CHARTattack:Features Feed

The Grist 13 And Shitty 7 — July 2009

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 13:11:03 -0500

The Grist 13

1. "Ridiculous"
Insult of the month. And you're thinking, "There are worse things someone can call you," right? Wrong.

2. G.I. Joe: The Rise Of Cobra
Transformers are bullshit.

3. Cutebreak's YouTube Channel
An oasis of aaaawww in a desert of shit. Highly recommended: "baby beaver loves a good scratch" and "kitty plays with a theremin." Here is the latter:

4. Barbecues
Grilling food and getting so drunk you fall out of lawn chairs is awesome.

5. The Feeling Of New Socks
It's like a dozen kittens lovingly nuzzling up against your toes.

6. Kettle Chips
These are potato chip artisans who deserve our support.

7. Texts From Last Night
You have to sift a bit to find the quality one-liners, but it's still worth the time.

8. Sesame Street Slayer
It's exactly what it sounds like.

9. Adidas Flagship Store 50 Per Cent Off Sales
Score!

10. Lady GaGa
We don't care about her music or her fashion, but when she tells kids they should learn about Kate Bush it makes us think she's secretly on our side.

11. The Brick Testament
The Bible... in Lego form. We respect the retarded effort that went into this.

12. The Newer, Tougher Maple Leafs
They're still gonna suck, but at least they won't lose a fight this year.

13. All Night MJ Dance Parties
The King (Of Pop) is dead. Children are safe. Now, let's dance.

The Shitty 7

1. Hipster Appropriation Of The Three Wolf Moon T-Shirt
Fuck you, you ironic little fucking fuck bags. You've destroyed the magic power of this image and nobody will be able to wear one of these around town without people thinking, "Hey, X over there is a real super-douche in that shirt." P.S. Read the customer reviews.

2. Garbage Strikes
I don't know who deserves more blame — the unions or the politicians — but both deserve some sort of punishment that involves frolicking naked on festering mounds of dirty diapers.

3. Having A Mysterious Deadly Cough
Worse, the doctor says it's "possible" that it's swine flu because "it's everywhere now" but it's not severe enough to test for and what you really should do is take a day off.

4. Sunburns
Not only are they painful, but all your "friends" slapping you on the back is cause for a knife fight.

5. When There's No "Get CD Track Names" Information In iTunes For A CD You're Importing
Usually, it makes us just pull the CD out and wait a week to try again. Laziness rules.

6. Plaid
Hands up if you're a lumberjack? No? Then stop WEARING FUCKING PLAID!

7. Lack Of Sleep
It makes you so irritable that you want to punch puppies.

Breakout 2007: Kill The Lights

Caitlin Hotchkiss — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 13:04:15 -0500

Hometown: Toronto, Ontario
Official Site: www.killthelights.ca

Sound:
You know that post-rock, melodic-guitars-and-aching-vocals style that was seemingly bred somewhere in England and for which hipster critics like to describe with adjectives like "angular" and "frantic?" That.

Why?
When presented with the very MuchMusic-esque question of "What makes you guys cool?" Kill The Lights' affable drummer Yann Geoffroy takes a minute to think — and chuckle — before answering on behalf of the quintet.

"Well, first of all, we are really nice people. Plus we're relatively good-looking, and that's basically what you need for a band, right?"

OK, seriously now. "We take pride in being good musicians, and we're always striving for a beautiful melody in a song that invokes a feeling. We don't write songs about how George Bush invaded Iraq or something like that. We write songs about feelings, and so our music comes from an honest place. For that reason, people will dig it."

And it looks like Kill The Lights will have a solid chance to get their music out to the people, as their first official debut album, Buffalo Of Love, gets a Feb. 27 release through MapleMusic. Longtime fans who already have a copy of their indie EP, Winter Asthmatics, may find the latest release the same, yet better. Half of the tracks, including "Skinny White Girls" and "Orestes," are retooled from their original release.

"When we signed with Maple," Geoffroy explains, "they were like, ‘Here's some money, let's do a really good job with this album.' We used a lot of the bed tracks, but we went back into the studio and did a lot of work on the songs, and now they sound way better. We added a lot more keyboards and vocals and harmonies and overdubs and whatever you could think of. Lots of noise. We're big noise fans."

However, in terms of pinning down an actual sound for the band, "we definitely don't want to be pigeonholed," Geoffroy quickly states.

"Just through the writing processes in the few years we've been together, our style has definitely changed greatly. It's very vast, and we're all over the place. I don't want that to be a bad thing, but y'know, I think we can be all over the place and still retain our style — which is inevitable, because we do have these vocals that are very characteristic, plus the way that we play together and the tones that we go for are very identifiable. But in terms of a definite style, I think that we're gonna be very broad."

The Cliks Brush Off The Dirt

Kate Harper — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 11:27:42 -0500

Success is often unexpected, and it can sometimes catch bands off guard. Adjusting to the somewhat artificial environment that's created by being on tour can be tough, which The Cliks found out when touring behind 2007's Snakehouse.

Singer/guitarist Lucas Silveira talked to CHARTattack about how these experiences made their way on to The Cliks' new album, Dirty King, and what he's learned from them.

CHARTattack: What influenced Dirty King, and are there any common themes running through it?
Lucas Silveira: The writing process was a kind of a little bit different than anything I've ever done.

You know, they have this saying in the music industry, which is you have your entire life to write your first album and six months to write your next one, and it didn't feel like I had six months to write this one. It felt like I had two.

So it was a little scary, to tell you the truth, because I'd been on the road for so long, I wasn't used to being on the road and I started figuring out that people don't write on the road and if they do, it's very, very random.

So it was a little strange because I felt like I was being really, really rushed through, sort of, like, emotions, and the only emotions that I'd been really hitting had been about the confusion of being on the road, and I think that that was and is a running theme in the album.

Then when we got asked to go to Weed, California to go and record the album, and there is where I think I really sat down and for the first time I had two weeks to sort of do pre-production and do some writing and it was there that it all sort of came together.

We had, probably, I don't know, I think 14 songs when we went there, and I think of those 14 songs, probably about five of them made it on the album and I wrote about nine songs in two weeks, which is something that I've never, ever done.

Sylvia Massy, who produced the album, she had this way of just sort of making you feel really free and open. This town Weed was so small. There was nothing going on around there, and I think it was what I needed, was just to absolutely be away from everything — from the city, from noise, from checking my email every five minutes to see if I was on tour tomorrow, you know?

I think the theme for the album is, it's sort of about this confusion of... sort of with the duality that I experienced, and I think our band experienced as well when we first hit the road. We sort of hit the road with our feet first and just started running. It wasn't like it was slowly — it was just, like, boom!

What happens when you're on the road is you're in this world of — it's not really real. It's a very surreal world and you're meeting fans and you're playing every night and you're always rushing, and there's really no time to sort of catch up with the emotions that go along with that, and I think what happens is when you come home for really short periods of time, is your body needs to catch up to rest, and your mind needs to catch up to what just happened. But by the time you're almost starting to do that, you're back on the road.

So it makes you feel really fucked up and it makes you sort of feel like you don't know what's going on around you, so there was a lot of confusion, and I think in that confusion came a lot of distrust and there came a lot of not understanding what was going on in myself and what was going on with people around me.

So it sort of creates paranoia, and for some reason, as well, there's the running theme of just losing your trust in your friendships and the people around you because you just don't know why they're there anymore. There's all kinds of stuff. Every time I do interviews I feel like I'm doing, like, a therapy session.

Musically, how would you say it's different?
This album has a lot of songs on it that I thought weren't quite, you know, Cliks songs. I had in my head this idea of, "I'm a songwriter, so I write all kinds of songs." I write anything from soul to classical to, you know, whatever.

I always thought the Cliks is a brand, so I have to sort of write this particular kind of music, or when I write, I have to pick through them to find the songs that I think will fit the band.

Sylvia made me see that it's not the songs that you write for The Cliks that are Cliks songs. It's the songs that you write that are Cliks songs. It's how we make them. On this album, there's a song that's sort of very waltzy, it's a bit of a Beatles throwback, there's a lot of string arrangements in it.

Morgan's drumming is — I can't even explain to you how well her drumming came out. It's probably my favourite thing on the entire album. There's a little bit more of a soulful angle to it as well with some songs.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that from song to song to song there's a different element of, like, genre almost. So it kind of takes you along a little bit more of a trip than Snakehouse. Snakehouse had sort of like a feel throughout the entire album that was very cohesive and maintained. I'm not trying to say that this album isn't cohesive. It's cohesive in a very different way.

What would you say you learned last time on the road that will help you this time?
Number one, no drinking. Bad, bad combination. Touring and drinking are a really bad thing. For me, anyway, and for most people, but they just don't want to admit it. Get as much sleep as possible, and leave the road on the road.

You have to learn to separate that life from this life, and you have to give yourself a transitional period, even if it's just, you know, like asking a friend at home for one or two days of just literally getting home and doing nothing but sleeping because that really, really helps, and then just slowly coming into your life and being very normal when you get home.

This is a skill that, you know, me and the band are still working on, but we're really, really trying to get a hold of. It's really hard to come back from such high energy to feeling quote unquote normal or sitting down and watching T.V. and drinking wine, like in a mellow environment. That seems so out of context, and so you have to do normal things, like do your laundry, wash the dishes, vacuum a bit. Being normal, which I love. I love being normal.

Breakout 2007: Die Mannequin

Caitlin Hotchkiss — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 11:23:02 -0500

Sound:
Like Iggy Pop and Brody Dalle going on a raging punk-rock bender together before having a knife fight in a dirty Los Angeles alleyway. With Chrissie Hynde refereeing.

Why?
They may seem to be few and far between, but pretty much any music fan can name a band whose live show has made them want to scream out loud, punch their fists in the air, rush the stage and set shit on fire. For many people in 2007, that band will be Toronto's Die Mannequin.

"Messy and scrappy, but then gluing it all together," is how Care Failure describes her band and their thrash-worthy music. The frontwoman of the trio continues, "I think it's kind of refreshing that there's bands like ours and others where you don't have to make up stories or an image. It'd leave less work for labels, but they don't wanna work with fucking bands like that. Everyone won't touch that shit with a 95-foot pole."

Yet, as a band to work with, Die Mannequin are hardly enfants terrible. When it comes to their music and live shows, they're passionate, dedicated workaholics whose persistence at home and touring cross-country is starting to pay off with bigger gigs and more notoriety. This is something like a double-edged sword, however, because with more renown comes more exposure, not to mention "people calling and claiming to be my long-lost Russian cousin and stuff," Failure laughs.

"I do watch everyone with a guarded eye now," the guitarist admits. "I mean, I already have a reputation for having done a lot of drugs and stuff, and then there's the music rep and all that. Some people are really amazing and just genuinely nice — and I'm not used to people being nice to me — but y'know, if anyone talked to me before all this, they'd know that I'm still the same person."

And the ability to kick ass onstage is hardly something Die Mannequin would lose thanks to a little extra fame. With ragged songs "Autumn Cannibalist" and "Fatherpunk" from their brutally awesome How To Kill EP, combined with the chaos of their live show ("There's no personal concern for myself onstage," Failure says blithely), Die Mannequin have already more than proven themselves to their homeland. The rest of the world is next.

This feature is from the February 2007 issue of Chart Magazine. To purchase the issue, go to the Chart Shop.

The Juan MacLean Leave The Musician's Underground Railroad Behind

Phil Villeneuve — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 11:12:47 -0500

The Juan Maclean are on tour across North America in a big van.

John MacLean, the band's mastermind, had a few minutes to chat with CHARTattack about his futuristic influences, blurring the lines between fiction and reality, his Canadian roots and slightly illegal trips across our border.

CHARTattack: A lot of the press photos and album art for The Future Will Come are dark, sterile and futuristic, but the record itself is pretty warm and inviting. How did those concepts meet up?
John MacLean: I think that had more to do with the lyrical tone of the album.

I've also always had a futuristic feel to what I've done, so Nancy [Whang] and I actually compiled a mood board, which was a collection images. So, stills from movies, photos and compiled them to establish a mood or tone for the artwork and visuals.

What mainly came out it was stuff from Blade Runner, Logan's Run, THX-1138, which is the first George Lucas film and also 2001: A Space Odyssey. Those were the big ones and the themes that emerged were a lot of white, bleakness and seeming futuristic without the inclusion of things like spaceships or robots or something.

So with these pictures, is this a future you'd like to see? Or is this what you predict?
It's just simply cumulative influence of things that I grew up with and still seem to be in touch with. Everything from the authors Philip K. Dick to William Gibson to the movies that I mentioned to music that was made mainly in the '80s that was meant to sound futuristic — like Kraftwerk or Gary Numan. So you throw all those things together and you end up where I'm at.

Have you ever considered comedy? Your blog is pretty hilarious.
It's funny, a couple of years ago I was approached by an agent and then a publisher wanting to know if I was interested in compiling them somehow and publishing them. I kind of decided it needed to wait, so I had a lot more time to devote to it. But I think I always envisioned a sort of novel.

I was blown out of the water by the James Frey book, A Million Little Pieces. I always wanted to do a memoir that was half fiction, half non-fiction, blurring the lines between the two. But since then, people have inadvertently done that and gotten in trouble. I'll just wait 'til the dust settles a bit, because I love writing that stuff and people seem to react to it really well, sometimes more than the music.

And you often speak of Canada in your blog.
Yeah, "Canadia" I like to call it. I have a lifelong history with Canada. My father is Canadian. He grew up in Sydney, Nova Scotia and I've toured Canada so much in my music career and always have a good time there.

How did your parents meet?
I actually don't know. My father ran away from home when he was like 17 or something to Boston and who knows? I grew up in Boston, conceived at the drive-in apparently.

Speaking of Canada, they're letting you back in now after years of visa rejections, right?
Yeah, now they decided to let me in and I get proper visas and everything. I have no problem getting in now, but cross my fingers, you never know when they're gonna pull the plug on it.

I shouldn't say this, but we had to be a little creative with our entry into Canada for a while and we had to cancel shows at first because they just wouldn't let me in, but now everything's good.

It makes you wonder if there's like an underground railroad for artists to get into Canada sometimes.
I know! That's what it seems like. There should be, I guess.

Do you find when you're DJing and when you're performing as Juan the musician that you're a different person?
Oh, for sure! DJing is such a solitary exercise and a solitary life. You're travelling alone, you're DJing by yourself ... when we're in tour mode with the band, you're travelling in this little bubble of people, there's a lot more persona involved, you have to become something that's a little more larger than life and interesting to other people.

I think we're all very concerned with being entertaining. Especially attempting to play electronic music live, so much of the time it seems people just get up there with a lap top and stand there and it's very boring and we're all really concerned with the notion of putting on a really engaging live show that's really exciting.

I've read that one day you think the Juan MacLean will only write three minutes pop songs. Is that still true today?
I dunno. I say things like that and then I change my mind. Lately I think to myself, "No, I wanna write 'Happy House' over and over again 'cause that's my favourite song. I want to write 12 minute epic dance tracks." Honestly, I'll probably always split the difference.

Breakout 2007: Attack In Black

Stephanie Joudrey — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 11:07:58 -0500

Hometown: Welland, Ontario
Official Site: www.myspace.com/attackinblack

Sound:
A dizzy mix of alt.country and punk that compares favourably to the workmanlike vibe of the Constantines.

Why?
As the newest band on Dine Alone Records, Attack In Black will no doubt benefit from their close association with Alexisonfire, Cancer Bats and related members of the record company's family.

In sound, though, they're not all that similar to their screaming friends. Guitarist Spencer Burton, bassist Ian Kehoe, singer-guitarist Daniel Romano and drummer Ian Romano may share the same punky spirit as their cousin bands, but their music is all their own.

"We don't sound like NOFX, but we are still a punk band," says Burton. "It's just how we grew up. We grew up listening to punk rock music. Whatever we do is going to be punk rock, because that's just who we are."

With their Widows debut EP getting great reviews, the band are excited for 2007 when Marriage, their first full-length, comes out along with an acoustic seven-inch single. It'll be a busy time for Attack In Black, so it's a good thing they enjoy the work.

"Honestly, this band and the music we make is my favourite band in the world," says Kehoe. "I think if every band in the world could think the way this band thinks, then music would be what it should be, instead of what it is. Instead of just giving people what they want, if people did what they wanted and believed in it 100 per cent and really, really intensely made it the most beautiful thing in the world, then it would make everything a little bit better."

This feature is from the February 2007 issue of Chart Magazine. To purchase the issue, go to the Chart Shop.

Interpol Explain Our Love To Admire Track By Track

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 10:49:33 -0500

Daniel Kessler and Carlos D. explain all the songs on Interpol's Our Love To Admire album...

Daniel Kessler
"Pioneer To The Falls"
It's a pretty complicated song, but it came out pretty naturally. I wrote the main guitar bit at home and then the band wrote everything else around it. We wrote keys as a prominent member of the band, so with that in mind, while we were writing "Pioneer," keyboards played a great role in the genesis of the song.

"No I In Threesome"
"No I In Threesome" is a bit more of a classic tune. It's definitely got a verse-chorus-verse-chorus kind of feel. But the atmosphere we had around it gave it sort of a different vibe to the chord progression.

"The Scale"
There's a really slow groove to the whole thing, and it's a really non-traditional song where it kind of stays on the same keel and then changes keys three-quarters of the way through. There's a really ambitious breakdown. I don't know if we pulled it all off, and in fact, we made that song one way and then went back and remixed it.

"The Heinrich Maneuver"
I believe that's the first song we wrote for the record. I remember Sam and I jamming that song before we started writing the others and it felt pretty good just bouncing around. It's definitely one of the songs that when we play live has the most energy. You can really just feel Interpol charging forward.

"Mammoth"
"Mammoth" is a very definitive song for the record. I think Paul sang the best he ever has on this record. He does a falsetto on this song and I think it fits very naturally. That was one of the songs that you're writing, and you have disagreements and treaties and amnesties and so forth. At a certain point you're like, "I'm committed to this, but I don't know what it is." And then you look back and you go, "That song's pretty good." Those are the best kinds of songs.

"Pace Is The Trick"
Paul's right at the front of the track. I think with a lot of the songs he sounds different from track to track. That one, as much as it doesn't seem like it would be too complicated and I had the progressions done for a while, it took us to some spots where we were like, "Uh, how are we gonna get out of this?" This song definitely had a lot of "do we really need this or that?" and those are important conversations to have. When you get out of those conundrums, you feel very validated.

Carlos D.
"All Fired Up"
It's a song that had been on the back burner for a long time because it was like a different aesthetic right off the bat. There was Daniel's rockabilly-ish kind of riff, and we always wondered how we were going to Interpol-ize this thing. It was quite a challenge for us. We waited a long time and then finally it clicked one day and became what it is now. It's weird.

"Rest My Chemistry"
That song kind of wrote itself. Some songs are stubborn. Others kind of go with the flow. That one really went with the flow. It's a pretty straightforward song, wears its heart on its sleeve.

"Who Do You Think"
Paul and I had a long debate about that one. The guitar riff itself served as the genesis of the song. Because of the way Daniel plays it, it's not exactly obvious right away that the riff begins at a certain point. So there was contention among the band members as to what the actual nature of this guitar riff was, and it took
a long time to resolve this.

"Wrecking Ball"
It has kind of a Brian Eno vibe to it. And then at the end it shifts into this orchestral, symphonic thing. It's quite an immediate song because the verse vocal melody is very visceral. But then the rest of it is way out there.

"The Lighthouse"
We knew from the moment Daniel brought that riff in that this song was going to be a different beast from anything we've done before. So that in particular was a challenge. I mean, the rockabilly thing was a challenge, but at least we knew there was going to be drums and bass. But with this one we were like, all bets are off. We were very happy with the outcome.

The following feature is from the July 2007 issue of Chart Magazine. You can purchase the issue at the Chart Shop.

The Future Of Voivod

Keith Carman — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 10:21:14 -0500

Infini is the name of the progressive metal outfit/Jonquière, Que. natives Voivod's latest — and possibly last — full-length album. The affair is culled from tracks founding member Denis "Piggy" D'Amour left on his computer before he passed away in 2005.

Bassists Jean-Yves "Blacky" Thériault and Jason "Jasonic" Newsted, drummer Michel "Away" Langevin combed through this material with vocalist Denis "Snake" Belanger and able to craft 13 songs to finalize both D'Amour and Voivod's legacies.

Langevin discussed this emotional foray into what could be the end of an era.

CHARTattack: How difficult was this undertaking?
Michel "Away" Langevin: It had the same difficulties as [2006's] Katorz, in that we had to re-record our respective tracks over the guitars. It's very difficult to be tight. We also did it in different studios so it's hard to make it sound like a band in one room.

It seems as if D'Amour left you a gift, having recorded perfect guitar tracks before he passed away. It's like he wanted to ensure Voivod continued.
It made us think he knew something was wrong inside so he rushed to get things done professionally. What really impresses me is that he also wrote two albums of material himself with guitars and bass. One day, Snake and I would love to finish it, but it won't be Voivod at all. There were 25 electric songs and five acoustic songs meant to be solo albums. He even put some drum and vocal ideas there. The music is really impressive.

It's like you get to help him finish his solo material like he helped you with Voivod.
Snake convinced me to keep working on this stuff. After the release of Katorz, we took a couple of years off. I thought Voivod would be forgotten, but it went the other way.

Over the past few years, there have been more offers to play and pressure from fans to get into the studio and finish Infini. Snake finally said if we don't go on stage or in the studio, the music will rot and die. Better to make it live again, which convinced me to get back into the action. I had been concentrating on my art with a gallery and commissioned art. I finally thought Snake was right.

What's the situation with members? You've got Blacky and Jasonic on bass and now Dan Mongrain on guitars. It's kind of messy since Blacky's playing live, but Jasonic is on the disc...
[A few years ago], Jason couldn't make it to a show, so I asked if he minded if we had Blacky come back out. He was entirely behind it.

As for Dan, we've known him and his band Martyr for a while around the Montreal scene. He's sort of a student of Piggy — not that he was taught by him, but Dan learned to play listening to Piggy.

Our main fear was that people might find it sacrilege to go on without Piggy, but the reaction was great.

It seems as though Voivod are experiencing a resurgence, especially after the lean years earlier in the decade when Eric Forrest was playing bass/singing.
There were quite a few periods where we were so underground, it was pathetic. It's a period where the albums were unknown, but the live show was fantastic.

Around 2002, Jason brought things back for us. It was another period where Piggy and I had split the band because of too much obscurity. We didn't think we'd do anything again.

Eventually, we wanted to get back to doing music so we called Snake and he was into it. Since we'd been jamming with Jason or a studio project, we asked him if he'd be into doing the bass tracks for us. We never thought he'd eventually join the band.

So what does the future hold for Voivod now that you've tapped Piggy's vault? Will Dan take over his role now?
Voivod is strange. I've learned to take it day by day.

Piggy's departure has brought all of the Voivod members closer, like Blacky, Jason and Eric. All the little grudges suddenly seemed stupid when Piggy took ill. Now it's like a family; a collective.

I really dream that down the line we could write an album with Dan and have everyone involved. That'd be great, but it's just a dream.

I realize now that Voivod is pretty established and it'd be great for the people who like our music that we keep working on the project. I'll try to do so. We want to play live as much as we can for the next few years, but I'd also love to finish Piggy's two solo albums with Snake, write with Dan eventually, and see what comes up.

Breakout 2007: Tele

Jen Zoratti — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 10:07:19 -0500

Hometown: Winnipeg, MB
Official site: www.myspace/tele

Sound:
An epic fusion of ethereal keyboards and yearning vocals, Tele are a band best heard loud. Echoing British acts such as Radiohead, the electro-rock quartet makes despondency oh-so-listenable. Note to the kids in white belts: this is what emotional music is supposed to sound like.

Why?
The eardrum-shattering quartet from the ‘Peg have racked up quite a rep as being one of the city's most killer live acts. But when you have such a powerhouse live show, you can expect that people will want to take a slice of it home with them — and will be on your ass about it.

That's precisely why Matt Worobec, Zack Antel, Brendan Berg and Derek Allard will be spending the next few months in the studio working on the quartet's debut record. After getting some attention from Muse producer David Bottrill with an early demo, the band have solicited the Grammy-winning music maven to work with them on the forthcoming record.

"We're excited to release a piece, a cohesive unit that we can show to people and say, ‘Here. This is Tele,'" Worobec says.

So far, the Tele that scenesters know is the stage incarnation. But for a virtually live-only band, the four-piece have done quite well scoring a secure following. Demo versions of "Choose" and "Lullaby" have become playlist regulars on 92.9 Kick FM and Hot 103 in Winnipeg, the Edge 102.1 in Toronto and XM Satellite Radio. They've been showcase favourites and had their praises inked in music mags all over the nation. Hell, labels have even flown people out to Winnipeg to catch Tele shows.

Needless to say, this brand of hyper-exposure has created some high expectations for the record, which is slated to come out in the spring.

"We like pressure," Worobec insists. "It gives you something to strive towards. Even the pressure from the press is good because they care enough to talk about you. It just keeps us working harder."

If Tele's work ethic is any indication, this album will be hotter than hell.

This feature is from the February 2007 issue of Chart Magazine. To purchase the issue, go to the Chart Shop.

The Shins Turn On The Night

Noah Love — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 12:47:18 -0500

Indie rock's most unlikely stars delay inevitable success

The Shins' third full-length, Wincing The Night Away, wasn't supposed to come out more than three years after Chutes Too Narrow. If everything had gone according to plan, the new LP would have seen the light of day as early as late 2005, and no later than the summer of 2006. But then Garden State happened. When Natalie Portman told Zach Braff The Shins were the band that would change his life, the lives that truly changed were those of James Mercer, Dave Hernandez, Marty Crandall and Jesse Sandoval, New Mexico's new favourite sons.

"We toured for Chutes Too Narrow for two years, and that was just off and on touring, one month on and one month off," Mercer recalls. "So then Garden State came out and suddenly we had to tour again for the first record again, and we had bigger shows, so it was kind of more enticing. And you want to win the bread and all that stuff, so finally we were like, 'We've gotta write another goddamn record.'"

But for The Shins, and for the perfectionist Mercer, that wasn't a cut-and-dry proposition. Deadlines were set and then missed, all in the name of getting it right. Of course, it's probably a little tough to swallow if you're Sub Pop and your biggest moneymaker, whom your entire release schedule hinges on, alters the way you're prepared to conduct business for a given six-month period.

"I think it was my inability to estimate how long it will take me to do this stuff,"
Mercer explains. "When Sub Pop calls me up and says, 'So OK, how far along on the record are you?' And I'm just sitting there trying to guess how much more time it'll take me. I think I was just always underestimating. I just kept putting tentative dates up and saying, 'Man, I'm not even close to done.' "When you start getting asked, 'Can you have it in three months?' and you think, well, three months, that's a long time, some bands will do a whole record in two weeks.' And I'm like, 'Yeah, shit, I can do it in three months.' Then I'm lost," he laughs.

Deadlines aside, Mercer's obsession with lyrics also dragged the process a bit. The one thing that has remained consistent with The Shins since the beginning has been the singer's ability to craft words that are sincere, poetic and, most importantly, unembarrassing. They're unique in that they're memorable, yet they never detract from the melody or structure of the songs.

"I think I try to avoid clichés, that's one of the things I try to do," he says. "I don't think I always succeed, but I try hard at that. Sometimes you hear lyrics and you think, 'Ah shit, that's a little too much information,' or just something will be kind of embarrassing to listen to and I guess maybe sometimes I can feel when I'm writing and I just change it if I'm getting that feeling. There's a lot of drafts going on with my lyrics."

The real challenge for The Shins with Wincing The Night Away, however, will be maintaining their popularity while moving past the ubiquity of Garden State. Whether fans who picked up Oh, Inverted World will make the quantum leap to the more electronic sounds of the new LP remains to be seen. One thing is certain, though: Mercer doesn't regret the infamous movie moment for an instant.

"I am very happy about what it's done for my career," he stresses. "I don't pretend to be unhappy about success or something. It's good. I think it's what everyone is trying to have happen." Although, he admits with a chuckle, "it's maybe cheat-ing or something to have a big movie come out and say that you're a great band
or something."

bonus sidebar
Towing The Line

Wincing The Night Away has more electronic sounds than its predecessors, which Mercer says came from working on a soundtrack for a documentary.

"Matt McCormick did a documentary about tugboats called Towlines and I did the soundtrack for it, and I ended up using sequencing software and stuff like that for it, and I just really enjoyed it. It's part of the vernacular now, you know. I mean it's this whole electronica thing, and it's on a lot of the records that I listen to, so it would kind of naturally end up on something."

This feature is from the February 2007 issue of Chart Magazine. To purchase the issue, go to the Chart Shop.

Sunset Rubdown Ditch The Studio Magic

Scott Bryson — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 13:48:33 -0500

Sunset Rubdown and Handsome Furs are both technically bands, but they've also acted as vehicles through which Wolf Parade collaborators Spencer Krug and Dan Boeckner have traded album-by-album blows since 2006.

With that in mind, it's hard not to envision Sunset Rubdown's latest record, Dragonslayer, as a well-timed counterpunch to the Handsome Furs' Face Control.

CHARTattack got the scoop on Dragonslayer's genesis from keyboardist/percussionist/vocalist Camilla Wynne Ingr while she jarred her homemade marmalade.

CHARTattack: Marmalade?
Camilla Wynne Ingr: It's a fledgling business... in case the band doesn't work out.

Let's talk about Dragonslayer. How long had you been working on this album before it could be officially declared finished?
As far as writing the songs was concerned, that happened pretty organically. I'd say it happened over a period of about a year.

We did a three week tour that ended in Chicago — it was basically three weeks of paid practice — and we spent a week there, doing the recording. We mixed over maybe four days, here in Montreal, in January.

Was Dragonslayer as the title a group decision?
I don't know... I think we generally leave the naming of the songs and album titles to Spencer. He controls the lyric writing.

Was the recording process any different than it was for Random Spirit Lover?
It was almost all recorded live off the floor. We toured it into the recording, so we'd be really tight playing it together live. It didn't totally work out that way — a couple of things ended up getting tracked individually — but for the most part, that's Spencer's live vocals. It's a little stressful to record that way, but it's fun, too.

Both albums before, there had been a lot of building up stuff in the studio — a lot of studio magic, if you will. This time we just wanted to represent our live show.

One of the album's songs, "Paper Lace," was taken from the latest Swan Lake album, right?
We added a couple of new instruments but it doesn't depart much from the original. It's the same chord structure and lyrics but the instrumentation is different.

I noticed a theme in the words that were used to describe this album in the press release. It was called "screwy pop-rock," a "skewed approach to pop" and the word "crazy" was tossed about a couple of times. Do the five of you view your music as screwy or crazy?
I guess that's apt... I think we were going for a bit more of a poppy record this time — eight straight-up songs. We never totally succeeded at being straightforward, I think.

How so? Because of direction changes... or song length?
Definitely length. You don't see a lot of 10-minute singles out there. I think our songs average around six minutes. And our instrumentation — it's a little different than the standard drum, guitar and bass. And Spencer also writes some pretty sophisticated chord progressions that are sometimes daunting to learn. It's not just chorus, verse, chorus, bridge.

Breakout 2007: Lions In The Street

Brian Pascual — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 13:26:54 -0500

Hometown: Vancouver, British Columbia

Sound:
If the Glimmer Twins left the Stones' Some Girls sessions to join the Allman Brothers in the studio to record the soundtrack to Almost Famous.

Why?
Lions In The Street really are Vancouver's best-kept secret. When it comes to Canada, at least. While the four-piece rock combo haven't toured anywhere in Canada outside of B.C. yet, they've been making fans south of the 49th for the past few years, playing New York, Chicago, Texas and California.

"The U.S. has been great to us," says Chris, the band's single-named vocalist/guitarist. "It's a place where we've had nice, warm receptions everywhere we've gone. We had some good blog coverage, too, which has definitely enabled us to tour there."

American interest surrounding the Lions started to bubble sometime in 2004, resulting in their signing with a major label. The band were sent to Los Angeles to record their debut full-length with such heady names as Todd Rundgren and Gilby Clarke being thrown around as potential producers. It was almost too perfect. Things would inevitably go sour, forcing the Lions to make the decision to extricate themselves from their record deal.

"You get caught in competing interests and different perspectives and the band always loses," says Chris. "The music business is so much about ego and so little about music. People fight, the band gets caught in the middle and you end up losing. So we took things into our own hands and got a lawyer and split."

Going from a luxurious, fully loaded Los Angeles studio to a damp, Vancouver basement with an 8-track, the boys recorded and self-released their Cat Got Your Tongue EP (available as a free download on their website) in 2006. After their disastrous first taste of major label life, they're refocused on building their name from the ground up, relying heavily on the internet community, satellite radio and good ol' fashioned word-of-mouth hype. Expect them to bring their ass-shaking, rhythm and blues-inflected rock 'n' roll across Canada sometime in '07. Then we can rightfully claim these Lions as our own.

Official Site: www.lionsinthestreet.com

This feature is from the February 2007 issue of Chart Magazine. To purchase the issue, go to the Chart Shop.

This Interview Is Broken

Matt Littlefair — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 09:14:26 -0500

Music biographies are usually a post-mortem exercise — either the band has ceased to exist or they've ceased to exist in the world of creative relevance (like The Rolling Stones, U2 or the Backstreet Boys).

So when news emerged of a book chronicling the inception and growth of Broken Social Scene, a lot of people asked if this signaled the demise of a truly groundbreaking musical act and Toronto institution. They've been prone to declaring their obsolescence on more than one occasion, so it seemed plausible.

Fear not. As Stuart Berman, the author of This Book Is Broken, says, the band are in fact a "going concern," which means we thankfully haven't heard the end of Broken Social Scene just yet.

Berman, a long-time friend of the band, took what seemed like a daunting task — wrangling a group whose membership is, we'll say, "fluid," and composed a history of both Broken Social Scene and the community they helped foster.

Berman, an accomplished music journalist and editor at Eye Magazine, caught up with CHARTattack on a sunny Sunday afternoon and was a little worse for wear after a respectable Saturday night. Here is what he had to say, unedited and in full.

This Book Is Broken will be feted this Wednesday (June 17) at The Courthouse as part of Arts & Crafts/NXNE showcase.

CHARTattack: Given that you're friends with all these guys, what kinds of challenges did that present while you were putting the book together?
Stuart Berman: I think it was trying to balance being a friend versus being a reporter as well. I think the book touches on it.

You know, it hasn't been a totally smooth happy ride all the time. For the most part, it's been a happy success story, but there were personal issues that arose along the way and you have to gauge how comfortable people are talking about stuff. Some people are very comfortable and open about it, and some people chose not to [be].

Even though it's sort of this post-Twitter era where everyone's lives are on display 24/7, when it comes down to it people had reservations about putting their life in a book as a permanent record. Because the other thing is, as much as there have been the odd internal issue over the course of time, things tend to work themselves out, which is a testament to the fact that these people have been friends for the better part of 10 or 20 years in some cases. They find a way to deal with it.

While it seems like drama at some point in the story, give it six months or a year and it'll work itself out. It's just a question of how personal people want to get. I'm not Kitty Kelley writing an expose on Frank Sinatra's sex life or whatever. These are my friends, they have lives, I'm not going to play the role of ambulance chaser and try and sensationalize their lives and they aren't the kind of people that want that. They want their music to be heard and loved by a lot of people, but they're not so much into the celebrity aspect of being a musician.

What's the response been like from the band?
For the most part, it's very positive. Like I was saying, some people do feel weird about their lives being canonized. Particularly because they're at a point in their career when they're a going concern, they're not necessarily interested in looking back. They still feel like they have a lot of records left to be made.

A lot of people asked me when I contacted them about the book, "Really?! What? Now?" I've been saying it seems like a long time ago. So much has happened to the band and the culture at large that 2002 seems like this quaint, bygone era. For the most part, people really love it as a sort of time capsule of their lives at that moment. They feel like it's a really well put together document both visually and orally, but there is that sort of hesitation to close the chapter on something that they feel is still being written.

At one point towards the end of the book, Kevin Drew says that when you tell a story, it inevitably involves somebody else so he doesn't do that for that very reason. Was that something you ran up against when you were putting this together because, like you said, they're so private and don't ascribe to this "celebrity" aspect of their music?
Kevin said that at a time when some personal issues were coming to the fore and he didn't want to you know... And they've never liked to do the traditional thing in terms of what a singer-songwriter does. You know, put their feeling literally into song. You can sense the emotion behind it but they don't like to spell it out for you and say, like, "My baby left me. Woe is me."

Justin Peroff had a quote recently where he said that as a band they know what they don't want to do more than they want to do. They have pretty sensitive bullshit detectors because they've all been making music for so long, but yeah, I think it's out of respect for other people in the band. They don't want to say something in the press in the heat of the moment that they're going to be held to for the rest of their lives. Because they're friends they know how to work through their issues, but it's something they want to do privately rather than in the press or through blogs.

Like Kevin just did his first blog post on the Broken Social Scene site. A lot of it was a post against Twitter and people losing touch with themselves even though we have more ways than ever to stay in touch it's a sort of disconnecting feeling. He's a bit of Luddite; he barely uses email. He's the kind of guy who if he wants to talk to you, he calls you.

How does that work, because at this point he's doing mostly A&R stuff at Arts & Crafts right?
Yeah, and it's sort of an old fashioned role. You go down to the club to see a band, go see them again and again over the course of six months and that's how you know a band's got it. It's not just going onto a band's MySpace and listening to their four demos and going, "Ah, they kind of sound like Crystal Castles. Let's do this."

You stopped writing about the band for all intents and purposes almost five years ago now. What spurred you to do this now?
When you're writing for a local weekly regularly, because the people that read those papers tend to be really involved in the scene and very aware of who is getting press and how much press, I didn't want Eye to turn into the BSS newswire, even though people think we became that anyway.

It's just by virtue of the fact that everyone in the band is putting out tons of records all the time. It's sort of a double-edged sword. It's like you can write about a band, they get popular and then stop writing about them and people accuse you of, "Oh, you're abandoning them. They're not good enough for you anymore," or you can keep covering a band as they evolve and it becomes, "Oh, that's all you write about."

If you look back at the sort of stuff I was reading while I was growing up, certain publications became identified with certain bands. If you read Creem Magazine in the '70s it would be all about Iggy Pop and Lou Reed. NME being a weekly paper, they sort of track their bands and they overdo it a lot of the time, but at least they make it seem like something you should care about and get interested in.

I felt like my time at Eye as Music Editor, those were the bands that we became identified with, as they were getting bigger. On a personal note, I realize that I wasn't going to be able to be objective, not that I ever really was with these guys. Just for the sake of not repeating ourselves all the time, I deferred.

The last thing I wrote about BSS in Eye was in 2003 and then I did a feature in Magnet in, like, 2005, but I figured that was in America so that was different. And then the book idea came up around 2007 and by that point enough had happened, the story had evolved enough that I felt like I could revisit it.

Was it your idea or the band and you as group?
It was actually Cam Drew, Kevin's Brother. He works in publishing and has a relationship with House Of Anansi and through conversations they had, House Of Anansi decided they'd be interested in a book about BSS, but there was no idea what form it would take. So Cam, Kevin and I had meetings, because Cam approached me and asked if I'd be interested in taking this on. So we had meetings, but we had no idea what this book was going to be.

Kevin was very adamant from the start that it be as much about the community as the band. Kevin is the one who is most sensitive to the idea of canonizing their history and sort of making this a permanent record. So he was really adamant — and he's been adamant in every interview he's done since 2001 — that the community is what inspires him and that's what he feeds off of and that's what made the band what it is.

So we went through various iterations, all sort of scrap-booky and very visual. And then I realized that I've always liked oral histories as documenting a specific scene, and this was as good an opportunity as any to do that. Originally, it was going to be a straight oral history, but then Anansi thought that because there were so many people involved, a lot of narrative strands to tie together, that I should write introductions to each chapter to set the scene for all of those who haven't followed it all the way through [laughing].

You've just sort of touched on this, but the book ends up focussing as much on what you termed the "post-indie" scene. Was that always what you intended? Is it even possible to separate the business model that A&C developed from the story of the band [BSS]?
No, I don't think you can look at one without the other. I mean Broken Social Scene existed before Arts & Crafts started, but they became a very different band once it started. The thing that people always remark about Broken Social Scene is the fact that they have so many other artists that have their own careers, a lot of that was facilitated by A&C. They became a home base for a lot of those bands.

In terms of the post-indie idea, I was just trying to compare the idea of being an indie band 15 years ago as opposed to now. A&C has never been very dogmatic about their indieness; if anything it's an entrepreneurial enterprise. "Alright, we want to sell our records. Why shouldn't we have control over that? Why shouldn't we strike the best deals for our artists?"

So as opposed to being like the "fuck you" major label system, because Jeffrey [Remedios, CEO and co-founder of A&C] was a product of that system, and he'll always credit the major label system with what he knows today, it's just that major labels have lost touch with artist development.

So Arts & Crafts, I think, have aspirations to be a major label in the sense of reach and making music accessible to lots of people, but they're very much rooted in artist development and they realize that without the artist they don't have a company, so it's in their best interest to gradually build these careers over long periods of time.

That's the real problem with the music industry right now, is that there is no artist development happening at the major label level. The reason why the music industry is as big as it is is because people have been buying Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd records for 30 years. Those catalogue sales help boost the bottom line, but they're not creating artists that will have future catalogue sales. Now the album comes out, it sells whatever it sells and no one is going to discover it in 20 years and keep buying it over and over again.

Photo by David Leyes

Given that you're drawing from something not necessarily chaotic, but like you said, with so many different narrative strands, was that a challenge to bring it all together.
Nah, I had a rough outline beforehand. I always wanted to go back to the '90s and set the scene because that's where I felt the story really began. If hHead had become global alternative rock superstars there wouldn't be a Broken Social Scene, so you have to chronicle those ups and downs.

Everybody came to this band for different reasons, on different trajectories in their career, so I kind of did have to step back and figure out "where did everybody come from?" Even though I've known these people for more than 10 years, I didn't know everybody's back story and how they came into the fold.

From Brendan, you have more of the macro Canadian alternative rock experience in the '90s and with Kevin you have this more of, someone who grew up listening to indie rock in the '90s and was inspired to make music himself. And then there's the whole history of the ESA [Etobicoke School For The Arts where Kevin Drew, Emily Haines and Amy Millan met] and how all of those people came together. And of course you can't talk about BSS without talking about K.C. Accidental.

So I had little MS word files of all different chapters and sometimes chapters got moved into one and others got pulled apart. I think the original version was 13 chapters and now it's 11.

Did the band vet what you wrote before you submitted it to the publisher?
Kevin and Brendan were granted a read and their suggested edits were pretty minimal. There were only a small handful of quotes that they felt they wouldn't be happy going to press with.

They're only two people in a group of 20, so most people have different opinions of each other. They do feel like it's their job as the band leaders to act in a sort of camp counselor kind of role, make sure all the children are getting along with each other and no one's feeling are going to get hurt. They took out a few lines that they thought might be read the wrong way. They're looking out for everybody.

It would have been impossible to get this book done passing it around to every single person, though that did happen. They did a big Mexican retreat last year and apparently the book got passed around. Fortunately, my inbox wasn't filled with too many suggestions. You know, there were suggestions from other people in the band, like, "can we take that part out" and I had to be like, "nah, there's a reason that I put that in."

Especially in an oral history, it's important that the quotes link in some sort of logical way. There were a few moments where the quote had to be taken out and I had to jump, instead of it flowing into the next quote.

What do you think the future holds for BSS at this point?
They're actually recording right now, so that's a positive. I think they need to get back to being Broken Social Scene.

There's been this period in the last four years where everyone is doing their own thing. I think they needed that because that period from 2003 to 2005 was so life-changing for them on so many levels that I think the last few years have given them the opportunity to step back and exhale.

Then Kev and Brendan releasing their solo records and even though they toured them as Broken Social Scene records, it's still in the public's mind a side-project rather than a Broken Social Scene record.

So they're recording right now as Broken Social Scene?
Yeah, with John McEntire from Tortoise. So I mean, who knows what will come of that? They're not the kind of band that goes into a studio and says, "OK, 15 songs, and these are the 12 that are gonna make it." Just like when you hang out with them, someone will be sitting on the couch noodling away on a guitar in the corner and someone else will say, "Oh, I like that," and jump on the piano. They're always creating in their own subtle way.

When you read the book you almost get the sense that it couldn't exist if it weren't written by a friend because it seems like such a close knit group of people.
It's interesting reading their interviews as they go out and do press. I think when you get into that promotional cycle and you're doing 10 interviews a day, inevitably you're going to get asked the same questions and you sort of go into auto-pilot, so I think this was a healthy exercise because it wasn't about promoting their new record.

I was able to get them for long periods of time and talk about stuff that they probably haven't talked about in a long, long time. Even someone like Andrew Whiteman, and he was initially one of the more skeptical people, in terms of like "Why is there a book?" and at the time he was focusing on Apostle [Of Hustle, Whiteman's other band], he'd kind of taken a year off from the band, so his mind wasn't on Broken Social Scene. We talked for like an hour and a half and I was like, "Well I'm done" and he said "Really? That was so much fun!" Even the ones who were skeptical at first really opened up.

You have to know the time to step back and be proud of what you've done and look back at your accomplishments because you're always looking towards the next thing. And I think this was an opportunity for them to do that and say, "Yeah, we did pretty good" considering where this came from.

I feel like the book starts really slowly narratively, it's kind of drifty and that was kind of the vibe in Toronto at that time. No one was doing anything together. It was very just kind of gradually snowballed and snowballed.

What about the photographic submissions? Were they hard to get a hold of, because they seem really personal.
Justin Peroff was entrusted with the task of compiling the photos because he does all of their album artwork as well, so he's the visual, aesthetic director of the band. So that was his task, but he was on tour a lot at the time. So he was trying to email people and it became this sort of wild goose chase at times.

I had to drive out to Amy Milan's mom's place out in Scarborough to get all the early stuff of Amy and Emily [Haines]. That all came from the Milan family archives, much to Emily's dismay.

Musicians can be a bit hard to get a hold of at the best of times, so then when you're asking, "Hey, can I get those old school photos..." [laughing]. And Kevin's stuff was in storage half the time because he was moving around a lot back then.

I actually finished the book in April or March of '08, edits, everything done and at that point they decided to focus on visuals and they realized they did not have nearly enough time to make their June deadline because they wanted to put it out that fall so they just automatically backed it up and were like, "Fuck it, this is coming out in the spring of '09" and gave us six months and it turned out we need it. Because I wanted to document this pre-internet era of music history in Toronto which you don't see a lot of documentation of.

From 2002 on, everybody has a million photos of this band on their camera phones, but before that there wasn't really that much going around. People weren't documenting their lives on the internet the way they are now. Even just finding a simple photo of hHead was a bit of a challenge.

Was it difficult to find photo's from the Ted's [Wrecking Yard, the now defunct College Street bar where Broken Social Scene's earliest live performance/jams took place] era?
Actually, no. They were fortunate in that they had a lot of friends who were photographers and filmmakers.

A few years ago, Stephen Chung, who is interviewed in the book, he shot all those Ted's shows, he's got them in the studio recording You Forgot It In People, hundreds of hours of that stuff. Even before this book project, there was a plan to do a documentary, but that fizzled. It was a combination of the band's hesitation to cap their story.

Breakout 2007: Geronimo

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 09:08:39 -0500

Hometown: Regina, SK

Sound:
Geronimo take the sonic strangeness from Modest Mouse and rough it up a little in the mosh pit, making for a quirky little marriage between indie handclaps and punk rock guitars. It's weird, fast and good.

Why?
Sure, Regina doesn't have the indie rock cult of, say, Montreal, but the oft-neglected prairie city has produced some exciting buzz bands over the past few years.

Funnily enough, two of the most stirring Saskatchewan exports have been comprised of half of Geronimo's lineup.

After the Regina-based, angular art-rock band Despistado called it quits in 2005, ex-members Leif Thorseth and Dagan Harding didn't completely abandon the idea of making music. After a few months apart, the pair rekindled their musical relationship and, along with Garret Matheis and Henry Brass, were able to get Geronimo moving. Armed with their debut EP, Enlightenment In A Small Town, the quartet have already snagged gigs with indie buzz acts Tapes ‘N' Tapes and Minus The Bear.

"We've been really lucky," Harding says. "I mean, our third show was with Ted Leo And The Pharmacists. We've been extremely lucky."

To an outsider, luck might seem essential for the indie band trying to break out of Regina. But that's the thing: Geronimo aren't trying to break out of Regina. Without a high-pressure music industry present in their home city, Hagan feels that the band are better able to concentrate on music.

"I've played in this scene for seven years, so I've gone through a couple perspectives," Harding says. "Regina's full of as many good bands as Toronto or Vancouver, but they're just not motivated. It's hard to have that John K. Sampson ambition to make it at home. But I think there's nothing wrong with choosing to stay home and choosing a life of creativity. I think I'm still making music because I'm still in Regina."

Although the immediate plans for the band don't include ditching their hometown, the quartet are excited to play some gigs outside of western Canada. Geronimo plan to make a six-week cross-country trek in May, their first jaunt across Canada. The band will spend the early part of the year writing feverishly.

"We'll be writing from now until May. After that, we don't know. That's as far as we've planned," Harding says cryptically. Keep your ear out.

Official site: www.myspace.com/geronimonow

This feature is from the February 2007 issue of Chart Magazine. To purchase the issue, go to the Chart Shop.

Breakout 2007: Les Breastfeeders

Phil Villeneuve — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 11:06:32 -0500

Hometown: Montreal, QC

Sound:
Imagine, if you will, throwing a troupe of high speed '60s pop and garage rock singers and a full-time tambourine player into the microwave, setting it on high and frying ‘em until they explode. Poking at the electric rainbow splatterings of their innards wouldn't be as much fun as Les Breastfeeders.

Why?
With a name like Les Breastfeeders, it's hard not to stand out a little bit. But the Montreal garage rockers do that even without their maternal appreciations. They sing and scream in French, play wildly fuzzy dance rock, have a singing mod-babe named Suzie McLeLove and a tambourine player who likes to drop his drawers.

"Most of the time people just want to dance and party with us and that's what we're there for," says guitarist Sunny Duval. "We've been lucky enough to have been booked in the right places and also being French in the States and English Canada makes us more noticeable than if we were just singing in English."

Les Breastfeeders have been playing the Montreal French (and English of late) circuit for some time, winning over critics and collecting a diverse fanbase. Their live shows have a reputation for being sweaty dance parties where sitting quickly becomes a crime. Thanks to their celebrated Les Matins De Grands Soirs, which was recorded by Ryan Battistuzzi of Malajube, the band have had a buzz following their noisy trail. Lead singer Luc Brien and McLeLove sing about dancing "Le Yah!," le "freddy" and "nitty-gritty," but also belt out smart songs about love, hate, politics and poetry.

"Thanks to bigger English bands from Montreal, the media have still been paying attention to the Montreal music scene," Duval says. "This allowed for the English and French scenes to merge in a way because there are more bands and venues than there were 10 to 15 years ago.

"There's now a crossover and it's a really good thing.

Being part of a music scene so vibrant and healthy that a band like this one can perform, record and tour, is another really, really good thing and Les Breastfeeders know it.

"We're really poor, so getting to play around the world, to me, is one of our big dreams," Duval says. "We're also really intense people together, so to keep playing and stay happy together is another. It's good to have small dreams."

Official Site: www.lesbreastfeeders.ca

This feature is from the February 2007 issue of Chart Magazine. To purchase the issue, go to the Chart Shop.