tracks thick with sloshing echo and violent tremolo bends—not that it’s necessary to hear the words clearly to understand their gist, particularly evident on “Waking Up”, where the vocal breakup alone paints a picture of a grimy youth kicking dust against the wall, waiting for the firing squad to show up.
As a package, Growing Over suffers from the inclusion of the instrumental tracks “Put Away”, “Always Home” and “Colour Out Of Space”. The former two bookend the album in boring, washy fade-outs while the latter is a throwaway noise recording of heavy echoes and brass instruments that doesn’t really endear itself to the black humour that makes the rest of the album so enjoyable.
Dilapidated and miserable, Sex Church run wild with surf beats, Brit-punk clamour and Velvet Underground dissonance to create something every bit as ridiculous as their nom de plume, but in a bummed-out and bleak way. Like the beach on a stoned, rainy winter day, everything is a little sludgy and muddled, but sometimes that’s a great thing.

Blackout Beach w/Fine Mist, The Ruffled Feathers, & Alicia Tobin @ The Anza Club

I wasn’t really sure what to expect out of Megaphone’s third annual Night of Joyful Voices—a mixed line-up of music and comedy whose purpose was to recognize the work of the publication’s vendor program—but I wasn’t about to miss out on Blackout Beach, so I bundled up tight on a crisp December evening and headed down to the Anza Club to take it all in.

  When Alicia Tobin first took the stage, no one really knew how to react. It was still early in the evening, but it took three or four minutes for it to sink in – “oh, this is a comedy routine!” Tobin delivered plenty of holiday-related wisecracks but she was funniest when digging into the crowd, singling out those closest to the stage for some mud-slinging.

  I’d heard a great deal about the Ruffled Feathers from a friend of mine who described them as “dance music,” so I was pleasantly surprised when a quintet walked on stage behind nearly twice as many instruments—among them a ukelele, a mandolin, and a trumpet—and went wild playing extremely cute but nonetheless evocative music. You could get away with calling the Ruffled Feathers chamber pop if you really wanted to, but to do so would discredit how well thought-out their set turned out to be. Those in the crowd not dancing were observed to be tapping their feet and transfixed on the youthful musicians, who blended Broken Social Scene and Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros into something warm and magical.

  After the Ruffled Feathers I was in a good mood to have my expectations blown away, so I was prepared to give Fine Mist the benefit of the doubt. Unfortunately, armed with nothing but a keyboard, a drum machine and two space-echo-drenched microphones, the duo took that benefit and drove it into the ground. Between their tired synthetic dance beats and uninspired vocal pair-offs, they just didn’t look interested doing what they were doing. Megan McDonald has a great voice and on a few tracks she was a pleasure to listen to, but for the most part Fine Mist lacked soul, spirit, and prowess.

  Blackout Beach blew me away with their ferocious, unholy energy. I make coffee for frontman Carey Mercer: he comes into my café a few times a week, usually with his young son. He is quiet, friendly and patient, and to see this contrasted with the musician’s on-stage persona, not to mention the epic lyrics of the recent Fuck Death LP, was a staggering and patently invigorating process. Each new song drew Mercer further and further away from the realm of normal human beings. Like a bard being burnt at the stake for heresy, Mercer is all high poetry and strangled shrieking, and to see his tunes backed by a group of sane musicians made for an interesting juxtaposition.

  Blackout Beach were a much different experience live than I was expecting, with a fairly traditional guitar/bass/synth/drum lineup standing in for the experimental waves of monophonic synthesizers that Fuck Death toys with, but the instrumental differences didn’t hinder the band from playing intense, literary songs about cowardice and war like “Beautiful Burning Desire” and “Be Forewarned, The Night Has Come”. Observing Mercer rip into his 12-string Stratocaster like it was the spirit of hate and vengeance was a sight to see.