MARK LEPAGE SAYS GIVE AN EAR TO WHAT LOCAL BANDS ARE PLANNING FOR 2013,
Mark Lepage looks at what Montreal bands of all stripes have on tap for 2013,
Lucky ’13.
From the Last Supper to the hangman’s noose, it has been a controversial number. But it’s going to be somebody’s year.
Against mighty odds, we made it through Mayapocalypse 12-21-12. The hatches were battened. Now they reopen on the regular season, the one that matters: the local rock season, where the pickhandlers emerge from their studios and rehearsal dives to suit up and leave everything they’ve got onstage.
The further we get from any credible critical mass of great major-label mainstream rock ’n’ roll bands, the more important they become. You’re going to listen to something in 2013, and there’s only so much Taylor Swift you can gorge on. And she won’t be in Divan Orange or Popolo anytime soon, where you can reach out and touch the musicians ... figuratively, of course. Don’t touch them. Unless they touch you ...
This list can’t pretend to be comprehensive — there are too many bands in too many genres, some of them hiding under Internet rocks where they can’t be found — but it’s a fair idea of who’s doing what in 2013 on the local scene. Some may end up on Letterman or in Rolling Stone. Some hope for a review in Pitchfork. There are relative newcomers, like Saxsyndrum and the Leamers, others like Suuns and UBT who hope to build on recent or semi-recent successes. Some will play Osheaga. Some will play Barfly. Most will be somewhere in between, rolling the 13-sided die to see where they land.
There are lifers like Rick Trembles and Montreal postpunk institution American Devices, who’ve been doing this since rotary phones and will continue to beyond the time we get the jetpacks the futurists promised us. Trembles himself expresses it best. “While he was still 50 years old throughout 2012, Rick Trembles was hoping to complete the book he was writing about his 35-plus-year cartooning career and how it has cross-pollinated with the American Devices, but life got in the way.” He catalogues his own annus horribilis of 2012, losing an apartment and job (both of 14 years) and battling on regardless. Trembles “continues to write and hopes 51 is the magic number for completion. 51 is 15 spelled backwards, after all, which is around the age (I) started cartooning seriously and fantasizing about punk rock.”
Collectively, they are an object lesson in the twin poles of indie musicianship and semi-career: tenacity and lassitude, talent and whimsy, professionalism and amateur-hour, future promise and likely disappearance. Playing as a band vs. just being in one. The contemporary musician has issues his or her predecessor never did. That old knee-slapper about the club manager not paying you for the gig? Now the Internet won’t pay you for the song, either. And so there is an implied request or invitation for someone to complete the energy circuit, from band to listener. That’s you. The same way writers need readers. Because nobody gets into this because they don’t care.
Proto-post-punk survivalists American Devices celebrate 33 years of dogged, diligent musical perversity with a show Feb. 8 in Divan Orange. They’ll also be creating a DIY video of new songs, with “home video photography of the band’s singer lip-synching most likely in his kitchen set to go into fullblown production any day
now.” Said singer-guitarist Rick Trembles also plays in Sacral Nerves.
Arcade Fire are recording. We know not where, nor what, but a record is due this year. More crucial to the Montreal audience, they’ll be at Kanaval, the annual Haiti carnival, Feb. 23 at the PHI Centre on St. Pierre St.
Andrew Whiteman (Broken Social Scene) and wife, Ariel Engle, a.k.a. AroarA, create “digital faux-folk,” most recently inspired by American poet Alice Notley’s book In The Pines. First five-song EP is due March 12 on ClubRoll, followed by touring. Dreamy franco-folksters
Avec pas d’casque have an EP, Dommage que tu sois pris, due Feb. 5 (Dare to Care). Guessing the launch is in Église St. Jean Baptiste on Feb. 8, which could be a busy night.
Like an old Prince video come to life, post-disco performer Jef Barbara drops spacey ’80s Minneapolis and androgynous sprechge sang in the Post-Exposure EP, March 26. Certainly, there will be cabaret-style gigs. Engaging folkies the Barr
Brothers, who appeared on David Letterman’s show in 2012, will record with no fixed release date. Force of nature the
Besnard Lakes draw raves everywhere and are likely to do so again with fourth album
Until tible UFO, In Excess, which we Impercep- expect to be customarily oceanic.
coast BMF hardcore” is a “straight-up side project east coming from Slaves On Dope frontman and CHOM DJ Jason Rockman. We’d spell out the acronym, but we’d be fired. The B is for “Bald” …
The Dears are in the very first stages of making a new album, playing song ideas to one another. The fun part. Aside from the onstage adulation, I mean.
Raga-rockers Elephant
Stone have a new album out Feb. 5 on Hidden Pony/Reverberation Appreciation Society, and will play CMW and SXSW with ... the Zombies. Yow. A North American tour follows in spring with the Black Angels.
The Fabulous LoLo is Queen of Ska Lorraine Muller’s rankin’ 10-piece porkpie orch, planning a rare local show mid-March and a possible short European tour as a solo singer backed by an existing European rocksteady band.
Garage pop-rockers FFud — not to be confused with the Forum For Urban Design — follow an idle 2012 with “new songs, a regular practice space, plans to record early in the year and finally play a gig on a street other than St. Laurent.”
Filthy Haanz drop their EP April 23. Their wooze-rock
distantly recalls The Good, The Bad and The Queen, or some other Albarn project. I said distantly.
Danceable, sophisticated post-wavoids First You Get
The Sugar kicked the year off with a show last Friday in Divan Orange and will troop out to CMW and NXNE and release new material without a fixed date yet. Can’t go wrong with threepart harmonies.
Godspeed You! Black Emperor follow the critically acclaimed Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend! album with an Australia/New Zealand tour in February 2013.
Former Starvin Hungry guitarist Scott Mucklow has a new classic rock-influenced band called Half
Measures, self-described as having an Alabama Shakes thing goin’ on thanks to harmonies with lead singer Amanda Bechard.
Half Moon Run, last year’s breakout band, continue to break out — freshly signed to New York’s Glassnote Entertainment (Mumford & Sons, Phoenix), touring and writing/recording in Australia, they have 10 shows in Que./Ont., SXSW and a major opening slot on a European tour in spring with a major headliner.
Giddy electro-garage pop
sters Les Handclaps are writing new material to follow up last year’s digital remix album on iTunes, and
brainstorming what Lorraine Muller calls “two very separate and different ideas for live performances in order to offer two distinct shows to our fans!”
The High Dials get higher, awaiting spring release of the Andrew Loog Oldham Orchestra project — yes, Oldham of Stones fame. The band recorded a cover of Between the Buttons song She Smiled Sweetly. Other artists involved: Gryff Rhys (Super Furry Animals), Johnny Marr (the Smiths), Al Kooper, Elliot Easton (the Cars). They’ve got a new psych-rock album due as well, produced by Marc Bell.
Phillip Karneef sounds like he has heard of David Byrne and reveals influences along those Beefheartian lines with the In Error album, due April 9.
Patrick Krief ’s album, Hundred Thousand Pieces, gets U.S. release March 5 via Rock Ridge Music, followed by an American tour, 21 gigs down to L.A. and back through Texas. The Montreal gig is in Casa Del Popolo Jan. 25.
Lyrical folksters Lakes of Canada, now a quintet, follow the ringing Toll The Bell album with a second release, will do CMW and tour the northeast corridor. Took home Greenland’s “Band of the Fringe” award at the 2012 Montreal Fringe Festival.
With Devil Eyes on hiatus, Matt Lee has a new band,
Leamers, cranking the psych/garage, their own label, Talking Skull, two crunch-raunch releases (Year of the Rabbit and Magic, Yo), a 10-inch vinyl coming, a Divan Orange show Feb. 8 with American Devices and a long U.S. tour in October/ November. Engaging indie rockists
Parlovr have finished a video for the single Just Marriage from the Kook Soul album (great titles!) and will tour throughout the year. If the new video is anything like the incandescent one for Pen to the Paper, they win. Roy “Choyce” Vuccino and Red Mass have been working on a debut full-length album, A Hopeless Noise, the story of a woman who loses everything, deludes herself that she’s rich and “becomes a perverse and cruel creature of the night.” Whittling down from 150 songs (!) and will “release this monster of a record, tour everywhere and complete 4-5 videos.”
Thoughtful singer/songwriter Bud Rice readies a CD and has a show at Grumpy’s Jan. 26 and one in New York at Rockwood Music Hall Jan. 31. Fun horn/beats duo Sax-syndrum launch Vol. 1 of a mixtape-mashups series called ReMash on Jan. 21, and an Indiegogo campaign to raise money for a full-length album due in the spring. Summer means festivals. Montreal metallions Slaves
On Dope celebrate their 20th anniversary Feb. 5 with an EP of covers featuring five songs by Faith No More, Sheriff, Marvin Gaye, Genesis and Loverboy. A new album drops in summer. Primal psyche-tranceoids Suuns release the eagerly awaited Images du future album March 5, launched in La Sala Rossa April 4, followed by a looong Euro tour. Chamber pop band Sweet
Mother Logic are woodshedding new material for an autumn EP.
It’s garage-alt and it’s retro-prog, and it’s now UBT, shortened (thankfully) from Uncle Bad Touch. Mikey Heppner’s non-Priestess, non-Zappa band has a new album due, recorded in Adrian Popovich’s studio (Sam Roberts, the Dears, etc).
Electroprimitivists We Are Wolves have an as-yet untitled album due Feb. 12 on Dare To Care Records.
Swoonsters Young Galaxy release new album Ultramarine worldwide on April 23, recorded in Gothenburg, Sweden, with Dan Lissvik.