Arran Fisher (l), Dean Martin and Garrett Sordi-McClure, a.k.a. The Summerlad.
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Broken City
Friday, February 19 - Friday, February 19
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What would the Calgary music scene sound like without The Summerlad? It’s impossible to say, but it’s safe to assume that without the contributions and influence of vocalist and guitarist Garrett Sordi-McClure, drummer Dean Martin and multi-instrumentalist and producer Arran Fisher, Calgary bands from The Ex-Boyfriends to The Cape May and The Brenda Vaqueros would be vastly different animals.
As instrumental as its membership has been in the local scene, The Summerlad is more than the sum of its individual parts. The band is set to release its fourth full-length album, Blue Skinned, a snapshot of its past, present and future. The amicable departures of founding member Sean Grier and keyboardist Liz Collins (both left the band after the recording of the album) and Fisher’s part-time relocation to Qatar have significantly changed the band’s dynamic.
“After 11 years, I think it's OK for people to want to do other things, and when other members left, there was no way we were going to be mad or feel that all is lost,” says Sordi-McClure. “With Arran in Qatar, it’s kind of the same. Dean and I write and record and Arran has to come back and play catch-up, and that's if he even likes what Dean and I have written or feels like it's a direction he wants to go. I think since City of Noise [the band’s 2007 concept album, consisting of a single 40-plus minute song], we are closing the chapter on long compositional music. I think we all want to do something different with each other.”
“I think Blue Skinned is a closure,” he continues. “I feel that I love the songs as an artifact, but lately I have been wanting to move on and try other things, musically and artistically. I think Arran and Dean feel the same as well. We already have another record on the burner that is so opposite to Blue Skinned — Dean and I wrote it while Arran was away, and he came back and added his parts, recorded it and we played a few shows with that material.”
Blue Skinned showcases a band very aware of its own strengths and weaknesses. A song like "On a Witch's Ride” illustrates that awareness — when conceiving the song, the melody and chord progressions were solid, but the groove eluded the band. Fisher was convinced that it was because they didn't want to settle into tried-and-true musical tropes, and Martin thought that the song structure was overdone.
“I’m sure it would have worked great as a kind of Lou Reed groove rock number, chugging along with a simple drum beat, but that’s just not our mode,” Fisher says. “We lose patience with sounding like something else. In a way, it’s kind of myopic or juvenile to be like, ‘Oh no, that sounds too much like Radiohead or Sonic Youth.’ We can’t sound like that, but most of the time, the less we’d try the more amazing it’d be.”
“We just couldn't stay away from the song,” adds Martin. “We kept trying to change it and adding candy sprinkles to it until it looked like the ice cream sundae we wanted to eat.”
According to Fisher, one of the ironies of the band’s revised lineup is that certain songs now sound thin and uninteresting when the band plays them live. It’s obvious, then, that Blue Skinned represents a band in transition. To some, this could be a terrifying place, but for a band that has been together as long as The Summerlad, it facilitates the exploration the group has come to crave. Like Sordi-McClure, Fisher is convinced that Blue Skinned closes a chapter.
“It’s signifies the end of this kind of approach to rock songs that’s really full bodied and epic in scale,” says Fisher. “These days, we’re a lot more interested in noise, textures and randomness. We’re steering away from the rock songs, and if we do end up writing them, I think we’re moving towards simplicity.”
Martin agrees and, like Fisher, looks towards the next project. Even with the band’s next record, Gang Lion, already recorded and waiting in the wings, there’s also enough material for another album, and one can easily understand the band’s eagerness to move on.
“These songs are kinda like old books to me, too,” admits Martin. “You read them, put them away, maybe visit them in the future, but these tracks have been on the back burner for quite a while now and it’s good to get them out and off our chests. Really, it’s hard to think of some of this as being the closing or beginning, since The Summerlad to me has always been about exploring musical avenues. It’s always changing for us; our tastes, our music and our direction.”
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