Kill The Lights And Chill The Ham

With all the debate about local scenes that's been raging over the last few years — though mostly between bored hipsters online — it's pretty hard to avoid the concept of "buzz cities" for hot new Canadian bands. But Toronto indie rock quintet Kill The Lights serve as a good example of melting-pot band geography.

"Geographical determinism?" queries drummer Yann Geoffroy. "Well, I wonder about that. Maybe that's part of why we have this vast sort of range to our music.

"Basically, we are from all over the place. I'm from Quebec, Alex [Hackett] is from Quebec, Joe [Yarmush] is from Quebec, and John [Dignard] is from New Brunswick, but has been living in Toronto for many years. I've been living in Toronto for four years. Steph [Hanna] is from Ottawa, but lives in Montreal. So if there is any kind of geographical determinism, we've really kind of scrambled it. But I think that the two hubs — Montreal and Toronto — are very close together, and musically there's a lot of similarities."

Yet the one unifying tie that's binding pretty much every band on the face of the planet right now is Rupert Murdoch's crown jewel, the ubiquitous MySpace. While Geoffroy concedes that the networking website is "the epitome of proliferation of music on the internet — you can hear everything at the click of a button," he doesn't put a lot of stock in becoming famous off of a website.

"The thing about MySpace is, I don't think people should take it too seriously. It's more like a jokey kind of thing, even though the music is serious. You can't be all like, 'We have this many friends, people are always looking at our page' and blah, blah, blah. I think that's just wrong.

"One of our challenges or issues that arose with MySpace was whether or not to put a review up on our profile — like a review of our album or show or something. We decided not to do it. MySpace isn't an advertisement. I mean, it is, but we don't want it to be. It's a community thing. It's about hearing other bands' music, checking out their pictures and watching their videos, not like, 'This reviewer said this about our album' and stuff."

Although Kill The Lights cop to actually having a MySpace profile (Geoffroy claims that they have around 750 friends, "and they're all porn stars"), they seem pretty comfortable as a semi-underground indie band — a funky, new wave-y little secret of those aforementioned hipsters, if you will.

"If you're indie, you've got automatic cred," says Geoffroy. "You haven't sold out yet because you haven't gotten the chance.

"Plus, we also feel very free to do what we like. We're confident in our taste, and so we really feel we've got the creative carte blanche. We get to mess around and it's not like we're gonna lose our huge audience if we do something they don't like, because we don't have a huge audience yet."

And I think it's really fun to build upon it. The journey is a big part of it, I think. We've learned so much as a group and as friends and as a working entity, and that journey is awesome."