>>PREVIEW
NQ ARBUCKLE
Thursday, November 24
Broken City
What kind of a band could create an album loaded with all the torn nylon, overflowing ashtray exhilaration and sadness that goes with those wild nights, burnt-out streetlights casting shadows on that long walk home, taxis headed the wrong way past you on a one-way street?
And you are alone and happy or alone and unhappy or together and happy or together and unhappy, and it doesn’t matter, because in a few months or years, all you’ll have is some credit card receipts, a matchbook cover with a nameless phone number, and some blurrily sweet memories to show for all these nights.
Toronto band NQ Arbuckle has somehow created that soundtrack for these memories with their second album, Last Supper in a Cheap Town, this year’s followup to 2002’s Hanging the Battle-Scarred Piñata. For one thing, the band’s home in Toronto is the perfect setting to collect the data supplied by a thousand bands, drinks and overdue sunrises. For another thing, lead personality Neville Quinlan collects people the way someone else might collect postage stamps.
The Montreal-born Quinlan has lived in Toronto for about six years, after following a girl there from his hometown. If it was she who got away from Quinlan, she was about the only one who did, as people like Carolyn Mark, Sarah Slean, Bob Wiseman, Bob Egan and others somehow turn up to support the serenades to barroom sanctuaries sported on Last Supper. This is testimony to the fact that Quinlan was no wallflower, grabbing a gig changing guitar strings for Alejandro Escovedo within a week of showing up in Toronto. He met Mark when she was opening for his new friend Richard Buckner, and he decided to walk up and say hi before she even went on stage.
The guy’s just like that, a people magnet, which explains some of the alchemy in his songs. It also reflects his pedigree. You may have first glimpsed Quinlan more than a decade ago on television, where he was already in training to make an album as superb as Last Supper by soaking up the Can Rock renaissance in Montreal.
"I remember going to the first Deja Voodoo barbecue. It was in a church basement and I was backstage making hamburgers for them and MuchMusic was there. I was actually filmed saying, ‘Hi, I’m Neville and you’re watching the nation’s music station,’ and I was so excited. We’ll never get on (MuchMusic) any other way," he jokes over the phone from his Toronto home.
He had started playing guitar a few years before the incident, and by the time he was 16 he was performing live.
"I’m not good enough to be a country guitar player so I was playing country-esque tunes. I used to play with all the French Canadian punk bands in all these weird little loft shows."
Some other moments of interest are mixed into his past. He was born in 1971 into a household where the windows had been blown out with bomb blasts from the recent October Crisis in Montreal. Even today, he can pick out his folks in old video footage from the Trudeau years, as they were ardent protesters. No wonder the man’s songs are like paintings capturing the nightlife – his great-grandfather was Frank Johnston of the Group of Seven.
When he was 17, he began working every summer in Calgary, drawing maps for a geological company. The time spent in the nearby mountains still resonates in the wistfully western tinge of his Toronto band’s music.
"I don’t read very much, so I think that the number of times I’ve walked through Banff or Canmore at sunrise, seeing the blue hills and all that, shows up in the music."
Quinlan’s meeting with Luke Doucet of Veal proved to be a spark that brought forth the first album, which the two made without aid of a larger band. "We just kind of ended up doing some shows together, let’s do a record, and Six Shooter Records said, ‘OK, we’ll put this out.’ I didn’t have any of that waiting and begging most people go through."
Of the magic on Last Supper, of the songs that swing between introspection and extroverted exuberance, Quinlan is forthcoming. "I’m recording with my friends. It’s getting a mood and being honest, which is really easy. Everyone feels like if someone didn’t do their part living up to their potential, no one minds saying, ‘Dude, do it again.’
"We’d go in at noon, have 6,000 beers and sit there and have a blast. I loved it, it’s like, we are doing recording! If anyone has $250 burning a hole in their pocket, go to one of those little indie studios. You barbecue a bit, do some tracks, barbecue some more, then Carolyn and people would sing a little bit. You get this feeling of friendship – you can’t help but create something meaningful." |
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