Two-man band feels ‘like royalty’ coming back to Canada
Twelve years playing together, being pigeonholed as ‘blues’ act has led duo to some reinvention
The Harpoonist and the Axe Murderer have come a long way, baby, from their acoustic-blues roots to the inspired psychedelic mutant-R&B sprawl of last year’s thoroughly enjoyable fourth LP Apocalipstick, but all that progress comes with a real physical cost.
Harmonica-slingin’ singer Shawn Hall (the Harpoonist) and hot-to-trot guitarist Matthew Rogers (the Axe Murderer) are but two people onstage, after all. They’re already playing an assortment of percussion instruments with their feet on top of their other musical duties. Each trick they add to their live arsenal — to keep up to speed with HarpAxe’s continuously evolving sound and expanding sonic palette — basically means they’ve gotta strap something else to their bodies.
“You don’t have eight people to choose from. It’s been a really, really neat group to play in that way because there’s room for us to be able to bring new stuff in, but at the same rate it makes it scary to try to expand,” says the gregarious Hall from his basement on Vancouver Island. “The benchmark’s pretty high now. We’re a little bit terrified to look like monkeys onstage.
“For instance, what do I love? I love ’80s hip-hop hand claps, so how do I bring that in organically with my feet without going through, like, a triggered MIDI thing or bringing in synths? ‘Oh, here’s a guy that makes spatulas that go together that sound like claps.’
“‘All right, well, let’s bring that in and I’m gonna throw that on my left foot.’ Honestly, you’re working with one appendage at a time. ‘OK, how are the hand claps?’ ‘I don’t know if they were so good.’ ‘All right, next!’ And then you try something else. I just started playing bass with my voice through a Vocoder.”
Necessity is clearly the mother of invention. And on Apocalipstick, the Harpoonist and the Axe Murderer — now approaching their 12th year as a band, which Hall likens to “a 40-year marriage” — found it necessary to reinvent themselves a bit, if only because they were growing tired of being reductively pigeonholed as a “blues” act.
Not that Hall and Rogers are antiblues or anything. Hell, they’re up for three awards at the Toronto Blues Society’s Maple Blues Awards on Jan. 15 at Koerner Hall, which is why they’re also gracing Toronto once again with their blazing two-man live show at the Great Hall on Saturday. But, as one can hear on Apocalipstick, largely co-written with Rogers’ singer/songwriter brother Ben, there are a great deal more influences than, say, just Little Walter and Muddy Waters filtering down into the mix these days, from reggae and ska to prog and Sly Stone-esque cosmic soul.
“We’ve had an interesting career because we’re ‘in’ with the blues societies,” Hall says. “Not that, you know, that’s like being in with the cool kids or not being in with the cool kids, but we are because we do roots-based music and we’re not a pop band. There’s not a lot of smoke and mirrors going on (with) synths. When it’s live, it’s a different entity. But on record you can do whatever the hell you want because it’s a completely different field, right?
“We’ve gained a reputation from hitting the trenches and hanging out with all the last people to leave the festival.” SHAWN HALL THE HARPOONIST
“So this time we were all in my basement over on Vancouver Island sitting around the piano, and we hashed out around 40 ideas and dwindled them down to whatever’s on the record. We wanted more of a narrative and we wanted to get a lot freakier, and pull out of the blues world and pull into more of the obscurities that are just the f---ing reality of what’s going on out there and take it out of the more traditional route that we were taking before . . . The amount of hip-hop and reggae influences that I have in my life certainly haven’t really gone down into the band. There’s a lot of stuff that’s in the wings, right? And we’re just gonna start exploring more and more and more and seeing if we can blend it in, in an authentic way, not just like ‘Here’s a guest appearance by Toots and the Maytals!’ ”
Just to further make the point that they are not “blues traditionalists,” the Harpoonist and the Axe Murderer’s next release will be an album’s worth of remixed material from Apocalipstick, entitled — wait for it — Post-Apocalipstick. The band plans to have it out just before they return to Europe for another run of humbling “150-Euro-a-night” gigs in March.
“That’s gonna be pretty wicked. That’s gonna be dubbed-out songs completely reimagined,” Hall says.
“Everything’s been stripped off the record. Matt and I ended up remixing it as opposed to sending it off and spending thousands with other producers. We decided that we would completely reimagine what the record would be. It’s a fair bit druggier and, in terms of freedom of creativity, we’re really letting that shine. It’s pretty electronic.”
Touring overseas might provide Hall and Rogers with a periodic dose of hardscrabble reality, but at least it enables them to feel “like royalty” when they come home to Canada — where, it should be said, they’ve only reached the point where they can play reasonably sized venues such as the Great Hall because they’ve put in nearly 12 years of honest, hard work. They’ve never been the “hype” band; they’ve just been very good and kept at it until people paid attention.
“It’s a super-Canadian curve, in a way,” Hall laughs.
“I think of other hard-working bands we’re good buds with, like the Deep Dark Woods and Royal Canoe — we’re accessible to the CBC and college radio, but do you hit the mark on pop radio? Not really. That’s a pretty strange thing. That’s a hard thing to look at if you’re not in the AutoTune realm of music production.
“So, no, we’ve never been the ‘hype’ band. We’ve gained a reputation from hitting the trenches and hanging out with all the last people to leave the festival — for better or for goddamn worse.
“This Great Hall gig is probably our favourite-looking show that we’ve done. We feel like it’s time to step out of the bars in Toronto. We’ll always go back to them, but it’s time to step out of them and do something a little classier. My mom’s 74. She needs a classy venue.”