Age of Electric never ends
Hard rock has been very good to Todd Kerns.
The bassist for Slash and the Conspirators, and enduring Las Vegas party band Sin City Sinners, says he’s been extremely fortunate to make a career out of plugging in and turning up.
“Every time you come back to North America, you get the whole ‘rock-is-dead’ routine, but I’ve been around the world a few times with Slash and let me tell you that rock is alive, well and kicking ass in Brazil, in Europe, in Asia,” Kerns said. “The demand for it here is plenty strong as well, and there is constant renewal in the audience. I see a lot of young faces.”
There certainly is demand for the kind of rock Kerns makes as guitarist and singer with Age of Electric.
The band featuring Todd’s brother, John Kerns, on bass, as well as guitarist Ryan Dahle (Mounties) and drummer Kurt Dahle (The New Pornographers) roared out of Saskatchewan in 1989.
Constant touring built the band a following and, in 1993, the group had its commercial breakthrough with the Ugly EP.
That recording spawned the radio staples Ugly and Untitled. The band signed with Universal Records Canada and with Mercury in the U.S. for global distribution and hits such as Remote Control from 1997’s Make a Pest a Pet followed. By 1999, the group had dissolved.
The Dahle brothers’ Limblifter project was a Juno Award-winning success, as was the Kerns brothers’ next band, Static in Stereo.
Through the years and various projects, the members kept in touch. In 2015, Age of Electric reunited for a show in Calgary. It was so much fun the musicians decided to reboot the band, release a special 20th-anniversary edition of Make a Pest a Pet, featuring a never-before-released song titled Th13teen. There is also a new, four-song EP that came out in February on We Are Busy Bodies.
“Todd and I had been getting together and tossing ideas around for the last 10 years or so and the four songs on the EP all came out of that, playing around in my studio,” Ryan Dahle said. “People had been hounding us to do something and to play some shows, and we’d been saying no because we had quite amicably split to move on to do other things, and were. But then it happened we were all available and some dates came into place and we were all into it.”
Both Kerns and Dahle seem genuine in their compliments about fellow band members and the projects they have gone onto.
Age of Electric was always something all felt strongly had maintained an extremely high level of quality, and reuniting without being completely committed was never an option.
Ryan notes, “when it’s your brothers, you kind of give more of a damn about what they think and how they are doing, and I’m proud that we always worked with the interests of all four of us being primary.”
If a recent sold-out show in Toronto was any indication, the band should prepare for the tour by bringing extra merchandise. That Hogtown hoedown saw everything sell out at the merch booth before the band even came on stage.
What is it that gives Age of Electric that kind of pull? Trying to put a finger on it proves difficult for both Kerns and Dahle.
“Kurt and I were playing in bands and living this touring lifestyle while our younger brothers were still in high school and we were always saying that, ‘Hey, your brother plays drums, my brother plays bass, we should really do something with them,’ ” Todd Kerns said. “When it finally happened, it was already a thing everybody was into. I was a bassist, but John had picked up one of my old ones and become so much better than me, so I moved up front to do the Paul Stanley thing and it just clicked.”