May. 28, 2008 - Issue #658: Beija Flor
The Summerlad
Calgary’s the Summerlad brings its City of Noise to ours
Presumably, the musicians of the Summerlad must bust out jams somewhere in their cycle of creation, but you’d never tell from the results. On stage or over the course of their recording projects, their music is marked by precision and intent, with even pauses underlined by determination.
The veteran art rockers have been mainstays on the Calgary scene for eight years now, one of that city’s most stable configurations of music-makers. A recent shakeup—they lost guitarist Sean Grier but gained electric ivory-tinkler Liz Collins last year, with some overlap—shifted the sonic thumbprint slightly, but the band remains the veteran practitioners of angular and glossy compositions, balancing intricacy with straightforward guitar riffs and thundering rhythms, moody atmospherics with more raucous aural blasts (emphasis on the latter when playing live). The Summerlad specializes in being cerebral but not chilly, arty but not stuck-up and rock without sloppiness.
“When we write music, we derive great pleasure from elaborate structures,” Fisher shrugs. “It’s not at all us trying to be like any more on higher ground than other musicians; it’s just what gives us pleasure. We’re nothing in terms of complexity compared to classical musicians—we’re really meat and potatoes still, just scratching the surface of what can be done with composition. We don’t want to have to bow to the whim of the punters, but we’re not out to alienate. We generally satisfy that rock music urge, especially at bar shows. In the end, I hope we’re powerful enough that people listen.”
City of Noise certainly proved riveting. The rave-reviewed, sold-out performance was commissioned by One Yellow Rabbit, an organization whose reason for being is to push the boundaries of theatrical spectacle. Their winter festival, High Performance Rodeo, has drawn experimental artists from across genres and disciplines all over the world. Joining the ranks of Philip Glass and Laurie Anderson, the Summerlad was invited to contribute a longer piece for 2005.
“It was ‘a day in the life of a city’—we didn’t conceptualize much past that,” Fisher explains. “We wanted to put it up for the listener to make their own picture of it, draw their own associations. In a way, the theme was something for us to write around, to give us structure for a musical trajectory, so it wasn’t endless noodling.”
The full-length piece, clocking in at around 40 minutes, was built from one of the earlier Summerlad-universe pop songs, a taut, anthemic number that verged on apocalyptic funk. The band stroked and sculpted the piece, adding movements and variations that return to themes again and again, convincingly conjuring up a particularly intense Calgary day (probably a Friday—it has the manic trainwreck energy of morning crisis, but also restive moments and periods of elation).
Abridged versions have since been performed, and the Summerlad—notoriously fastidious studio creatures—finally finished committing City of Noise to album form (vinyl and CD, with both formats including the original four-minute song and the whole composition) late last year, releasing it late this past winter. The band’s attention has turned to touring it over the next few weeks across several provinces, although Fisher confesses that there is another agenda.
“We may not play the actual piece in full,” he offers. “We’ve done it twice in Edmonton, once fairly recently. We haven’t really decided what to do with the set, but we’ve started a new record, we’re 80 per cent recorded now. We write in the studio, so we kind of have to learn to arrange and play this album live, that’s what really this tour’s for. So we’re going on the road with two sets: City of Noise and ‘normal’ rock songs, our new songs.” V
Thu, Jun 5 (8 pm)
The Summerlad
With guests
New City
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