The angry robots in Mt. Royal are hell-bent on taking over Calgary and destroying everything less pretty than a rainbow
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Medicine Hat might not be the most obvious indie-rock hot spot, but through fanboy enthusiasm and endless networking, the young lads in Mt. Royal have managed to establish exactly that. Not only have they built a scene of rabid music lovers in their hometown, they’ve created something worth bringing to the big city. Fronted by the twin DiNinno brothers — Thomas and Robert — the time has come to get the word out about Mt. Royal.
With their debut EP Mad Foxes, produced in widescreen Technicolor by The Summerlad’s Arran Fisher, Mt. Royal are putting Medicine Hat on the map with an exciting blend of pop tunefulness and good, old-fashioned youthful noise. “Ghost Song” and “Let In the Light” are built on waves of swelling, clockwork keyboards, while “Eye-Lights” builds on a chorus of handclaps to make a driving cacophony. With near-mechanical precision and its fair share of madness, Mad Foxes packs in more ideas than some bands muster over the course of an entire full-length. It’s a surprisingly assured debut, in particular for a band with such inauspicious beginnings.
“We always wanted a band really badly,” says Thomas, “but never had an excuse to play. Some of our friends asked us to play with them, and we started just writing songs for the show. It just kind of happened.” Shortly afterwards, Thomas and his bandmate Steve Lind started the Young & Pretty series of shows, currently a weekly sellout success at Medicine Hat club The Ottoman. Featuring one of the province’s best stages, lit from beneath Saturday Night Fever-style, the venue has helped make their hometown one of the de rigeur stops for every Calgary band worth their road salt. “I don’t do anything for the shows,” adds Robert (whose side project, Capital R’s, is one of the town’s biggest local draws), “but people always give me some of the credit for them, and that’s cool with me.”
Giving credit where credit is due, recent props for Mt. Royal include Calgary shows with The Summerlad and Sunset Rubdown, and this summer sees the group taking on their first major tour with local heroes-in-the-making Women. “Alberta’s kick-ass. It’s the best place for music right now,” says Thomas. Robert interjects, “We really like Medicine Hat, too. It’s cool actually. We own this town.”
Yet, despite their distance from Calgary, the DiNinno boys’ work in changing the face of Medicine Hat for its teenagers has also given them a role to be reckoned with in Calgary’s music scene. “I think a lot of people forget we’re from Medicine Hat,” says Thomas. “They’ll try to send me posters to put up, and I’ll have to remind them I don’t live in Calgary.”
“It’s kind of neat that way, just being out of the big city,” adds Robert. “We’re impartial to the corruption of the big city.”
