One for the SKID KIDS
Critics love the debut album Death Lust by Brandon Williams’ rock band Chastity, but the Whitby native really wants to reach another audience
Chastity’s debut LP, Death Lust, was conceived by bandleader Brandon Williams with a somewhat specific “audience of one” in mind, so it’s been a bit of a revelation for him to witness the numbers who fit that description whilst touring the record upwards from the lower west coast of the U.S. since its release three weeks ago.
Hell, it’s been a revelation to encounter an enthusiastic and engaged audi- ence outside of the localized DIY-punk circuits Chastity — playing the Camp Wavelength festival at Fort York in Toronto next weekend — has intermittently traced over the past three years or so at all.
“Which is new,” concedes a sleepdeprived Williams, stopping over in Toronto for a day earlier this week to record some vocals on a planned split single with Spanish punks Mourn with producer Josh Korody at Candle Studios after an overnight drive from Cleveland en route to dates in Montreal and Boston.
“I mean, southern Ontario has been fine and maybe the northeast has been fine. But that was just my first time playing L.A. and to have a patch of kids showing up and enthusiastic about it all was quite moving.
“Los Angeles and San Francisco, they feel like quite faraway places from Whitby, to me.
“So for it to happen and for it to have resonated there is …”
He trails off, as Williams often does in careful search of the perfect word or phrase to enunciate what he’s trying to get across, although usually he tends to settle on “le mot juste” after verbally rewriting his sentences a few times on the fly.
He’s an obviously thoughtful chap — “I’m always trying to see it in print while I’m saying it,” he apologizes at one point, unnecessarily.
He’s also as sweet and as giving of himself in an interview with a semi-stranger as one might think he would be after weathering the open-hearted storm of catharsis that is Death Lust.
He gives a lot of himself on that record. Although we’ve chatted via email a few times, I knew few biographical details about Williams going into our chat. However, I wondered on the walk to Candle on Thursday while listening again to Death Lust — a breathtaking metallopunk opus released last month via Royal Mountain Records in Canada and Brooklyn label Captured Tracks in the States and overseas that’s easily one of the finest albums to come out of Greater Toronto or anywhere else so far in 2018 — if he might have been raised in a religious home, given the interrogation of the concepts of Heaven and Hell that often intrudes upon its harrowing meditations on loss, mortality, depression and the impulse to suicide. Turns out he was.
Williams “grew up in the church,” first learning music on a variety of brass instruments, before discovering punk rock and skateboarding and “finding my way into another sort of sanctuary that fit better” through the community that congregated around muchloved Oshawa underground venue the Dungeon. That, he says, set him on a path where the idea of “Hey, we’re able to build this thing ourselves and make a difference socially to a number of people, even just in this immediate community” was central.
By Grade 6, he’d already kind of idolized the guys who went to Anderson Collegiate up the hill from his school who played in a band called Happy Go Lucky — “guys in dark clothes with long hair talking about politics and doing the whole trench coat, steel-toe-boot thing” — and who would go on to form internationally acclaimed Whitby avant-punk outfit Protest the Hero. Finding such fellowship in the east-905 punk scene in tandem with witnessing a hometown outfit as mercilessly uncompromising as Protest the Hero succeed on a global stage left a deep mark on Williams. He’s fiercely Whitby proud, and has devoted much of his time to fostering the same sort of underground community in the suburbs that he had access to during his youth.
Of late, he’s organized shows at a barn on the edge of Whitby known as Ashburn Green — Chastity was double-billed with one of his personal Toronto faves, METZ, back in April, for instance, while PUP played there last October — but he also once staged a Chastity show in his bedroom until the police showed up. He’s not longing to escape the ’burbs as so many have before him; he’d rather coax the downtown outward. He’s got something big planned for that barn, something we probably shouldn’t talk about yet but that will indulge the filmmaker side he’s shown in Chastity’s many, astutely drawn video vignettes of suburbia to a spectacular degree. In the meantime, however, Chastity hits Camp Wavelength on Aug. 18.
“I want to represent Whitby,” he says. “The thing is, there are thousands of Whitbys and millions of skid kids like me, y’know?”
Chastity on Death Lust — which is already drawing some seriously positive international praise from critics and will have Williams and his bandmates (Julia Noel, Jeremy Ramos-Foley and Sam McDougall) on the road on both sides of the Atlantic until the end of the year — and its similarly eclectic, if more concise, EP predecessors sounds like what you’d expect from someone who grew up absorbing the glossier end of the grunge era (think Smashing Pumpkins or Jawbreaker) and the non-icky reaches of nümetal through the Big Shiny Tunes- era before happening upon the self-actualizing potential of hardcore. Williams concurs with the assessment.
“I obviously grew up on the internet and I think there was a lot to absorb there and lots of access, all of a sudden, to looking back on things. Like, a band like Refused had been long broken up when I first heard them,” he offers. “So I think it’s sort of ‘Whitby by view of my computer.’ I think that’s maybe what has happened with Chastity because I’ve just sort of been on the internet all day for the last 10 years or whatever — in Whitby, though, you know what I mean?”
Back to that “audience of one” thing, then. First hearing a cer- tain singer/songwriter “be so real about anxiety and battling our chemicals” also made a dent on Williams.
“I felt less alone listening to someone like Fiona Apple,” he says, and he hopes that he can connect with the listeners who might find kinship and a passage out from the depths through Death Lust — “a nonfiction concept record” — in a similar manner. “I wrote it, to be honest, for this ‘audience of one.’ I think great songwriters write for an audience of one, and I think that audience is maybe my younger self, sort of ‘in the struggle.’ And I just want to be in the struggle with that person.
“I think the message of Death Lust is sort of about the availability and the option of death but then by the end of the record choosing life instead. I wanted to sort of deep-dive into the reality of the feeling, but outside of that ‘pinned down by this death feeling,’ this deathobsessed thing on the record, I hope there’s relief. And there is in real life … It’s about the availability, ultimately, of survival. I know the record’s called Death Lust but I hope, by the end of the record, the message is about returning to our core and living, you know?”
I hope so.
“I think great songwriters write for an audience of one, and I think that audience is maybe my younger self, sort of ‘in the struggle.’ ” BRANDON WILLIAMS CHASTITY FRONTMAN