Kongos out to prove it’s no one-song band

Strange as it might sound, 2

sometimes there’s a downside to having a platinum-shifting smash single. Kongos has found this out since last spring’s release of Egomaniac, a strong follow-up to the quartet’s surprise 2012 breakthrough, Lunatic.

The problem goes something like this: Lunatic didn’t exactly catch fire in North America right out of the gate. In fact, Kongos—siblings Dylan, Daniel, Jesse, and Johnny Kongos—considered the record halfdead in the water stateside when the tribal earworm “Come With Me Now” finally found an audience on radio in early 2014. The song, built around a hypnotically insistent accordion line, gang-chant vocals, and thunderstruck drums, would continue to gain traction over the year, eventually popping up everywhere from car commercials to Hollywood trailers to World Wrestling Entertainment spectacles.

Kongos was already at work on Egomaniac when suddenly it found itself in high demand as a touring act with a massive, late-breaking hit. And even though its Lunatic followup is loaded with songs that are every bit as crowd-pleasing, the four brothers have found themselves waging something of a battle.

“We’re extremely grateful to have had a hit—it’s better to be something of a one-hit wonder than a no-hit wonder,” says Dylan Kongos, on the line from the band’s hometown of Phoenix. (Like all of his brothers, he’s a multi-instrumentalist and a songwriter in Kongos.) “‘Come With Me Now’ enabled us to make a lot of new fans, and now we’ve got a core fan base that’s actually interested in what we do. But I think the biggest problem we had from everyone—and we’re even guilty of this ourselves— is that we all milked ‘Come With Me Now’ on the Lunatic cycle to the point of exhaustion because it made a lot of money for everyone.”

Except now a lot of folks—including, he says, some at Kongos’s record label, Sony—haven’t been able to get past seeing Kongos as the “Come With Me Now” band.

“At the end of the day, the story of the band was not told,” Dylan suggests. “There was a lack of long-term foresight in how to develop a band. There are people who think of us as a one-song band. On Egomaniac, that’s something that we’ve really tried to change. And for us, it’s going to be a long process.”

To see why this might be frustrating, consider what Kongos has accomplished on Egomaniac. As fans—true fans—are well aware, the band’s story is indeed a fascinating one, and not just because of the four-siblings angle. The patriarch of the Kongos clan—their father, John Kongos—racked up multiplatinum pop hits in South Africa back in the ’70s with songs like “He’s Gonna Step on You Again”. Everything from classic rock to world music was played around the house when he had kids, which is more than evident in the Kongos sound.

On Egomaniac the band works a truly hypnotic world-music groove on “Take It From Me”, swings through New Orleans for the zydeco-laced “I Want It Free”, and channels the synth-obsessed ’80s on “Hey You, Yeah You”. Those looking for more of the sound that shot the band into the spotlight, meanwhile, can proceed straight to the pounding “Repeat After Me”.

One of the things John Kongos Sr. instilled in his sons was a sense of humility. That’s certainly proved important over the past couple of years, to the point where it inspired not only the somewhat ironic album title Egomaniac, but also many of the record’s lyrics. “Come With Me Now” may have broken big, but success, evidently, doesn’t spoil everyone.

“Suddenly, we were attending things like the Sony Grammys party,” Dylan recalls, “where you’d see real icons like Berry Gordy and Stevie Nicks, and folks like John Mayer, get all this attention as soon as they walked into a room. It was bizarre to observe on a major scale like that, and also bizarre to observe that in yourself on a smaller scale. You’d see the uncontrollable egoism in people, and then see the uncontrollable egomaniac within, which you have to harness and reel in. If you don’t, it will destroy you. Luckily, I have three brothers, and parents, who really bring me back down to earth.”

> MIKE USINGER

Kongos plays the Imperial on Tuesday (May 16).

Scenic Route to Alaska loves life on the road

Unlike most Canadians, Trevor 2 Mann, frontman of Scenic Route to Alaska, has no qualms about admitting his more uncool habits. Caught with his fruit boots hanging out of his backpack, the upbeat singer and guitarist has just finished a morning pounding the sidewalks when the Straight reaches him by phone.

“I just went Rollerblading for an hour,” he says on the line from a pub in Edmonton. “Don’t make fun of me—i got laughed at enough on the trails already. It’s the first time we’ve really seen the sunshine here in what seems like a year. We’re about to head out on tour for a month straight, so I’m trying to get some Trevor time in before it’s too late.”

Being out on the road is, fittingly, Scenic Route to Alaska’s greatest joy. Four records into its career, the trio found a natural home travelling around Canada—a far cry from the group’s origins in the basement of drummer Shea Connor’s parents’ house. Growing up in the same Edmonton suburb and attending Riverdale School—a fact that, Mann assures us, has spawned a number of Archie jokes—a group of four friends decided that they would rather play music than dodgeball after class.

“We started when we were 12 years old,” the singer recalls. “At first, we’d jam out old R&B and blues like the Beatles and Chuck Berry. It was a really cool way to begin a band because it was absolutely just for fun. I started writing some of my own songs around the time I was 17, we cut the band down to a three-piece, and started getting our own gigs. Six years later, it’s turned itself into a business. Now we all live together, and play around the world.”

The maturity of Long Walk Home, Scenic Route to Alaska’s fourth record, is testament to the group’s lengthy touring history. Boasting a more well-rounded sound than its predecessor, Warrington, the 11-track album ranges from the sunny, guitardrenched “Coming Back” to introspective, folky ballad “Taking Its Toll” and the lazy “Young Free Wild”.

“When we first started touring out east,” Mann recalls, “people from Alberta came to our shows, and they coined the term Prairie indie for us. They said, ‘Oh, your sound really reminds me of home.’ Personally, I’ve always taken that as a huge compliment. We want to go for a bit of dirt in the sound, but still present what is more properly indie rock or indie folk.

“I don’t write my lyrics down,” he continues, “so I just sit at the end of my bed and mumble over a couple of guitar parts, and I start to hear ideas come to fruition. It’s a streamof-consciousness thing. Sometimes they’ll scare me because they’re things that I really do mean but I wouldn’t have said otherwise—and I find that my lyrics get more complex as I have more experiences in my life, and a lot of those have come from our time touring. On this record, there’s a lot about wanting to feel younger, and the difficulties of stepping into adulthood. It’s about navigating a quarter-life crisis.”

> KATE WILSON

Scenic Route to Alaska plays the Cobalt on Sunday (May 14).

Tunisia’s Mathlouthi touts avant-garde evolution

Sometimes the best way to look 2

forward is to look back first— and that’s one of the strategies Emel Mathlouthi employs on her new album, Ensen. Although her 2012 debut, Kelmti Horra, found the Tunisian singer and multi-instrumentalist exploring a variety of vocal styles, some influenced by western pop and folk, she’s now letting her North African roots step up, as she says in a telephone conversation from New York City.

“I wanted to give a new challenge to myself, and I tried to really, really search in the depths of myself to see what kind of interactions I could bring,” Mathlouthi tells the Straight, speaking in fluent and fast-paced English. “So I tried to imagine a Berber heritage in my vocals, something that could be raw but very powerful and almost, like, transcendent.”

That she succeeded is obvious: on record as well as in concert, the emotional content of her songs needs little

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translation. And the 35-year-old musician has also progressed along another path: bringing Tunisian music into the 21st century through state-of-the-art electronic accompaniment.

“Something that the western side of the music business doesn’t realize is that we do actually evolve, in North Africa,” she says. “We create; we can be avant-garde, too, and pioneers. I think that makes us maybe sometimes a little more interesting. Our identity is not just one identity. I’m Tunisian, but I’m also very eclectic. I have been inspired and influenced by so many artists and so many different musics from around the world—and that kind of curiosity, I think, is visible now in my work. My work doesn’t just translate one part of the world; it’s a cocktail of different landscapes.”

Electronic music, Mathlouthi continues, is a way of expanding the sonic possibilities open to her—and definitely not a refutation of traditional styles. “When you play with acoustic instruments,” she explains, “you can offer a very interesting range of textures and soundscapes— but imagine multiplying that range forever, with the computer and with the pedals and with all the effects. So we had a lot of fun translating the instruments that are coming from my region, like all the tribal percussion, to the electronic setup.”

And with EDM the world’s most popular musical idiom, the singer is also conscious that it’s a good way of ensuring that her message will be heard. Mathlouthi got an early lesson in how music can change the world when her song “Ya Tounes Ya Meskina” (“Poor Tunisia”) was adopted as an unofficial anthem of the Arab Spring, and while the political messages on Ensen are more subtle, they’re no less potent.

Standout track “Ensen Dhaif” (“Human, Helpless Human”), for instance, is accompanied by a video that alludes to torture scenes from Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison while making a larger point about the way that we are all imprisoned within capitalism’s economic cage.

“That song was written without any conscious understanding of what it was really saying,” Mathlouthi admits. “But as years went by, I started realizing that it was about a system that empowers the richer minority and keeps billions of workers around the world in never-ending slavery, modern slavery. And it’s not only about workers who have difficult and ugly jobs. Even people who seemingly love their jobs never have time for their passions, for their lives, for their dreams.”

She’s no different, Mathlouthi adds—except that she’s able to bring her dreams to the stage in a way that will inspire her listeners to seek their own forms of liberation, whether in the streets of Tunis or the clubs of North America.

> ALEXANDER VARTY

Emel Mathlouthi plays the Rio Theatre on Sunday (May 14).

Get lucky with an interview 2

subject and they’ll do much of the work for you. This is certainly the case with the fantastic China Forbes of Portland’s long-running Pink Martini. The multilingual singer is basically a dream right from the point she picks up the phone in the Rose City, holding forth on subjects ranging from the therapeutic benefits of home decorating to the lifealtering power of travelling.

Perhaps expectedly then, Forbes has no problem nailing the intangible quality that’s made Pink Martini one of the most enduring acts ever to spring out of the Pacific Northwest. The group formed in the mid ’90s, when pianist Thomas Lauderdale was looking for a singer to front a project that combined throwback jazz, vintage swing, and classic pop as it existed before Elvis Presley changed the rules forever. Lauderdale found his frontperson in Forbes, whom he’d first met while both were attending Harvard. A phone call convinced her to pack up and leave New York for a West Coast town that was nowhere near as hipster-cool back then as it is today.

Ten albums have followed, including last year’s typically stellar Je dis oui!, which delivers 15 tracks ranging from the Big Apple jazz of Cole Porter’s “Love for Sale” to a sweepingly elegant take on Franz Schubert’s “Serenade”. Pink Martini rolls out retro originals that are classier than Hollywood during the fabled ’40s (“The Butterfly Song”), and travels to far-flung locales for covers that are as exotic as they are impeccably rendered. After going en-français for the knock-out opening title track, Forbes proves equally at home singing songs in Farsi, Armenian, Portuguese, Arabic, and Turkish.

The appeal? That’s easily summed up, especially if you’re Forbes.

“Right from the beginning we decided to take this in a more sophisticated direction rather than a kitschy one,” she explains. “We earnestly just perform the music that we think is beautiful. We’re not winking, or trying to be cute. Basically, we started very innocently, making music based on the vintage sensibility that Thomas just inhabits. He is vintage.”

Terms like elegant and grand are good starting descriptions not just for Je dis oui!, but also for pretty much everything the group has done since releasing its debut, Sympathique, in 1997. And that approach makes Pink Martini a natural for shows like its upcoming appearance with the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra.

“What’s interesting is that we really never know anything until we show up,” Forbes says of the upcoming collaboration. “What’s going to happen is that someone will make a set list at some point and they’re going to learn the orchestrations. Then we’ll show up, because we know all the songs, and then we’ll just do it. We get to have one two-hour rehearsal, and then we do the show.”

Being that comfortable wasn’t always the case, at least not for Forbes, who was carving out a pop-rock career before she reinvented herself with Pink Martini. But you can evidently sometimes teach yourself to do things just a bit classier and more sophisticated—not to mention kitsch-free.

“I was a rock ’n’ roller with a band in New York, so I wasn’t really super knowledgeable about classical music or anything like that, other than a love of opera,” she says. “But I’ve really grown comfortable over the years in so many different genres. And long ago, I lost that self-conscious, wondering-if-i-can-pull-it-off thing. Now I can sing in your living room by myself on a piano, I can stand in front of an orchestra doing arias in a church. I just love to sing.”

> MIKE USINGER

Pink Martini and the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra join forces at the Orpheum on Saturday (May 13).