Preview
NO HANDS
Saturday, March 19
Night Gallery
In Edmonton, the sun doesn’t shine for eight months out of the year and the glaciers will roll right over your car if you leave it parked too long on Jasper Avenue. This imparts the citizens with a special resourcefulness, as they eke out a living along the dark, cold banks of the Saskatchewan River.
This sub-arctic chutzpah has spawned a unique strain of musician. Whereas rockers in more forgiving climes tend to avoid sunshine and paying for their own drinks, do-it-yourself has taken on a unique twist in Edmonton, where people actually do things – themselves.
"You’ve got to cover all your angles," says Clayton Skinner of indie-rock outfit No Hands. "Five years ago, we would have went on the road – we would have just got in the van. Now, we’re not going anywhere unless I’ve contacted people, organized things, gotten press. Just the basic things that are essential in the music industry for any success."
Sure enough, Skinner and James Stewart (from another Edmonton band The Last Deal) are not speaking with me over the phone, but are actually in Calgary, weeks ahead of their upcoming show at the Night Gallery, to do press. And to poster. And get this – not only does Skinner play guitar and sing in No Hands, but in order to release their newly finished four-song EP, he’s started his own record label, Roast Records.
"I finished university, got my degree and basically (started the label) out of fear of getting a day job in a laboratory. ‘Well, nuts to this,’ I said. I want to take music, the years of experience I have with it, and develop it into something tangible," he says.
The No Hands EP, for those of you familiar with the Karate and Jawbox catalogues, gets pleasantly familiar – muted, minor rock that jangles, jars and veers in all the right places. But there’s an underpainting of sonic texture that starts to stand out on repeated listens.
"Me and the bass player have a long history," says Clayton. No Hands was one of their incarnations and the two members felt the need to do something definitive with their material. "We wanted to put out just the most straight-up, rock ’n’ roll – what we do best…. We capped that off with the EP, and now we’re off in a new direction altogether. Now we want to do things that we’ve never done before."
The impetus for things they’d never done before arrived abruptly, after replacing a too-young drummer and finding themselves without any agenda. "We basically made noise for months until patterns started to emerge, then we had an idea of where we were going again," says Skinner. "Right now it’s just drum machines, samplers, a lot of Sonic Youth-style noise. Before, everything was extremely calculated. We wanted to push on, do a lot noisier, hypnotic, droning stuff. I wanted to do more vocally based stuff. And simpler songs too, so that you can build layers of sound, rather than highly orchestrated stuff."
Entrepreneurship and new sonic territory have both proved to have some steep learning curves, but true to that good old Edmonton moxie, both are coming along fine. The No Hands disc will be shortly followed up by a Last Deal recording (also on Roast Records), which is awaiting a final mix. Both bands plan to tour extensively in the summer, in the company of the label’s third roster member, Champion, Alberta.
"It’s becoming easier and easier to do everything yourself," says Stewart, noting that they screen print their own posters. "Everything is available to you now. There’s no reason not to do it. You can’t just sit around waiting for someone to do it for you, because you’ll be waiting a long time. Especially in Western Canada. Especially in Edmonton, Alberta." |
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