Age of Days evolve but stay true to roots
AT A GLANCE Age of Days plays Halloween Howler Saturday at the Grey Eagle Casino.
It’s fun to imagine the massive apparatus behind Halloween Howler rolling into town.
There are four bands involved in the event, which takes place at the Grey Eagle Casino on Saturday. That includes headliners Stone Temple Pilots, South African altrockers Seether, Vancouver post grungers Default and Calgarybased rockers Age of Days.
Needless to say, none of these acts are DIY indie-folkies travelling by Greyhound. So it’s easy to picture an operation as big as the bands’ collective sound rumbling from city to city.
“We’re not literally travelling in a convoy,” says Age of Days vocalist Tim Morrison with a laugh. “I will say the STP and Seether guys have a pretty substantial crew with trucks and trailers and buses and et cetera. But it’s fun. It’s like a big family on the road.”
Age of Days began life nearly 15 years ago in Fredericton. While they have certainly evolved in that time, the band’s mastery of the larger-than-life, guitar-driven howl of modern hard rock has made them a reliable support act for similar-minded brethren such as Papa Roach, Buckcherry and Disturbed.
“We’ve stuck true to our course,” Morrison says. “We’re a rock band and we’re always going to be a rock band. That’s the trajectory that we chose.”
Still, they have tweaked their sound since Morrison and bassist Matt McLaughlin formed the band as Age of Daze back in 2005. That much is clear on its newest single, a thundering take on Swedish pop duo Roxette’s late-’80s pop-rock hit The Look.
The song, which comes complete with an old-school, sexy-women-in-sports-car video, is the leadoff single for the band’s third record, currently being recorded in Los Angeles. It features Morrison sharing vocals with Butcher Babies’ Heidi Shepherd on the track.
It was meant to mark a slightly new direction for the act.
“We wanted to put something out so people could hear the new evolution of the band,” Morrison says.
“There are a lot of digital aspects to The Look and there is going forward in the new material we are writing. We figured we’d do something fun, something people wouldn’t expect from us.”
Morrison relocated the band from Toronto to Calgary five years ago, adding local drummer Harvey Warren and guitarist Darren Schofield to the lineup, helping maintain the band’s trademark hard-rock attack on stage.
“The way we approach our recording is that we don’t record anything we can’t play live,” Morrison says.
“I know for a lot of bands, the theory is to do whatever you can in the studio and then figure out how to (play it live) later.
“We start off writing songs acoustically. If it doesn’t translate into an acoustic format, it doesn’t make the cut.”