Nov. 25, 2009 - Issue #736: Poster Boys
You say party! We say die!: Still alive
You Say Party! We Say Die! is lucky to have not, um, perished
Eventually, You Say Party! We Say Die! did get back in the van, and this Friday the band will roll into Edmonton for an in-store appearance at Megatunes and a show at New City. Bassist Stephen O'Shea says that the band was able to keep it together thanks to the group's collective sense of purpose, as well as a persuasive tour manager.
"I remember the next morning after [the fight] happened, we had sort of split into camps—there was team party and team sleep," he recounts, mentioning that he was on team sleep. "It took our tour manager eight hours to get between the two camps. The other three were in this Internet café and so she was like, 'OK, they say this,' and then she'd go back across the street and go, 'OK, they say that,' and it took about eight hours before we finally got in the van and agreed to go to the next town.
"I think what it is is we just, the five of us, absolutely care about the music of this band and it was really when we got it all together and played a show the next day we realized how special a thing we have."
That shift in thinking has coloured all of the band's activities since the trouble in Germany and is especially apparent on the band's new record. Shying away from the get-up-and-jam, seat-of-the-pants, dance-punk mayhem of the group's previous work, You Say Party! We Say Die! instead put in the time to craft a much more layered new-wave album, a mature effort from a group that has been at this for the better part of a decade. The realization that the group had in Berlin also coloured the theme of the record—though it's named XXXX, O'Shea admits that the band had another name in mind.
"Essentially we named our album Love—which is a pretty bold thing for a band to do—and we put it behind a secret code of sorts," he says. "That's been the main theme since that day, since we essentially broke up and got back together in the same day."
The theme of love hasn't just affected the business within the band, but also the way the members have dealt with outsiders over the past two years. Getting off the tour that almost destroyed them, the members of You Say Party! We Say Die! decided to slow down from touring and—not being big, rich rockstars or anything—needed to find jobs. Instead of delivering pizzas or working at a record store, however, most of the band decided that they wanted to help people and took jobs working with people with developmental disabilities, the homeless and an international aid organization.
"I find touring to be giving and yet completely taking ... We feed off of what the audience gives to us and that's taking so touring becomes this odd give and take and I never know how to balance it but when I got home I thought that I could give essentially back to my community in a real and tangible way. I really wanted to see results," says O'Shea, who has a job assisting individuals with developmental disabilities. "At the end of the night everyone goes home and you don't really know if the show you gave them was beneficial, but with this job I can see the results each and every day—the quality of someone's life is actually improved by my work."
In the two-and-a-half years between XXXX and the group's previous studio album, Lose All Time, You Say Party! We Say Die! seems to have been re-born—an idea that is echoed in the newest album, and the way the group went about making it.
"I think that this is the first record that we wrote without a plan ahead of time," says O'Shea. "When we started this band we said, 'Let's be a dance-punk band,' so we began the process of writing songs that we thought were dance-punk and with the second record we wrote there was a need to follow-up what we'd done with the first record, but with this record it was a lot more natural. It was like, 'Well, what works and what doesn't work?' Let's put what feels right instead of what we think should be right for our particular sound or genre." V
You Say Party! We Say Die!
Fri, Nov 27 (3:30 pm)
Megatunes, free
Fri Nov, 27 (9 pm)
With Little Girls, Christian Hansen & the Autistics
New City, $10
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