No Gold promises that its new material, set for release this year, will be less reliant on the 'traditional rock setup.'

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Broken City

“Vancouver has a really specific energy... something kind of ecstatic and also confused. Maybe we have some of that same energy,” says Liam Butler, bassist for Vancouver indie rock visionaries No Gold, a project he shares with his friends Ian Wyatt and Jack Butler. The trio play a highly danceable, world-influenced brand of indie pop that draws as much from tropicalia and Paul Simon as it does from Pavement or Yo La Tengo.

Prior to No Gold, all three members shared their time in the group Yukon. “Yukon was a folk-wise band that Jack and I formed with Theo during university when we met on the SkyTrain,” Butler recalls. Later, after Yukon broke up, we joined up with my friend Haley and made No Gold, which I guess was more focused on dance music and light as well as being a completely different band.”

Shrinking down to a three-piece again, the group approaches its craft with a sense of anything-goes energy. “Just like in real life, there is no set way that we do things,” Butler explains of their songwriting methods. “[It’s] all over the map really — but a lot of the stuff on the new album was made through improvisation.”

Listening to No Gold, one can definitely hear the improvisation. Slow-burning tracks such as “Rainforts” and “Council Jam” inhabit the sort of wide open spaces that can only be carved out through tireless hours of practise space tinkering.

Still, the compositions also boast a loose cohesion that can only come from a tight-knit group of musicians. “We all lived together when we made the album,” Butler says. “The typical day was making breakfast and drinking coffee, followed by exercise, followed by working in our studio, followed by a big dinner. It took about two months and the songs are mason jars full of the things we did in and around that time.”

When the record was released earlier this year via Ontario imprint Unfamiliar Records, No Gold quickly did what most good bands do and hit the road, including a stint at the venerable SXSW music conference in Austin, Texas. “SXSW was a wild parade,” Butler says. “We had some amazing tacos and barbecue from various carts and drank lots of water. We saw some amazing performances from Basketball, Bonjay and Babe Rainbow.”

They didn’t only tour America though, as the band has lived through numerous cross-Canada treks. “We almost ran into a moose at 3 a.m. outside of Wawa [Ont.], then ran out of gas a mile later,” Butler explains. “In the morning I was woken up by a man in a Molson Canadian hat siphoning gas from a jerry can into our tank. His name was Wendel, and he invited us back to his place for Black Diamond marble cheese on toast and coffee. He saved our asses. That’s No Gold’s Canadian moment.”

Perhaps No Gold will have a run-in with Wendel once more, as it embarks on a cross-Canada tour this month that will see band members travel from Vancouver to Toronto and back. From there, they’ve got more releases up their sleeves in 2011.

“We’re really excited about the things we’re working on now, which are less reliant on the traditional rock setup,” Butler says. “At this point we don’t know much more, but there is a lot of material sitting on computers right now.”