Mobile's Movie-Inspired Album

09/18/08 4:33pm

by Ciara McCann (CHARTattack)

Some bands are lucky enough to make their mark on the music scene as soon as they begin. But Montreal pop-rockers Mobile began working long and hard in 1997 before they finally landed a major record deal with Universal and released their Tomorrow Starts Today debut in 2006.

Mobile enjoyed success with their album's upbeat, '80s-inspired style, but lead singer Mat Joly says they're even happier with their upcoming Tales From The City album, which takes a different approach.

"We wanted to write an album, not write a collection of songs," Joly says. "That's what we tried to do different from the first album. We tried to write singles for the first album, to be honest. We were looking for a record deal and we tried to write, like, 10 singles. Compared to this record, we didn't think about writing singles. It was more like, 'Let's write a record from beginning to end — a journey' — when you listen to the whole album and you feel like, 'Alright, I understand the whole thing.'"

"Gravity," "Mother" and lead single "The Killer" all revolve around a fictional television character.

"On tour, you get to watch a lot of things on the computer, and I was watching a lot of TV series like The Sopranos and The Wire and watching a lot of movies from the '70s like Shaft and No Way To Treat A Lady, which are like old cult movies, and I like those kind of movies," says Joly. "When I wrote 'Gravity,' that's what I had in mind."

The video for "The Killer" revolves around this bad-boy protagonist that Joly created.

"The guy is in kind of a weird city in the late '70s, kind of a Blade Runner-type of city," Joly explains. "He became a killer because society is against him. I tried to create a character just to do something different, and not always talk about myself on the record."

Tales From The City will be released on Oct. 7. In the meantime, you can see Mobile perform their new material live here with The Midway State:

Sept. 22 Toronto, ON @ Masonic Temple
Sept. 24 London, ON @ Fanshawe College
Sept. 29 Calgary, AB @ Southern Alberta Institute Of Technology Polytechnic
Oct. 1 Vancouver, BC @ University Of British Columbia
Oct. 3 Fredericton, NB @ University Of New Brunswick
Oct. 6 St-Lambert, QC @ Champlain College St-Lambert

Here are the songs on Tales From The City:

"Daylight Breaks"
"Mother"
"Hit the Floor #7"
"The Killer"
"No Tomorrow"
"Gravity"
"Slow Motion Car Crash"
"Sweet Light"
"Live to Find"
"All Is Forgiven (Parts I-II-III)"