Alvvays embraces rough edges
Band’s just-released album comes ahead of tour to U.K., U.S. and Canada
Alvvays has just gifted us with its best record yet, and yet its best record is surely still to come.
Don’t read that as a knock against the charged, charming and rathermore-ripped-than-you-might-expect “Blue Rev,” which landed Friday via Polyvinyl Records in the States and Transgressive Records overseas five years along from 2017’s solid sophomore outing, “Antisocialites.” It’s exactly the shimmering noise-pop firecracker one dared dream Alvvays might make right now, but to invoke My Bloody Valentine — the U.K. shoegaze luminaries whose influence looms large over “Blue Rev” — the transplanted Toronto-via-Maritimes quintet is still at the “Isn’t Anything” phase, still striving towards its very own “Loveless.” And that’s highly exciting because, as time goes on, it gets clearer and clearer that Alvvays’s note-perfect eponymous 2014 debut wasn’t a lightning strike or a lucky one-off but the dawn of a long and thrilling career. Alvvays is a band audibly determined to grow.
“That would be the only expectation I would ever foist on our band,” said frontwoman Molly Rankin, a Cape Breton expat and, yes, a member of that Rankin Family, “just to continue to get better and to see more clearly and to feel more comfortable on stage and to expand our craft, as silly as that sounds. We like to do everything in scrupulous detail and it can be really taxing.”
“From the start, we had a rule not to delude ourselves ever or to, like, convince ourselves something sounded good when it didn’t,” concurred guitarist and co-songwriter Alec O’Hanley, himself late of ace Charlottetown power-pop ensemble Two Hours Traffic. “And we try to extend that across all realms. You know, if we don’t like a video it’ll never see the light of day. We fail more often than we succeed and often, when we do succeed, it’s when we’ve done the thing ourselves in our living room and just stumble into it. And I think because we’re just consummate amateurs and we love learning and listening and playing, that’s just the path we’ll always follow.”
“Blue Rev,” named for the sugary, Toronto-born caffeine-and-vodka beverage, isn’t quite as militantly D.I.Y. as its lo-fi predecessors, although its arch pop tunes are still fuzzed-out and scuffed-up enough to qualify — as O’Hanley dryly puts it — as “medium-fi at worst.”
It might have been a much more polished outing, but we’ll never know. Alvvays was all set to record its nascent third album at Los Angeles studio institution Sunset Sound with a producer of some regard in early 2020 when a certain global pandemic threw a large wrench in their plans.
“We were in a studio when everything shut down,” recalls Rankin. “They cancelled the NBA season when we were in pre-production about to go into Sunset Sound in L.A. We were on a mini-tour with the Strokes. And before the last show, everything fell apart and we were running through the airport.”
“Live Nation said ‘All bands go home’ and we didn’t realize who our masters were until that moment,” chuckled O’Hanley. “But we did go home, with our hoodies tied tight.”
“And by the time we got home, everything was mayhem,” said Rankin.
Fortunately, Rankin and O’Hanley have the advantage of living together, so the material that would wind up on “Blue Rev” continued to morph and develop during the long stretches of COVID-imposed stasis to follow. As restrictions loosened, they kept bashing away at the tunes three nights a week with keyboardist (and Rankin’s childhood pal) Kerri MacLellan, bassist Abbey Blackwell and drummer Sheridan Riley in their rehearsal “shed sessions” which, O’Hanley noted, “would invariably end with Molly getting on the drum kit and a little karaoke version of Amanda Marshall’s ‘Dark Horse.’ ”
Eventually, Alvvays blasted through all of the songs twice in a single whirlwind session with Alberta-born producer Shawn Everett — who’s done much more hi-fi work in the past with the likes of Killers, the War on Drugs and Kacey Musgraves — late last year. From there on, the band kept adding layers and colours and details with Everett’s help right up until a frantic final deadline, while still diligently trying to keep things a little bit messy.
“I don’t like when the rough edges get smoothed out and things sound glossy and pricey and gross,” said Rankin.
“Sanded down,” added O’Hanley. “We used to call that ‘café phase.’ ”
“That’s what our friends from home would say,” laughed Rankin. “‘They’re in the café now.’ ”
The pairing with Everett might seem unlikely for a band that prefers to leave its songs a little rough around the edges, but it was a match made in heaven.
“He was a guy who was doing weird things for a long time and we love Kasey Musgraves and all that sh--,” said O’Hanley. “It ended up being a great thing because he’s into verbatim everything we’re into. We’d be, like, ‘Shawn, do you like the Smiths?’ and he’d be, like, ‘I f---in’ love the Smiths!’ And same thing for the Psychedelic Furs or My Bloody Valentine or, well, you name it. He was just totally on board to be as referential as we are.”
“I have a lot of different personalities and so does Alec and one of the challenges is making it all live in the same world,” said Rankin. “So it took a lot of time to bring everything together and make it feel not disjointed.”
Alvvays is now feeling the sting of the album’s modestly grandiose ambitions as it heads to the U.K. and the States for a run of live dates. Turns out getting a handle on all the extra details swirling around in the mix on the new album is proving a challenge onstage, though one suspects the band — which will celebrate the record’s release with a gig in London, the same city it played on the day when Antisocialites came out five years ago — is up to it and will have whipped itself into true fighting form by the time a Toronto gig is scheduled this year.
“There’s a lot of layers. We kind of wish we had a few more arms. Kerri definitely wishes she had a few more arms. But she’s doing well. It’s a learning curve, just amplifying things — literally amplifying things more but technologically, too. There’s a leap for us that we’re trying to keep up with right now,” said Rankin, who is nevertheless glad that there’s still an international appetite for Alvvays.
“I go through periods of questioning whether the world will care or whether the small contingent of people who listen to the genre of music we pump out will care, but it’s nice when people react when you put something out there. I’m not gonna lie: it’s nice to be acknowledged. It’s also strange and complicated. But I’m happy that we’re functioning.”