Whisper To A Scream: Regina’s Library Voices Quietly Making Noise
Posted November 27, 2008 12:00 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
“It’s kind of limited in Regina, how many people play music. We just kind of invited all of our friends and they all showed up.”
Carl Johnson sits in Queen Street’s Shanghai Cowgirl talking about his band. Ten people, straight pop hooks and hailing from Regina, maybe he still wonders how he got there.
But Library Voices is no accident. Their show Wednesday night – the third-from-last of the group’s first foray into Ontario – is held next door at the Bovine Sex Club and filled with red light, sweaty, drunken sing-alongs and lots of good looking people.
All the hallmarks of a great show. And a promising act.
But it’s all happened rather quickly. Only formed in April and hardly from a major media centre, the group’s already got a sharp, buzz-building EP, a full length on the way and live spots with the The Weakerthans and Broken Social Scene to point to.
So, as David Byrne might ask, how did they get here?
Johnson (pictured above), singer and guitarist, insists it’s just a classic case of friends making music. Lots of friends.
“The good thing is you have this large army behind you playing and it’s great to be part of that,” he explains when asked about the advantages of having nine bandmates. “Some nights it gets off the rails, but it’s part of the show I guess.”
Not this night.
Instead Carl, Darcy, Michael, Michael, Karla, Eoin, Brett, Paul, Amanda and Brennan bounce through an impressively tight set, interacting with each other and the crowd in perfect measure while belting out a brand of indie pop that would make any member of BSS proud. Just be careful about drawing comparisons.
“I think they’ve influenced every indie rock band in Canada,” Johnson admits. “You can draw a direct correlation, ‘Oh there’s 10 of you, there’s a lot of them,’ and sure on a level that’s true, but we kind of do our own thing.”
Michael Dawson, who according to the band’s MySpace page plays, “organ, synths, guitar, miscellaneous objects, etc.,” tends to agree.
“It’s one of those things where people see a large band and they sort of expect the same thing,” he acknowledges. “I think if anything the way we’re influenced by those bands is they made us realize you don’t ever have to feel limited playing two guitars, bass and drums.”
The constant ties to large Canadian acts like BSS and Arcade Fire are perhaps the biggest challenge the band has faced in the early going. Of course it could be worse.
“In St. Catharines there’s some people talking beforehand and it’s like, ‘Oh it’s Broken Social Scene, this should be good,'” Johnson recalls. “They’re being sarcastic, but when we start playing, we don’t go for that sound.”
It’s true enough. The group’s debut EP, Hunting Ghosts And Other Collected Shorts pulls from the Violent Femmes, Lemonheads, Talking Heads, Elvis Costello and Fleetwood Mac (all names with which they willingly associate) without actually sounding like any of them.
It’s something many artists are experiencing in this age of musical diversity. And when you have 10 people, you’re not likely to stay in one place for long in any sense. Of course just as it’s an advantage to have so many hands on deck, groups that size are not without their obstacles.
“…just logistics, planning jams, anything from a rehearsal to a photo shoot,” Johnson says of when they’ve hit snares. “Travelling … 10 people, that’s 10 different body odours … well probably more than that.”
But on stage they do anything but stink.
They seem affable, in love with one another and mostly just happy as hell to be doing what they’re doing. It’s a cliché a lot of musicians fall back on and a look many a band has gone for, but it doesn’t always ring with the sort of sincerity that it did inside the Bovine just before midnight Wednesday.
Not even some minor technical difficulties and Johnson’s assertion that, ” Steam Whistle sucks,” could sway a gushing crowd.
So they all take a glass and down a shot right before a final song (pictured, top). Hey, it’s only your first show in Toronto in front of a packed house at the Bovine once.
And in the afterglow, singing, songwriting, accordion-playing frontwoman Darcy McIntyre (pictured below) is all smiles, bottle of Bohemian in hand.
“We have so much f****in fun up there,” she says with a toss of her blond locks.
Friendship and fun. They’ve been mantras from the beginning. Since the group laid down its first six tracks in a Regina studio that was converted from a Jewish funeral home.
“Back where the control room is is where they used to drain all the bodies of all the fluids. And in the front there’s a dance studio,” Johnson explains.
“It kind of sounds creepy or morbid, but the inscription, I think in Hebrew, says ‘House of peace, love, friendship and rest.'” It’s message Library Voices appears intent on carrying along.
“The first night we got together we finished our first song in the basement and we said we’ll do this again tomorrow and maybe no one will show up,” Dawson recalls of the band’s genesis earlier this year. “From Day 1 the same 10 people have been there.
“We did the first six songs, we sort of showed up, plugged in our amps, stuck some mics in front of them and went for it.”
Library Voices is just getting going.
To see CityNews.ca’s interview with members of Library Voices, click on the video link up top.
