Scene veteran finds musical inspiration in Twin Peaks roadhouse
The seeds of High Parade can be traced back to the dark, ominous roadhouse in the disorienting third season of David Lynch’s cult series Twin Peaks.
Not literally. Presumably, the Calgary five-piece has never set foot in the place.
But as fans know, the 2017 reboot/third season of the 1990s cult series featured a different band playing the fictional venue at the end of most episodes. There was a wide variety of music on display, everything from Portland’s synthpop outfit Chromatics to Minneapolis folk band The Cactus Blossoms, to a terrifically nightmarish performance by Nine Inch Nails and an angsty, acoustic one by Eddie Vedder.
The audience would usually hear a song in its entirety, which is a rarity for television. After an hour or so of the bizarre, violent and often inscrutable action of Lynch’s comedy-drama-horror, these episode-ending segments seemed to bring an unsettling sense of foreboding to the series that transcended genre and helped elevate Lynch’s avantgarde vision.
High Parade guitarist Aaron Smelski, a 20-year-plus veteran of the Calgary music scene, was a fan of both the original and rebooted series. When the mind-boggling, two-hour season première ended with a trippy performance by the Chromatics, he felt a certain clarity about what he wanted to do next.
The news release for the band’s debut EP, The Ocean, even reveals that one of the main goals of High Parade is “to create music worthy of Twin Peaks’ Roadhouse.”
“It just hit me,” says Smelski, in an interview from his Calgary home. “I thought ‘I know how to play this music. This music speaks to me and I know how to write this. I know how to do this.’ I just thought I had to get a band together to do this. It just recharged me. Every episode they would have another band that was just amazing. Seeing that line or theme between bands made me think that I want to get a band together that could capture the feel that the Roadhouse had. It was this idea, not just a band, but a musical project. How do you orchestrate a sound, an atmosphere, a whole feel around that? That’s what jump-started it.”
You don’t have to be a fan of Twin Peaks to appreciate the guitar-pop craft and haunting atmospherics of The Ocean, a seven-song (plus one remix) EP produced by Calgary ’s Lorrie Matheson. Still, High Parade would have slipped nicely into the sonic scenery of Twin Peaks, offering a fully formed dream-pop sound that mixes the hypnotic vocals of keyboardist Sheila Lacey with the interlocking guitar lines and arpeggios of Smelski and Lucien Lahey.
With lyrics penned by Lacey, the eight tracks tend to be variations of love songs. The bright, melodic pop of Ghost hides some dark sentiments. Throbbing opener The Waves recalls Smelski’s roots in 1990s shoegaze, while the fragile haunting indie-pop of Perfume builds to a soaring chorus. The act carries hints of everything from early Rilo Kiley, to 1980s-era REM,
to the sophisticated indie-pop of Wye Oak’s latest record.
“Approaching this album, it was very much about how to write a good pop song, but assuring that it still punches where it needs to punch,” Smelski says. “It still needed to have that raw rock feel to it as well.”
While he has a long history in Calgary’s indie-music scene, Smelski wanted to find some new blood for High Parade. He first entered the scene in the mid-1990s playing in lush, Britpop-flavoured acts such as Lotus Galaxy and Sky Suspended, before playing guitar for the more aggressive post-punk act Hot Little Rocket and, most recently, indie “supergroup” Star City Lights with former Sky Suspended bandmate Aaron Booth.
“I almost wanted to start over with this band,” Smelski says. “I threw out an ad on Kijiji, of all things. I wanted to see who is new out there. Sometimes you just get into your own small circle of musicians,
I thought ‘I know how to play this music. This music speaks to me and I know how to write this. I know how to do this.’
and I wanted to see who else was making music out there. I found Sheila on Kijiji after advertising I was looking for a female vocalist.”
He sent demos to Lacey, who had played in Calgary’s all-ages scene and once fronted a metallic punk band called Executioner’s Daughter. She was keen to explore a different sort of musical terrain. High Parade, which also includes bassist Jesse McWilliams and drummer Jonathan Pynn, entered Matheson’s Arch Audio studio in the summer to record the eight tracks. They will hold a CD release party at the King Eddy on Nov. 2.
“I’ve kept in mind the idea of how to have that project atmosphere, of putting a show together on stage,” Smelski says. “We’ve rehearsed that, how to have some songs move into one another. Down to dress, down to atmosphere, down to presentation on stage, there’s this idea that we are trying to create a show for somebody, that we’ve thoroughly thought this out …
“That’s really what I wanted to do with this band, beyond just four guys in jeans and T-shirts on stage. Which is fine, there’s some awesome bands that still have that vibe. But we wanted to do something different here.”