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In the recent history of Canadian indie rock, one of the most curious and compelling tales is that of The Unicorns. The release of 2003’s iconic Who Will Cut Our Hair When We’re Gone? triggered a scintillating ascendency into the realm of near-mainstream visibility. Roughly a year later, the entire thing had crumbled, leaving in its wake tales of calamity and bad blood between founding members Nick Thorburn and Alden Penner.
In the intervening years, while Thorburn was busy churning out a pair of albums with Islands and a one-off with Jim Guthrie as Human Highway, Penner has chosen to maintain a lower profile. He remained active on the Montreal scene, as evidenced by a trail of YouTube videos, but shied away from the spotlight in general. Now, after years of apparent hibernation, he’s emerged with a new project called Clues. If their brash self-titled debut is any indication, it’s been worth the wait.
“Clues is the result of a meditation on how to be in the world musically for me,” says Penner. “In [The Unicorns] days, I was always really afraid of making mistakes or feeling like all of it had been an error. The word ‘calamity’ is seemingly appropriate for describing what was going on in my head at the time, where it just felt like it was the wrongest place for me to be, somehow. I think that was my own feelings being projected on the situation, rather than the reality of it, which made up a big part of the pressure that I perceived.”
It seems that the true nature of the Unicorns split was rooted in a divergence of the musicians’ philosophies. And while Thorburn’s subsequent tactic may have had more immediately tangible results, it would be a mistake to think Penner has been on hiatus. Even prior to the breakup, the seeds of Clues had been planted through collaboration with Brendan Reed, whose voice crops up in the middle of “I Was Born (a Unicorn)” on Who Will Cut Our Hair. Working within the fertile musical community of Montreal, the pair has spent the better part of a decade teasing out melodies and toying with different executions, crafting the songs that would eventually become their current repertoire. Now, after a lengthy period of isolated development, they’re finally ready to surface.
“I think things reached a certain saturation point,” Penner says. “I was feeling personally like I’ve been taking my time with things over the years and I haven’t really put that much out, visibly at least, into the music world, in terms of having a project. For a while, [Reed and I] were into this idea of a band not having to be present in a way that other bands are, in a clear or definitive way. I think we’re OK with coming out of that now, because our back-and-forth could only go so far. There is a satisfaction in putting a collection of songs together to make an album.”
After forging a partnership with Constellation Records, the pieces began to coalesce and Clues became a realistic project outside the localized sphere. While the outcome is a departure from the usual fare for Constellation, replacing the label’s usual post-rock soundscapes with catchy vocal hooks and blistering rock riffs, it’s no less interesting. Charting a new path through a swathe of 1990s alt-rock sounds and textures, the songs put a new shine on an old esthetic, calling to mind the slacker-meets-sophisticate style of bands like Sonic Youth and Pavement.
“It’s funny, the band Pavement is not one that I’m familiar with at all,” says Penner, responding to the comparison. “It was always kind of a name and a record cover. I remember seeing Slanted & Enchanted and thinking ‘That looks cool, it’s all scratchy and stuff.’ But I suppose a lot of music from that period struck me, and probably Brendan, at a time in our lives when we were very receptive. Now we’re trying to take the best elements and graft them on to something new.”
In that department, Clues is a great success. From dark blasts of slacker-prog to slowly strummed space-folk odysseys, they achieve a unique blend of now and then. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that the whole thing is underpinned with a healthy sense of musical and lyrical irony, taking a page from the book of The Unicorns. When Penner delivers the album’s absurd recurring chorus of “Who here wants to sleep in the dragon’s mouth?” over the plunk of a xylophone, there’s a palpable tone of sardonic mischief.
“The dragon’s mouth... I’m not quite sure what to tell you about that,” he laughs, when asked about the phrase. “It’s not a place, per se. I mean it could be a place, it depends on what you want it to be.” A state of mind, perhaps? “A state of mouth, maybe…. It could be a place of safety or a place of danger, it could be the risk of making a bad song. But mostly it’s about feeling.”
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