DD/MM/YYYY Offer New Album And Heiress Sex Tapes

DD/MM/YYYY (pronounced "Day Month Year") are an odd band. In addition to playing some of the most bizarre music you've ever heard — which includes more time changes than you can shake a stick at — they have an interesting live show to back it all up. Some members switch instruments between each song, while others walk on and off stage seemingly at random — all before dropping to the floor, rolling around until the feedback fades out during their last song.

Fittingly, singer/drummer/keyboardist Matt King has a relatively goofy demeanour when talking about the band and their quirky nature.

"We want to reflect as much of ourselves as possible, and clutter the world with our random ideas, from our brain matter and... OK, I lost my train of thought. We like playing in front of people who are willing to let you take them for a ride, people who are willing to listen, willing to engage with the stuff that we're doing. That's all we can ask for."

Audience members at one of the band's shows would be forgiven for not fully understanding the music at first. Things happen so fast, with absurd lyrical hooks intermingling with eight-bit keyboard blips and jagged guitar riffs, that most people in the crowd are merely left scratching their heads.

"Everyone's going to interpret it the way they do," says King. "Sometimes you see a band and it's like, 'Oh, it's The Strokes and Interpol put together.'But other times, it's like, 'Whoa! It's The Strokes and Interpol!' Well, I've never said that, but it's how people see the influences. It'd be nice for people to say like, 'This sounds like Frank Zappa' or 'This sounds like Double Dragon.' Or even if they say, 'What the hell was that?' It's always a good experience."

The band's sophomore album, Are They Masks?, sees things moving in a more focused direction than their The Blue Screen Of Death debut.

"Our last album had a lot of changing and I was working a lot with not just time signatures, but the speed of the songs and trying to organically switch between one part and another," explains King. "That's the basis of DD/MM/YYYY, always changing and always moving.

"The new album is a little more like individual songs, as opposed to our last CD which was a short burst of song fragments. This one has 21 songs on it, and they're more recognizably songs, a bit more thought out. That's just the nature of how we wrote it."

The album also contains three songs that the quintet wrote under a different guise that feature some hilariously out of date pop culture references.

"I couldn't always be in Brampton to practise with the band, so Mike [Claxton, bass/guitar/vocals] and Tom [Del Balls, guitar/drums/vocals] made this band and called it Paris And The Sex Tapes, which was very topical at the time," says King. "There's a lot of poking fun at popular music, and all the lyrics from that song were taken from tabloid magazines."We changed it to Heiress And The Sex Tapes, and those three songs, 'The Simple Life,' 'Twin Star,' which is about the Olsen twins, and 'Live Sex Acts.' It's funny how they were totally topical at the time, and now they're so out of it. The Olsen one was about Mary Kate not eating. I like the fact that it's so old, even though it's two years old, but it's so nonsensical. I want to write songs about even older tabloids."

Here are DD/MM/YYYY's upcoming tour dates:

May 7 London, ON @ Call The Office
May 13 Winnipeg, MB @ The Royal Albert
May 14 Winnipeg, MB @ The Store
May 15 Saskatoon, SK @ The Bassment
May 16 Fort McMurray, AB @ YMCA
May 18 Calgary, AB @ Chinese National League
May 19 Calgary, AB @ Hi-Fi Club
May 20 Lethbridge, AB @ Jesters Pub
May 22 Vancouver, BC @ Royal Unicorn