Zeus’s retro tag a bit of a myth
The words “retro” and “revivalist” cling to Zeus like a bad odour — look, there they are again — when, really, the Toronto-via-Barrie quartet just deserves to be known as a rock ’n’ roll band.
Zeus plays rock music that sounds like, y’know, rock music. It’s not a punk band or a New Wave band or a synth-pop band or a metal band or an indie-folk orchestra, it’s a rock band. Traditionalist? Yes, but just because these four favour the sort of guitar-rock so beloved by Q107 listeners doesn’t mean they want to drag us all back to 1972 and pretend the past 40 years never happened.
One could raise the argument that there’s something post-modern and 21st-century about the manner in which Zeus’s fine second album, Busting Visions, stitches together a wealth of good ideas pilfered from the entire arc of rock history. You need distance from the source material to collage this cerebrally.
In any case, Zeus — which concludes its first headlining tour of Canada at the Phoenix on Saturday night — has learned to live with the “retro” thing, even if it’s still a bit of a reductionist pain in the ass.
“We work in a certain idiom, I guess,” shrugs Mike O’Brien, who shares vocals and a multitude of instrumental duties with fellow Zeus songwriters Neil Quin and Carlin Nicholson. “The type of music that we make is basically a product of the music that we grew up on. It’s not something that we shy away from or make apologies for, either — it’s just the music that we make. “When you spend a year working on an album and writing the songs and working on the arrangements and recording . . . and then it gets reduced to ‘They’re a retro band’ or ‘They’re rehashing this,’ you can take it a little bit personally. But for your own sanity, you have to take that stuff with a grain of salt.”
At least Zeus isn’t alone out there. As O’Brien notes, there is “a little bit of a resurgence of that type of music going on right now,” with the Sheepdogs and Yukon Blonde also flying the flag for meat-and-taters rawk in Canada.
Mind you, on Busting Visions — a dizzyingly dense bricolage of the Beatles, Queen, the Who, Badfinger, Love, Harry Nilsson and other fleeting points of reference too numerous to get a grip on — Zeus proves itself the class act of the pack, steering clear of cheap-’n’easy riff-rock thrills in favour of intricate, ornate, harmony-draped pop craftsmanship.
The band is fond of calling it “the first real Zeus album.” 2010’s Say Us was good enough to get Zeus signed to thriving local indie label Arts & Crafts and establish the foursome as a force in its own right, more than just Jason Collett’s sometime backing band or the band that Afie “Bahamas” Jurvanen used to be in — but it was finished before anyone involved knew Zeus was a band.
“The first one was kind of an accidental thing, a studio experiment that became the band,” recalls O’Brien. “We all had previous bands and we were just sort of frustrated . . . and feeling a little bit stagnant so we just started working on new tunes together.
“Just to get them out of our heads, not for any other purpose.”