DIANA goes big band with new record
The synth-pop group returns with sumptuous electro tunes and a direction for the future
Carmen Elle hadn’t a clue she was signing up to front a “real” band when she agreed to sing on some early tracks for the casual studio project that would become DIANA four years ago, so it’s fully appropriate she didn’t realize she was embroiled in recording the Toronto synth-pop outfit’s second album until the process was well underway.
Co-founders Kieran Adams and Joseph Shabason simply started slipping “these innocent little emails” into her inbox seeking feedback and potential vocal melodies for nascent song ideas until — hold up — she’d been duped into making another DIANA record.
“Just because of the nature of the way Joseph and Kieran and I communicated in the past — I don’t think we do it anymore, but we definitely did in the past — there was almost a lack of communication about it,” Elle says. “I’m just thinking personally about it, but I didn’t really know that we were recording an album probably until we were pretty deep into it.
“Maybe that was just denial and avoidance, and me feeling too anxious to admit to myself that I was in the studio again . . . But the way we write generally is that Joseph or Kieran will demo the skeleton of a song in really, really basic form and then email it to us and go, ‘What do you think?’ So I started to get those emails trickling in and it took a while for me to be, like, ‘Oh, we’re writing a record right now.’ ”
No, no, DIANA isn’t some sort of running musical con job. Elle is there willingly, although her initial commitment to the group was almost accidental, prompted by the enthusiastic early response to a couple of commandingly smooth singles featuring her coolly expressive coo, “Born Again” and “Perpetual Surrender,” posted to SoundCloud in late 2012.
Adams and Shabason, two in-demand session players who had originally just been looking for a fun excuse to work together as friends, didn’t know she was the vocalist they’d been looking for until they brought her in. Nor did any of the three expect the album borne of their collaboration mere months later, 2013’s Perpetual Surrender, to garner so much immediate attention that they’d actually be asked to take it on the road.
They mustered a suitable stage show at the time despite Elle’s admitted “anxiety” in the face of touring with the fleeting addition of Paul Mathew on bass. But this time, DIANA is doing it up proper from the get-go to match the more expansive ambitions of Perpetual Surrender’s just-released followup, Familiar Touch: a sumptuous, slow-to-take exercise in midtempo electro-balladry informed in equal parts by ’80s synth-funk, classy downtempo ’90s post-rave chill-out fare and Adams’ and Shabason’s shared background in jazz. They’re taking it to the people as a seven-piece also featuring Thom Gill on guitars and keys, Bram Gielen on bass and Ivy Mairi and one-time Canadian Idol runner-up Gary Beals on backup vocals.
Elle concedes that a recent run of well-received, yet sparsely attended U.S. tour dates in support of Familiar Touch — which saw the band departing both Paper Bag Records in Canada and its American imprint Jagjaguwar for Toronto’s recently established Culvert Music label — didn’t exactly establish the new lineup as economically sustainable. But the DIANA “big band” is heading into Thursday’s hometown date at Toronto’s Great Hall knowing that it’s found a direction for the future.
“Those extra musicians don’t feel like they’re superfluous. Everyone feels really crucial to the setup,” Elle says. “I don’t know if that’s just the nature of the songs that we’ve written and they’re just f---ing epically huge arrangements that require that many bodies onstage or what. Kieran was always, like, ‘The album is the album and the live show is the live show’ because I would say, ‘Why do we have six vocal parts on this song? We’re never going to do this live!’
“But talking about another record after this, Kieran has been really, really excited at the notion of doing it even more live than this one. So I think that’s the direction we would like to move in, ideally.”