By Max Wall
Photos by Kirsten Berlie
It’s been four years since We Are the City released their last album, In a Quiet World. Filled with revisited eighth-grade demos and songs about squids, it nevertheless showcased a very promising talent, leading the band to win the Peak Performance Project grand prize of $100,000. Enter 2011’s High School EP. Initially conceived of as the work of a Gwen-Stefani-covering fake band, complete with t-shirt headdresses and false names, We Are the City decided to put out the album as an official release.
With Violent, the trio’s forthcoming full-length, the band carries the trajectory from their debut into outer space. Filled with Eno-esque ambiance and hard-hitting compressed drums, Violent navigates wide moves over complicated young-adult terrain. The album’s lead single “Baptism” was tagged the lengthy “progressive alternative” on Soundcloud, marking a progression from the abbreviated “prog-pop” descriptor attached to the High School EP.
The material from Violent is indeed more full and lush, willing to dive deeper and go longer than High School. Though the band still does not sound progressive, We Are The City seeks to move past the constraints placed on them in a way that embodies the original progressive ethos. Constantly tinkering with their musical equipment, Violent applies studio reverb to cheap Casio keyboards, and control 80s drum machines with polyrhythmic metronomes. I met Cayne and Andy from the band at their Commercial Drive home to discuss the record.
The Peak: For the last album you did as the fictional band High School, you revisited your high school experiences. Is this a record where you’ve moved on to explore more of a young adult experience?
Andy: Yeah, I think that’s actually a really good way to look at it. This album is a pretty fair interpretation of where we’re at, or at least where our thoughts are at. High School was very much a retrospective album, and this one is looking at where we are now. It’s introspective. I would say that’s a really fair assessment.
Cayne: It’s “Nowtrospective”.
The Peak: Speaking of High School, do you think those guys have another album in them?
A: Cayne and I were just talking about this.
C: I have pitched another album, yeah. We’ve had two conversations about it in total and they’ve been three years apart.
A: We’re on different sides of the fence. Cayne thinks it should definitely be that way.
C: Well not definitely, I’ve just pitched that it might be fun to look into doing another High School EP between this full length and the next. It would be like an evolution of High School — this sort of Jekyll and Hyde band type deal that’s really two bands within one band, and keep confusion going because confusion is interesting — at least to me if not to anyone else.
A: Well those are great points, I just think that it would actually be less confusing to do another High School album.
C: Well High School as it is now would be less confusing, but I’m talking about a reimagining of High School. It’s a conversation for the brainstorm table for sure. We’ve talked very briefly about it. Right now, it’s like you know when you’re doing thumbs up and down, how you can do sideways thumb? Well, it’s probably like as close to thumbs down without being thumbs down as possible.
A: Thumbs diagonal.
C: It’s at like 6:32. South-Southwest.
The Peak: So not counting the High School detour, it’s been four years since you last released an album. What was it like to hold on to songs for that long?
A: It’s really funny because we did hold on to songs, and we thought we had a few songs, maybe four or five songs and ideas.
C: Big ideas too, like “Oh man, we’re saving this up” kind of stuff. We had three truly finished songs that we had performed live and told people would be on the next album. We told each other that we only need to write seven songs because we have three songs!
A: And we didn’t use any of them. It wasn’t actually that long before we recorded that we were still holding on to them, telling ourselves that they would definitely be on the album.
C: The only song from that batch that we actually used remained a total demo until the very end, and it was still the one we worked on last. It was just a demo to us. Everything else we started writing around January of 2012 — all the chord progressions and melodies and lyrics, but before that, the summer of 2011 was when most of the rhythms were written.
The Peak: So what was the one song that made it onto the album?
C: “Punch My Face.” We wrote the song about the time when Andrew and I got in a fistfight, not with each other, but with some dudes at the Peachland elementary school.
A: Keep in mind it was totally one-sided.
C: Got in a fistfight means we got punched out. I got knocked out, and Andrew got kicked down and beat up. I got a black eye, and if you listen to the lyrics, its actually kind of comedic because the song opens with “Punch my face” as the first lyric — it’s very literal. Those guys fought us based on the fact that we wouldn’t let them take a little BB gun that Andrew had borrowed from his little brother.
A: In retrospect, I wish I would have just gave it to them.
The Peak: So you recorded with Tom from the Zolas at his new studio, Monarch. How was that experience different than recording at Vertical, or the Armoury, or Blue Wave for the last records?
C: I think that a huge difference was not necessarily for us, but for Tom. Tom had this new life, this new light coming out of him because he was just so excited to record there. It was just like a real accomplishment for him to finish that studio and he was just so excited [to record] and really willing to do longer days and not cut corners. So, the biggest change was Tom’s attitude. The Armoury and Blue Wave are beautiful studios that are big and have lots of gear, and in that way Monarch is very similar to them. Definitely the experience is made by the engineer and so Tom, his hands were on fire, moving at the speed of light, it was wizardry.
The Peak: You chose to name the new album Violent. What made you choose that title?
C: The original thought came into my mind when Andrew and I were at this get-together with a friend in White Rock. We were talking about music, about dynamic changes in music, and in passing the word “violent” was used. It just struck a chord with me, because Andrew, David, and I had so many conversations about what we wanted the album to be, and how we wanted the sounds to change, and the dynamic range we wanted to shape the flow of the album. At that point, we had written the songs and were in the process of recording, and they were shaping out to be very dynamic. We had high hopes for dynamics, and high hopes for lots of sounds: the quietest quiets, the loudest louds, and just colourful chord progressions. So, that’s one aspect of it. The word “violent,” for us, at least for me, is represented in my mind by beauty and a kind of passion. Definitely on the other end the process of making this album has been, in a sense, a little violent because of all the changes going on and the long time it took to write. Changes within ourselves and within our lineup of members, only two changes in the lineup, but still pretty emotional. We had the gain of some friends, and the loss of some friends; we moved around a lot. We wrote the album in two houses that were slated to be torn down. One was this octagonal house that surrounded an indoor pool that was totally moldy. We had a lot of experiences that were very vibrant, and left colourful memories. It was an array of colours that is best described in my mind as Violent.
