>>PREVIEW
PRESSURE KILL COMMON STYLE
Friday, May 26
Broken City
A debut album is a tricky proposition, especially for a young band. After playing together and amassing material, the group has to decide what songs are going to make it on the record. Do you lay down the classic tracks that date back to day one or do you work on more recent material that gives audiences a good idea of what you sound like now?
In many cases, bands don’t choose, instead putting out an album that spans from their first practice to their most recent show. While this is comprehensive, it can also be disjointed, with material so varied it doesn’t sound like the same band created it all. That problem is exactly what Calgary’s Pressure Kill Common Style wanted to avoid when they began work on their debut, Sad Animal.
"The thing with this EP is that we wanted to make it really cohesive," says guitarist-vocalist Patrick Anthony. "We just wanted to make it this flowing thing, so we left out a lot of pieces of ourselves that we felt we would do on the next recording."
Forming in early 2005, Anthony teamed up with his friend, bass player and sound engineer Rina Kozak, to work out some of the material he had been cooking up. Before long, drummer James Mathison of The Means and guitarist Pat Flegel of the now-defunct Veritas joined the fold. Finding the balance between melody and technical expertise, Pressure Kill Common Style started gaining the attention of many in the Alberta scene, including Mike Scourge who signed them to Edmonton’s Rectangle Records after seeing only one show.
It’s easy to understand. Their music blends elements of ’70s glam rock with the intensity of classic American indie and the melody of Brit pop greats. While Anthony cites everyone from Roxy Music to David Bowie as an influence, he says the band’s sound has more to do with what they don’t want to sound like rather than what they do.
"I’m getting really tired of bands that sound like Interpol," he says. "Bands that say ‘we sound like The Cure with a bit of Joy Division.’ I’m really tired of that. It was really important to me that it was never that."
Anthony won’t deny that the band has a bit of a retro flavour, but by filtering it through contemporary sensibilities, their sound is not as shamelessly dated as some of the other bands hopping on the ’80s bandwagon. Sad Animal offers up more than its fair share of vintage production techniques, with synthesized disco beats and some sparse but crunchy guitar riffs, but Anthony insists that this release only hints at what they’re capable of.
"There are a lot of aspects of ourselves that aren’t on display there," he says. "That’s kind of what I like about the EP. This is like one side of us in a sense. Our live sound is totally all encompassing at times and our recordings – we want them to be whatever the recordings really require."
As it turns out, that could be the most retro aspect of the album. By making Sad Animal a stand-alone release, Pressure Kill Common Style eschews the singles-based, quick-hit download mentality that has dominated music for the past few years. Instead they look back to a time where you would buy a whole record, not just one or two songs.
"People are just forgetting about putting out albums," says Anthony. "Everyone is trying to be so eclectic all the time. Why don’t you just put out an album that you actually felt?
"I don’t need to cover all bases all the time on every release that we have." |
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