Walrus wants to keep its fan base guessing

It took Walrus singer-guitarist 2

Justin Murphy a while to get comfortable as a songwriter, not so much because he doubted his talents, but more because he was intimidated by those around him. Sometimes it isn’t easy being a little brother, especially when you’re standing in the tall shadow of an older sibling.

“Most of my friends didn’t really play a ton of music growing up, so the only person I really knew who was in bands was my brother,” says the frontman, on the line from home in Halifax. “He’s four years older than me, so I was always a little intimidated to go ‘Let’s jam,’ or whatever. He’s such a good drummer that I was never really too keen on hopping in. But then when I was 19 I started writing songs. I was into them, and he was into them, so that’s where it started.”

Walrus started out as a bedroom project with Murphy and his brother Jordan, eventually morphing into the quintet that it is today. Since it formed there have been two EPS (2014’s Glam Returns and the followup, Goodbye Something) and enough touring to drive four different vans into the ground. On the day we speak, Walrus has just returned from its first European jaunt, the overseas swing in support of its debut fulllength, Family Hangover, which is on Dan Mangan’s indie label Madic.

In the tradition of Halifax alternative legends Jale, Wintersleep, and Sloan, guitars are the primary musical weapon for Walrus, with “Later Days” a gorgeously grey-hued exercise in towering postrock and “Step Outside” serving up psych at its dreamiest.

But the greatness of Walrus is how the band sounds like it’s interested in something more than the sound that initially made Sub Pop the greatest indie label in the world. “Tell Me” is twisted country-blues cut from the same cloth as ’90s-vintage Meat Puppets, while “Regular Face” serves as a tip-off that Murphy remains more than a little obsessed with four Liverpool lads who called themselves the Beatles.

“We don’t want to pigeonhole ourselves, so it’s important to keep people guessing about what we’re doing,” Murphy says. “That’s also our game plan for the next record—to try and do some new stuff but still keeping it within the pocket of what Walrus does.”

That record is, at the moment, a ways off, with the singer reporting that Walrus will be continuing to tour hard in the coming months across North America. Well aware of its track record with vans, the band now rents them— which makes sense when you’ve literally blown engines in the past.

What hasn’t changed since the beginning, though, is Murphy’s lack of interest in celebrating his work as a songwriter, this despite the fact that his brother isn’t the only person celebrating his brilliance these days.

“I’m happy with the new record, but I guess I’m a pretty humble person. I’m not that great a musician, so it’s the band that really turns the songs into what they are. I’m not too much on tooting my own horn—if it wasn’t for the band I don’t think this would really have come to anything.”

> MIKE USINGER

Walrus plays the Biltmore on Friday (June 23).

Sheldoncole could be playing your house next

Winning new fans will always 2

be a slog for up-and-coming musicians. Yes, young performers have the Internet on their side—but with more than 12 hours of music uploaded every minute on Soundcloud alone, creators quickly discover the importance of steering people to their websites in person. In other words, they need to get out on the road.

Organizing a tour is never easy. Questions over management, transportation, and which band to support lead to sleepless nights—and many performers visiting venues are forced to pay to play as the opener for a bigger group. There are, however, workarounds for those willing to get creative, as Vancouver singer-songwriter Sheldoncole discovered while living in Detroit. Stumbling across the burgeoning house-concert scene after a tip from a girl outside a coffee-shop washroom, the up-and-comer decided to build a 51-date tour around playing in people’s living rooms.

“It was a surprise to find homes that functioned as venues,” the musician, born Sheldon Kozushko, tells the Straight over tea. “There are established circuits that really talented poets, artists, and musicians can join. I was watching people just like me play their songs, and break even or profit off the tour. It seemed better than paying another artist to piggyback on their performances around tiny clubs.”

Returning to Vancouver, Kozushko pulled out his address book and sketched a tentative route across Canada and the States. Fascinated by the theory of six degrees of separation, he put out a call on social media to see who would be interested in hosting a performance for one night.

“When I started this process, I didn’t really know how to organize it,” he says. “There are networks of established house-tour stops, where musicians apply to play and homes offer to host, and once you’re in the fold they set you up with shows. So to get myself recognized, I reached out through various online platforms and had some great successes. I found a woman on couchsurfing.com in Minneapolis, for example, who was really into throwing a show in her backyard. I’m also playing a night in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, at a friend of a friend of a friend’s home that I found through Facebook.”

Not just excited about reaching new fans all over the continent, Kozushko also puts a lot of stock in the atmosphere that the gigs can create.

“The cool thing about the venues is that no two shows are the same,” he says. “Over the years I’ve played coffee shops, clubs, and bars, and at most of the performances people are noisy. They’re distracted with their own conversations, or they’re eating or drinking. That’s the culture of live music in that setting—you’re expected to be just in the background. What I’ve seen at house shows is that people actually listen to your performance, and they really get into it. I think that when people give you that opportunity, it’s possible to win them over and share something beautiful. That helps me make more of a connection with people, which

allows me to build a bigger fan base.”

Tours—particularly international, cross-continental ventures—often come with a hefty price tag. Kozushko’s approach minimizes much of those costs. He’s often able to sleep at his venues and drive himself to each new location, so his outlay is mostly limited to food and gas.

“At all of the nights I’ve been to on the East Coast, artists have a donation jar and sell their merch,” he says. “It’s pretty common to pass around a hat at the show, saying ‘Send this band to the next town.’ For the groups that I know, it works out pretty well.”

> KATE WILSON

Sheldoncole plays next Thursday (June 29). See www.sheldoncole.com for details.

Something exciting is going to 2

take place at this year’s edition of the Festival d’été francophone de Vancouver, but Jacky Essombé can’t say exactly what it is. She’s not being secretive; she actually doesn’t know precisely what will happen when the fest’s World Music Fusion project brings together five artists with roots in five different countries. The participants include the Cameroon-born, Paris-raised, and now Vancouver-based Essombé herself, along with ILAM (Senegal/ Montreal), Joe Amouzou (Togo/b.c.), Yoro Noukoussi (Benin/b.c.), and Canadian-born DJ Marc Fournier.

Mind you, Essombé—a dancer, singer, and storyteller who specializes in traditional Cameroonian village songs—won’t be going in completely blind; she knows Fournier well, regularly works with Noukoussi, and has collaborated with Amouzou in the past. The X factor is ILAM, a rising star in the Montreal scene whose songs blend Afro-pop and Senegalese rhythms with blues and reggae.

“With Yoro and Joe, we’re more likely, the three of us, to be on the same page when it comes to the different rhythms,” Essombé tells the Straight. “I think the difference will really be with ILAM, because in Senegal with the richness of their music, it’s also very unique and very specific. They have mbalax, which is the most widely spread style—the sabar and the mbalax—and so this is going to be quite interesting to blend what we bring with that. For instance, Yoro plays the talking drum. We have talking drums all over in Africa, but it’s played differently from one country to another. So for Yoro to play his talking drum to a Senegalese rhythm, that’s going to be very interesting and very unique just on its own. So we meet around rhythm, because we all understand rhythm.”

Rhythm is not all that these performers have in common. While they all hail from different countries, they share a common tongue. In Essombé’s own native land, which is home to some 250 indigenous cultures and as many different languages, French (and to a somewhat lesser extent English, the nation’s other official language) helps unite a very diverse population.

“It’s a chance for us to show and represent the fact that la francophonie is not just in France and in Switzerland and in Quebec,” she says of the World Music Fusion project. “It’s also all across Africa, more specifically in West and Central Africa. Those are the places where French is the language that we all [use to] communicate with one another.”

For Essombé, the project is a chance to immerse herself in a fully francophone creative environment, which is a rarity in Vancouver.

“I’ve noticed that whenever we’ve done work where it has been a francophone project, it has brought out something else,” she says. “You can just be more of yourself without having to translate anything in your mind.”

> JOHN LUCAS

The Festival d’été francophone de Vancouver’s World Music Fusion features performances on Friday, Saturday, and Tuesday (June 23, 24, and 27) at various venues in Vancouver and North Vancouver. See www.lecentre culturel.com/ for full details.