Goldfish’s debut album a long time coming
One of Montreal’s leading ’90s bands is back — temporarily — to finally release its debut album and stage a one-off show
In 1996, Goldfish was one of the leading bands in Montreal: a hardworking quartet with formidable melodic smarts, biting harmonies and a sterling live reputation.
After cultivating a local audience with two singles and an untold number of shows, they recorded their debut album.
It should have been their breakthrough. Instead, the band broke up before it could be completed.
The recordings were trapped in tape-reel purgatory as singer/ guitarists Carrie Haber and Vicky Klingenstierna, bassist Chris Pollon and drummer Gary Jansz drifted off to other projects, other careers, other cities. Two decades later, an unlikely and temporary reunion is freeing those songs from suspended animation.
Sitting in the storied Mile End studio Hotel2Tango last week with Klingenstierna, Haber attempted to recall the motivation to resuscitate Goldfish.
“I think it was the moment I realized that we’re going to die,” she laughed. “I have a lot of unfinished projects, and this is not one I wanted hanging over me on my deathbed.”
When Pollon visited from B.C. last fall, he and Haber got to talking about the record. “He almost had to remind me that we’d recorded this entire album,” she said. “That represented three years of our lives and it’s just sitting there somewhere, so let’s find out where it is and finish that sucker.”
Goldfish was known as a live animal, so a one-off reunion show on Saturday will precede the May 26 release of the cannily titled Predictions of the Future. Neither endeavour is a small undertaking.
For starters, once those reels were excavated, “I realized tapes have a shelf life of about 20 years,” Haber said. “It had been 20 ½, so they were just at the cusp of disintegrating.”
They were restored by highly regarded Montreal producer/ engineer Howard Bilerman, who recorded the original sessions and was eager to see the project through. Haber tied up some lyrical loose ends and completed a few vocals, “so I found myself in the last couple months recording harmonies with my 20-year-old self.”
Speaking last week as songs were being mixed, Bilerman estimated that, 21st-century tweaking aside, “98 per cent of the record is how it was left in 1996.”
Show rehearsals have posed obvious challenges. “Some songs were completely forgotten,” said Klingenstierna. “‘What do you mean I wrote that?’ But it did come back quickly. You open your mouth and the words miraculously come out.”
Geography presented another obstacle. Haber is the only band member still living in Montreal. Klingenstierna flew in from Sweden. Jansz resides in Ottawa; he’ll be at the show, but will be watching Fred Bouchard sit in on drums.
“I haven’t played drums in seven years,” Jansz said by phone last week. “But you can count on my participation in some form. Is that cagey and inscrutable enough?”
Jansz recalled periodic conversations regarding the unreleased material, but was surprised to get the call about reviving the album at last.
“I had been playing in other bands and doing my own thing,” he said. “Goldfish had become a distant yet very, very fond memory.
“The catalyst in terms of turning my head around was when I was in Montreal at the Hotel2Tango Monday, mixing on the first day. I thought, ‘Wow, this is sounding great.’
“I was actually really concerned: we were very much in and of our time. We were playing in the same pool as Veruca Salt and Lush and the Breeders and Pixies and all that stuff. But I do hear that we went outside of those things that brought us together … and created something that was, I think, identifiably our own.”
With Haber, Klingenstierna and Jansz all writing songs, Goldfish honed an ability to “mix and match the sour and the sweet,” as Jansz said. The sound quickly caught the right ears: management duties were taken up by local scene architect Dan Webster and future Evenko VP Nick Farkas, who were among the co-founders of stalwart concert promoter Greenland and would go on to set up Osheaga.
There were high-profile support slots across the pop-to-punk spectrum. For their second show, they found themselves opening for DIY iconoclasts Fugazi in front of several thousand at Metropolis. “Ian (MacKaye, Fugazi singer) was vocal-coaching us right before the show,” Haber said. “‘Beautiful! You’re ready!’ ” Klingenstierna recalled a Mother’s Day concert at the Spectrum with Natalie Merchant. “It wasn’t our show, but it was very special to open for her. I think we invited all our parents.”
Reminiscing about their own gigs, the conversation included long-gone venues — Station 10, Purple Haze, Stornaway — and peers. Stellar Dweller, Tinker, Bite, Dears frontman Murray Lightburn’s old band Wren — contrary to the revisionist history that suggests the local music scene was only legitimized once Arcade Fire’s success attracted the world’s spotlights, Haber and Klingenstierna remember mid-1990s Montreal as fertile ground.
“It felt like the music scene was booming,” Klingenstierna said.
“It wasn’t a matter of playing one show a month — people were playing every week.
“We were all paying attention to each other,” Haber said. “We felt close to bands like (hip-hop group) Shades of Culture; musically they had nothing to do with us, but we were all in it together — we were sharing resources and equipment and jam spaces. It did feel like this was our playground.”
There was no clear consensus last week on why Goldfish walked away from the swing set when they did. Jansz alluded to creeping inertia, exhaustion and “starting to feel this gravitational pull to do stuff on my own.” Haber cited an inability to agree on offers from labels.
“It was a very intense three years — travelling and playing a lot, and writing as much music as we could,” Klingenstierna said. “Maybe everybody needed a break.”
Two decades on, the old community has rallied around them. Greenland is backing Saturday’s show; Lightburn and Dears bandmate Natalia Yanchak are releasing Predictions of the Future on their label, Ting Dun; Bilerman was happy to help complete the album, and to discuss the formative role Goldfish played in his own career (see sidebar).
Any future activity is complicated by the geographical and professional distance separating the quartet. (Haber is a CBC producer; Klingenstierna operates several businesses in Sweden; Pollon is an environmental journalist; Jansz works in digital media.) But the door has been left open a crack.
“We’re trying to put out around 12 songs now, but I think we had 25 or something recorded,” Klingenstierna said. “We’ll see if we’re able to completely finish the project.”
“I was surprised at how some of the more political songs are still relevant, and some of the more angry feminist ones are even more relevant,” Haber said. “I think that’s what pushed me over the edge: when I listened with Chris to whatever few old mixes we had back in October, we thought they still mean something now, and they’re therefore worth finishing.
“Plus, yeah, we’re gonna die. So let’s get it out.”