>>PREVIEW
MATT MAYS
Friday, January 26
MacEwan Hall Ballroom (U of C)
Matt Mays is a man of vision. Mays, who up until now was best known for his single "Cocaine Cowgirl," which he performs with his band El Torpedo, may not seem like the most likely candidate to become Canada’s next rock ’n’ roll artiste. But with the release of Mays’s new "solo" album, When the Angels Make Contact, the Halifax-based musician shows that his imagination far exceeds that of your typical lead-singer of a roots rock-bar band.
When the Angels Make Contact is a concept album. The back-story goes something like this– a drifter comes across a motorcycle crash on a quiet rural road. Leaving the lifeless rider behind, he jumps on the bike and embarks on a road trip in search of his lost love. Along the way he must deal with some kind of sinister force that, according to the title track’s video, involves visions, an ominous man in a white suit and one of those arcade genie fortune tellers.
There’s good reason for the album’s cinematic plotline (that admittedly, sounds a little ridiculous on paper) – Mays has already shot a movie to accompany the album, though he says that the post-production costs are more than he’s able to take on at this point. Now, the "lost movie" soundtrack is an old concept album trick – look no further than Logan’s Sanctuary, Roger Manning Jr. and Brian Reitzell’s 2000 soundtrack to an imaginary Logan’s Run sequel – but Mays swears that the movie exists. He just can’t promise that you’ll see it in a theatre any time soon.
"We shot the movie over the summer," he says. "So, the album came before the movie, but the album is part of a movie. It just costs as much to finish a movie as it does to shoot one – the transferring cost and the editing and the sound effects. So we took all the parts of the movie we could to make a trailer and a video and hopefully we’ll be able to get enough money together in the future to finish it. It looks great, though."
Judging from the bits on the website (www.whentheangelsmakecontact.com), When the Angels Make Contact does look great, which is surprising, since ambitious projects like this one can so often turn into a self-indulgent mess. The album, incidentally, is nothing to sneeze at, either – the disc sees Mays pushing himself in places that El Torpedo could never have taken him. Co-produced by Mays and El Torpedo drummer Tim Jim Baker, the album finds Mays mixing his standard singer-songwriter compositions with beat-oriented and electronic sounds. Featuring loads of Mays’s musical buddies – most notably Buck 65 who raps on the title track – the album was constructed slowly, with Mays not initially really knowing which direction the project would take.
"Believe it or not, I’ve been working on it for four years – really off and on, obviously," he says. "All of a sudden it started getting more and more serious. El Torpedo were off the road and I had a month off and I didn’t know what to do with myself, so I went in and did some more work on it. In the spring we just hunkered down and put it in fifth gear to take ’er home."
To give the album its due in a live setting, Mays has assembled a nine-piece band that will be accompanied by a three-piece crew. The only member of El Torpedo along for the ride is the aforementioned Tim Jim, with the rest of the band filled out by some of Mays’s ex-Guthries bandmates, a couple of members of The Museum Pieces and R&B singer Alanna Stuart. As for the more studio-centred pieces, Mays has hired on DJ Double A to keep the show as live sounding as possible.
"It’s going to be pretty theatrical," Mays says. "There are so many parts and I don’t want to use too much of a backing track. So we kind of opted to have some recorded parts that the DJ is going to play. It’s a little more honest – he’s actually playing the parts. It’ll make for a very unique show."
While the very laidback Mays tries to downplay the extreme ambitiousness of this project, he’s also proud that he’s reaching beyond the typically banal band performance that has become de rigueur in the nation’s rock clubs. If anything, Mays wants When the Angels Make Contact to be respected as a piece of art, and hopes that his audiences will open their minds to what he’s trying to do without writing him off as being snooty or pretentious.
"A lot of the indie rockers don’t like the hard rockers and a lot of the hard rockers have a weird, smug sort of vibe about the indie rockers," Mays says. "I don’t care about that. Hard rock can be artistic if you want it to be. And indie rock or anything a little more arty can have an edge. If it’s all done well and in the right frame of mind, I like it all." |
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