ALMOST ALIEN
Pop-punk band set to mark 75th gig
The members of Almost Alien are passionate pop-punkers.
It’s the music they cut their teeth on — these four male millennials who joined forces in Regina almost five years ago and will soon notch their 75th gig.
“We all grew up in the early 2000s and the late ’90s and we were into that kind of music — all of us were … and it just kind of gelled,” said Curtis Vanthuyne, lead guitarist and contributing writer for the quartet.
“We’re fans of the late ’90s and early 2000s pop-punk, pretty much,” he said.
Pop-punk emerged in its earliest form at the hands of some punk rockers who adopted lighter and more marketable themes and melodies, but kept the hard sound of prominent drums and electric guitar.
The most popular and famous among these bands include Green Day and Blink 182, a band revered by Almost Alien lyricist, lead singer and rhythm guitarist Danny Owens.
“Going back to the old ’90s and 2000 pop-punk, it all comes from that. Like some of the riffs that Blink 182 came out with, they’re so damned catchy, that anybody could listen to them,” Owens said.
“It’s just what we like and it just comes naturally, I guess.”
The remaining onstage colleagues are Colton Geschwandtner on bass and Colby Middleton on drums/backup vocals.
True to the genre, the EP released last year by Almost Alien combines tempo and rock-like guitar riffs with pop themes — not the least among them the age-old angst over having young love and loss.
When life’s a bummer, the lyrics come more easily, according to Owens. For example, one song blames a partner for a split and asserts: “You’d be nothing without me.”
Explained Owens: “I wrote that during a rough part of my life. I don’t have too many rough parts of my life, but that was probably the main one.
“It was your typical bad breakup, and it’s about you watching somebody you’re with become somebody completely different … almost like you turned them into a better person. And then they left you, with no credit given,” he said.
Offsetting that lyric is another song entitled I Was Wrong.
“It’s not a one-way street. It’s about the same thing, but about taking blame,” Owens said.
Almost Alien has a couple of western Canadian tours behind them and have spanned from Vancouver to Winnipeg. They aspire to cover all of Canada one day, whether or not it means living as starving artists.
“Hopefully one day we can make a living out of it,” Vanthuyne said. “Even if I can just make the bare minimum to survive, I’ll do it.”
They’re also working on new material and hope another EP or even a full-length album comes to pass. But all that is contingent upon the twin realities of writing enough tunes and coming up with the cash.
“It’d be nice to do a full-length album, but you’re expecting 10-12 songs for that, and it gets expensive for a band that’s mostly selffunded,” Owens said.