Sam Roberts dancing to his own tune
Sam Roberts is a true believer in rock ’n’ roll. Very few who have witnessed his band’s all-in revival meetings would dispute this. Those witnesses can also testify to Roberts’ belief that music can move you.
“I was a university student in the ’90s in Montreal,” Roberts said last week at an Old Montreal hotel. “There was very little rock ’n’ roll happening on the surface. For better or for worse, it was dance, and that was our Friday night: We’d go to Sona and we’d go dancing.
“I like to dance, and I want people to dance.”
Stretch the genre’s parameters beyond raves and slap bass, and the Sam Roberts Band is very much a dance band — never more so than on Lo-Fantasy, available Tuesday. It’s Roberts’ fifth album and the second credited to his quintet rather than to him alone.
From the skeletal funk of Shapeshifters to Golden Hour’s hypnotic drift, the group moves to more than one beat — and not at the expense of songcraft.
“Sometimes the melody will pull you along and sometimes the rhythm pulls you along,” Roberts said, “and I find more and more — on the last few records, anyway — the rhythm is what’s driving me to keep writing.”
It was clearly a motivating force on Collider (2011), a daring but tentative departure from Roberts’ jean-jacketed heroism. The guitars were tense rather than cocky, and the horn riffs and skittering percussion added an air of nervous anticipation.
“We didn’t go all the way, I’ll admit it fully, on that record,” Roberts said. “There will always be a place in my heart for that record because of what we realized we wanted to do. Maybe we just didn’t know how to do it, or didn’t have the courage to fully do it.”
Courage can’t be lacking when you enlist Martin (Youth) Glover as producer. As one would expect of the bassist for post-punk warlocks Killing Joke, Paul McCartney’s collaborator in the experimental electronica duo the Fireman and an authority on a host of dance-music sub-genres, the British polymath brought strong opinions and a strong personality to the Lo-Fantasy sessions.
“He’s there to create a mindset, to create an environment, more than he is to nitpick over which notes fit with which notes,” Roberts said. “He’s there to destabilize, disrupt, rebuild a band in a way they’ve never seen themselves before. And we didn’t sign on for that knowingly — it just became apparent that this is how he works.”
Roberts’ easy laugh makes it clear that the tension between band and producer ended up being a positive force. He affectionately speaks of Youth as both a steamroller and a free spirit — a producer who didn’t hesitate to tear up his charges’ sketches, but would create interpretive oil paintings of the band’s songs.