Preview
FALCONHAWK
Saturday, March 19
Broken City
Fast Forward: Is Calgary a boy’s town music-wise? Can you kick everyone’s ass?
Kara Keith: Yes, we are a backwards culture here in Alberta. And yes, I am hoping to kick some fucking ass.
One of the best things about the Falconhawk website is its inclusion of Kara Keith’s diary. Not someone to censor herself, the keyboard-playing vocalist Keith muses openly on label dealings gone awry and shitty shows on the group’s first cross-country tour. If there’s an inner-band dispute or a nice groupie experience somewhere along the line, it’s all in there.
"I am completely honest in everything I do. I am earnest and sincere. I loathe pretentious assholes. I crave the fun of life. I want everyone else around me to have fun," she says, manifesto style. "I think maybe I am a tortured artist, but it just seems silly to torture anyone else around me." Were any further proof needed, Falconhawk’s new album Here’s Your Ghost flies in almost the opposite direction to their debut Hotmouth – the one that took the band from Calgary to Halifax and back again, and gave them a brief flirtation with the mighty Universal Records (a non-event Keith dismisses as "a shitty distribution deal to which we said, ‘that sounds lame, you guys are gaylords,’ and then all of a sudden everyone was congratulating us on getting signed and I was really embarrassed").
"Falconhawk had been around for only a few months when we did the recording and then all of a sudden we were selling out shows in Toronto and Halifax and cute boys were bringing us free sandwiches in some town in Ontario. It blew me away," Keith says.
Where Hotmouth fit snugly within the confines of synth-pop, Here’s Your Ghost focuses more on Keith’s piano playing, a less-danceable groove, the type of record where reviewer-types pull out words like "mature" and "grown-up" without ever meaning "dull." It’s a drive through the country in a shitty ’70s Ford kind of record – an all-on-your-lonesome kind of thing. You could also call it "brave" and wear out your thesaurus looking for synonyms for (that word again) "honest." You could also just lose yourself in it – the backing la-la-las of "Try A Little Longer," the burned-out synthesizer breakdown in "Gay Man Pants" and the big-ballad moments of "Transparency." Imagine Kim Deal had gone to Julliard or Ben Folds reborn as a woman, without his lame sense of humour.
Since the recording of Hotmouth, Falconhawk welcomed scene vet Steve Elaschuk into the band replacing Mark Rudd. The lineup may have changed, but the core of Keith as songwriter and Dave Alcock as drummer producer remains. Work on Here's Your Ghost became so all-consuming that the pair actually moved into Alcock's Sundae Sound during its recording..
"We would record day and night and drink whisky and bury ourselves so deep into it that when I came up for air, I just didn’t know where I was," says Keith. "Evidently and serendipitously it turns out that’s what the record is about – not really knowing where you are or what you’re doing or how you’re living."
As the photogenic focus of a group on the upward swing, Keith left the studio understandably nervous. "People in magazines were defining us before I even had the chance to think about what we were doing. Then when the new album was done, I became very self-conscious about what we were making based on the fact that people were conscious of us. I think that it’s easier to be creative when you think no one is looking. And upon thinking that people were paying attention and listening, I began to hate myself because I was forced to be accountable for something I still hadn’t come to understand," she says.
"Besides my own psychological pap, I was simply freaked out about the impending comparisons between the two records. After all, this new album lacks the sassy sense of humour that was imminent in the first album. I was scared that because there are no funny songs about kissing underage boys that people would think I was a bore."
There is clearly no cause for concern. Falconhawk have become widely respected artists and Keith in particular has become somewhat of a local media darling and playful sex symbol – but one who demands that you take her seriously. At this point, two albums along, Keith already knows how to play it smart – finding the middle-ground between her persona and her art.
"I am always ready to be a pin-up because I have an understanding of what it takes to seduce the public," she says. "All we need as a band is to be heard and whatever it takes for people to want to hear our music is all right. We are in control, methinks. We want only to reach a wider audience and if it takes a couple of boobs to reach the people outside of the indie music scene, then I’m OK with that."
Whatever works: Kara’s in control and Falconhawk wins again. Bend over, Calgary. |
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