MATT MAYS
Monday, April 18
Liberty Lounge
Monday, April 25
Pengrowth Saddledome
Making the exact music you want to make – stuff that genuinely comes from the heart – can be a curse as easily as it can be a blessing. There are a lot of indie artists who’ll tell you in a heartbeat that sticking to their guns has kept them shrouded in obscurity for the bulk of their careers. On the flip side, there are plenty of musicians who have walked directly out of the studio and into the hearts of the masses – with a quick stop at the bank on the way – only to be mercilessly drubbed by the critics.
Then you have the lucky guys like Matt Mays and his band, El Torpedo. They, like fellow Canucks Sam Roberts and Hawksley Workman, seem to innately straddle the line that allows them a little street cred while also offering a crack at mainstream success.
"It’s lucky that what we do fits in a lot of different places," says Mays. "It’s good to get on TV and radio and still have some credibility. That’s hard to do in this day and age when there’s so much crap on the TV."
The key to succeeding at this tactic, says the Halifax-based rocker, is to not even try in the first place. "The one thing we’re really into is not sacrificing any integrity for anything. But we never really tried to make a conscious decision that way. I think if you tried to do that you’d put out a shitty product."
No worries there. The consensus on Mays’s "product" seems to be unanimous across the country. Mere months after winning new artist of the year at the East Coast Music Awards, Matt Mays and El Torpedo landed Juno nominations for adult alternative album of the year and, again, artist of the year. Meanwhile, "Cocaine Cowgirl," the first single from their eponymous debut, was seeing airplay on campus stations and mainstream FM rock stations alike. As it turned out a couple weeks ago, Juno awards were not in the works for the boys. However, for a band that specializes in accessible straight-ahead rock ’n’ roll, unencumbered by excessive angst or irony, that was not the big disappointment.
"It was a bummer Neil Young wasn’t there," says Mays, citing Young, along with artists ranging from Bob Dylan to Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, as a major influence. For sure, one doesn’t have to listen too closely to the rumbling bass lines and lush, warmly distorted guitar chords of Mays and his four-piece band to hear Young and Petty in there. Catchy, simple riffs, layered under soaring lyrics that are deep yet not overly cryptic, all come together in strong, driving songs that are achingly urgent without ever (this is the tricky part) drifting into excessive yearning.
It’s a formula that, simple or not, is hard to reproduce. But then, as Mays alluded earlier, it all came together without a lot of forethought. All Mays wanted to do was follow up the rootsy, self-tilted solo debut he released during his stint with Dartmouth’s Beatle-esque country-pop darlings, The Guthries. But as the band that would ultimately become El Torpedo began to gel around Mays, the sound that would appear on their record began to solidify, too. " It started out as a solo thing with a couple of friends sort of helping me, but we're definitely a band now," says Mays.
And now, with a thick list of tour dates lying before him and a buzz that's just starting to really get audible, Mays is more appreciative of El Torpedo's accidental evolution than ever. "As we got closer as a band, we've developed this thing onstage where this magic happens that everybody knows is one in a million – it just naturally turned into a band, y'know?" |
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