Canadian band’s hit tapped into U.S. political tenor before election
Wintersleep’s new album comes after a long layoff to deal with management changes and kids
Sometimes it’s good to be right, sometimes it’s not. Sometimes you land somewhere in between.
A Donald Trump presidential campaign, let alone an actual Donald Trump presidency, was still the stuff of satire and dystopian science-fiction three years ago when expat Haligonians-in-Montreal Paul Murphy and Wintersleep started tricking around with a line from the Walt Whitman poem “America” — “Perennial with the Earth, with Freedom, Law and Love” — in search of a refrain to what would become their hit single “Amerika.”
It was a species of score, then, when the song’s symbolist lament for shattered ideals (“I can’t survive on my Amerika / If the worst is true / Is it just a waste of time? . . . Are you alive, oh my Amerika?”) preternaturally tapped into the tenor of uncertain times south of the border and consequently everywhere else upon release last January. And a score, of sorts, again when the tune’s accompanying, apocalyptic video — which drops a snippet of a Trump campaign speech into a mini-movie about humanity’s desultory reaction to its own imminent death from above — arrived in late April.
Either way, Wintersleep has a hit on its hands. Maybe its biggest hit to date. “Amerika” has, at present, logged more than a million streams on Spotify. It’s taken the band’s previous biggie, “Weighty Ghost,” nine years to get to 2.7 million. Do the math.
Frontman Murphy isn’t exactly celebrating the circumstances of Wintersleep’s current run at the charts — “Amerika” also reached No. 1 on Billboard’s Canadian rock songs chart last spring — but he’ll take it.
“It’s amazing. It’s weird. It’s a crazy thing,” he says of hitting the million-stream mark. “It’s one of those things where, like, my dad actually knows that, for some reason . . . I don’t even know what it means. We’ll get a cheque for 50 bucks or something, I’m sure.”
“Amerika” aside, Wintersleep returned from a long layoff in top shape this year with its sixth album, The Great Detachment.
Produced by Scotsman and sometime Mogwai/Belle and Sebastian/ Delgados associate Tony Doogan, Detachment is a big, blustery collection of modern-rock anthems that, were it a little less idiosyncratic and given a push toward the mainstream (which indie Dine Alone Records isn’t quite capable of ), could easily fit the needs of U2-lovin’ populist CanCon audiences abandoned by the Ar- cade Fire after The Suburbs.
Geddy Lee himself agreed to play bass on “Territory.”
In any case. Murphy and his bandmates, secret-weapon guitarist Tim D’Eon and drummer Loel Campbell, have a gift for writing immediate but deceptively deep songs that tease you for awhile before completely taking over. And Doogan, behind the boards for his fourth consecutive Wintersleep record since 2007’s breakthrough Welcome to the Night Sky, knows exactly how to bring some British Sea Power-esque Britrock grandeur to material that still audibly traces its roots to Halifax’s proud noise-pop heritage and East Coast folk.
All Wintersleep wanted to do this time out, after taking some time out to deal with a switch in labels and management and Murphy’s ascent to the ranks of parenthood, was make “something we could play front to back live if we wanted to.”
They will do just that with support from Fake Palms at the Danforth Music Hall on Wednesday.
The result? Nearly a year after its arrival, The Great Detachment has proven itself a proper sleeper. With another unlikely radio hit behind it, of course.
“I remember when ‘Weighty Ghost’ was on the radio it was this really weird thing because, to me, it still doesn’t feel like a song that you’d hear on the radio, lyrically and just as a song in general,” Murphy says.
“I wouldn’t think that would be a song that would get picked up by a mainstream rock station. And I guess it still kind of feels the same. But it’s amazing and it’s so cool that there’s still huge support within that community of people. It seems like they’re excited when we make a record. They definitely give it a chance, which is really nice.
“I think if we were, like, trying to make radio songs, it wouldn’t work out. We’d be really bad at that. So I’m glad that it worked out this way.”