Diamond Mind’s release proves a beautiful thing
Heavy Metal Sunshine aimed to be ‘a bit ridiculous, beautiful, sad’
An unfocussed mind usually makes a mess. A Diamond Mind? Bliss. Well, the Edmonton trio certainly does on Heavy Metal Sunshine — a gloriously slightly psyched album that madly goes off in all directions while always remaining tethered in the realm of pretty, melodic pop music.
“I was worried it would be a bit of a Frankenstein,” frontman Liam Trimble says of the band’s fulllength debut for Calgary-based Wyatt Records.
Again, it was a needless worry, but understandable when Trimble speaks about the way the 10 tracks came to be.
You can start with his vision. Three years and just as many EPs into the life of the Mind, he wanted to create an album that was on the poppier side of the sound that they had mined during that time.
But he went into it wanting the music to be “more elaborate, more ornate, more baroque” than anything they’d done.
More than that, “I wanted to make something a bit ridiculous, beautiful, sad,” he says.
That feat was accomplished over the course of separate sessions, with the main one being in his room, where he was left to take the nugget of a song and “explore every single, ridiculous rabbit hole” — sometimes going too far and having to rein himself in from the garishness; other times following it to its natural, gorgeously embellished conclusion.
The other session was in Edmontone Studio with producer Jesse Northey, Trimble bringing in the skeletons of the songs and he, bassist Matthew Cardinal and drummer Aidan Lucas-Buckland fleshing them out.
The entire process, Trimble says, required “a lot of time, a lot of excess,” but the results with Heavy Metal Sunshine are more than worth it.
From jangly, soaring eponymous opener Diamond Mind to slow, dreamy closer Webster’s, it recalls everything on the grand side of the pop spectrum from the Beach Boys to the Boo Radleys.
Actually, that final album cut is notable because it pairs Trimble’s beautiful vocals with those of local Samantha Savage Smith, who also just happens to be one of the folks behind the upstart Wyatt Records.
Merely a case of the label serving the needs of its artists?
“That’s one instance of them doing that very well.” Trimble continues. “She was in town on an errand unrelated to us and we coerced her to come into the studio and kind of sprang a song on her.
“I basically etched out all the lyrics onto a piece of legal pad paper and made her do it, like, 1,200 times until we got a good take.”
That number doesn’t seem like it’s too far-fetched considering all of the songwriter’s previous proclamations and admitted proclivity for going where his whims takes him.
Which makes one wonder if this record is a definitive statement of the Diamond Mind or merely a tangent on a destination with no endpoint?
“It’s a matter of what I’m feeling week to week,” Trimble says.
“The next thing is always going to sound different than the last. I don’t really care about consistency.”
So with Diamond Mind the only consistency we can expect is inconsistency?
“Maybe I should be wary of that, too,” he says, before noting he’s always careful not to push it too far out of his sweet spot.
“There’s commonalities amongst every piece I write, I think. It’s not like it’s insanely all over the map. It’s not like klezmer versus Norwegian black metal — it’s never going to swing that widely or that polarized.”
Well, until the next thing comes along Trimble and the rest of the Diamond Mind crew are hitting the road for a lengthy cross-Canada tour, which will kick off Thursday night in the city that their label calls home.
And while Trimble says they’ll use some “smoke and mirrors” to help recreate some of the added flourishes on the songs of Heavy Metal Sunshine, he also notes practicality requires it to be a much more musically conservative affair.
“I wouldn’t expect a Pet Sounds experience when you’re coming to the Palomino,” he says.