MUSIC

Bridal Party finds joy in music – and each other

by Yasmine Shemesh

It’s Sunday morning and members of Bridal Party have just woken up when the Straight calls. The pop-rock quintet performed the night before at Green Auto, an easygoing venue in

Vancouver’s Chinatown. After we get off the phone, they’ll prepare to make their way down to Seattle for the final gig on their month-long tour that’s taken them up and down the West Coast.

Being on the road again—back together, re-strengthening their live performance muscles—has felt really good, enthuses vocalist Suzannah Raudaschl.

“I think it’s the most calm tour we’ve ever done,” she says with a laugh. “Stressfree,” guitarist Joseph Leroux adds.

The band has encountered some roadblocks in the past. On one of its last outings, in 2019, the bus broke down in the thick of the Ontario wilderness. This time, all roads, literally and figuratively, were clear. “It feels like we’ve stepped to a different level, in a way,” Leroux says.

Since forming in 2015, finding each other in the heart of Victoria’s vibrant live and experimental scene, Bridal Party has traversed North America, playing energetic shows in the spirit of its effervescent sound. In the meantime, the band has released a pair of EPs—2015’s Hot Daze EP and 2017’s Negative Space—and, in 2019, a debut full-length, Too Much, on legendary

Vancouver label Kingfisher Bluez.

Bridal Party’s sonic world has always felt like a reflection of what’s going on both within and outside of itself. On

Too Much, warm and angular pop with dreamy harmonies coats songs about topics like complicated relationships to nature in a globalized world. Now, on the forthcoming sophomore record, Cool Down, the collective arrives at the juncture of change and the realization of what’s always been, directed by a compass of spacious melodies and rich layers of groovy texture.

Writing began at the start of 2020, with pandemic lockdowns inevitably forcing the band to shift the way it worked. Lexroux describes it as passing batons back and forth, sometimes getting to play together in-person, other times just having to do it online. It ended up making Bridal Party’s songwriting process the most collaborative, and arguably the best, it’s ever been. For example, when drummer Adrian Heim heard the demo for “Pool,” a sweet pop shuffle Leroux wrote as a reminder of the value of solitude, he flipped the chorus and verse. In another instance, with the album’s synth-driving title track, keyboardist Jordan Clairmont deconstructed some chords from Prince’s “I Wanna Be Your Lover” as Leroux played along, building new riffs. Raudaschl took that sonic sketch home and assembled the chorus and lyrics.

“We really put things together as a puzzle,” she says.

This approach worked to highlight the distinct contributions of each band member: Heim’s knack for finding structure and clarity, the polymathic dexterity of bassist Lee Gauthier, keyboardist Jordan Clairmont’s funky throughline, Raudaschl’s discerning ear for melody, the unique character of Leroux’s guitar. It also reinforced how strong a lyrical team Raudaschl and Leroux are.

Case in point: “Just a Habit,” an album highlight and the song on Cool Down that Leroux obsessed over perhaps the most. The guitarist had an initial sketch of ideas that he and Raudaschl further hashed out.

“Suzie [Raudaschl] and I came to a concept that was about the notion of addiction, or just the notion of these parts of yourself or your lifestyles that are really hard to get away from, and how alluring they are and how difficult they can also be to manage. I think anxiety does play into that, as well.” On the song, Raudaschl’s full falsetto soars over rhythmic basslines and staccato synths as she sings, “I know it never makes me feel good / (I don’t like it) / (It’s just a habit).”

Raudaschl continues: “I wanted there to be a lot of hooks in the song. It’s so fun to write a hook, you know? We were trying to not shy away from repetition or simplicity with lyrics. And the verses promote a visual of what I think it’s like to go into the weird part of your brain.”

Hooks are key here, Leroux notes. Because, he emphasizes, Cool Down is not a record about the pandemic. It’s about music.

“Yes, we were all going through these tumultuous things with our lives being upended by the pandemic and relationships shifting and other challenges. [But] we were a lot more focused on trying to write songs that were fun to play and had joy. We really wanted to be able to create that when we were practicing and writing and playing and then later performing these songs. There’s definitely a big focus on just wanting to make music that you could dance to and see yourself feeling good through.”

Bridal Party specifically referenced Steely Dan and Stereolab—bands wellknown for blending together particular elements of jazz, soul, funk, and soft rock—when creating Cool Down’s warm and lush musical landscape. You can hear it in the dreaminess of “Afterthought,” the swelling harmonies on “Baby Anymore,” the subtle brass on “Close to You.” Raudaschl also listened to a lot of pop to encourage her melody-writing, while Leroux dug into the R&B guitar of Mike James Kirkland and the experimental compositions of Nicolas Jaar.

“I don’t think we really get there on this record,” Leroux remarks, “but it’s important to have wide-reaching references, to show us what’s possible and the different ways you can flip the sound.”

With Cool Down, Bridal Party is the most cohesive and confident it’s been yet. “I know it takes a while to feel good about your strengths—or even know what they are, because there’s always other things you could be better at,” Raudaschl says. “But I think that really comes through: just knowing what we’re good at and how to work together.”

It’s like everything that happened in the past two years set the band on a path towards change and growth, where the members came to realize their greatest assets are the things that have been there the whole time: the music and each other. GS

Bridal Party. Photo by Jocasta Clarke

Bridal Party releases Cool Down on February 15, 2023.

MUSIC

Loscil gets extra-immersive with LINES+

by Yasmine Shemesh

The opening eight minutes of LINES+, loscil’s installation for Sound Space—the spatial music festival presented by Lobe Studios and New Forms Festival at Performance Works across the next week—is slow-moving, textural, and intended for deep-listening. It’s from a portion of his 2020 EP, Faults, Coasts, Lines, on which he took field recordings in Tofino and Ucluelet in a mediation on the Pacific. The drone-based sounds inform the rest of the nearly 45-minute set, which also includes new and complementing pieces that allows for a continuous flow that rises, falls, and changes direction dynamically. Any rhythm or melody has been stretched right out, except for where the water comes in, drizzling like a gentle storm. loscil—the moniker of Vancouverbased artist and composer Scott Morgan—wanted to create the feeling of entering a world of sound that is warm, safe, and allows for some respite.

“I’ve always felt that instrumental music—and, certainly, music that slows down tempo and takes you out of the very fast-paced world that we’re in—can be a kind of gift to people to offer that space,” Morgan tells the Straight. “And for me, as a creator, too, it is a space to go and disappear into.”

Morgan has been a prolific sound artist for over 20 years, releasing his debut album, Triple Point, in 2001 on the iconic experimental Chicago imprint Kranky. His work as loscil—the name inspired by a function in computer music language Csound (“Looping oscillator was what it stood for, and I thought, well, that pretty much sums up what electronic music is!”)—began in the late ‘90s, shortly after he graduated from Simon Fraser University. Morgan co-formed a multimedia collective, the Multiplex Grand, which curated regular experimental audio-visual events at an underground Gastown cinema, the Blinding Light!!

The West Coast, particularly the mountains and ocean, is a recurring theme in his work. “It’s an inevitable part of me, and it always seems to come back in my practice somehow,” Morgan says.

Take 2004’s First Narrows, for example, titled after the mouth of the Burrard Inlet that the Lions Gate Bridge stands over. Processing computer-generated sounds with live improvisations of instruments like the cello, Morgan creates an intricate and expansive sonic atmosphere that seems to breathe.

He enjoys working mostly with samples, preferring recorded sounds to synthesized sounds. His next project, Colours of Air, a collaboration with Australian composer Lawrence English out in February, also explores organic sounds: this time, with a century-old pipe organ that suggests sonic colour by the shapes of air moving through the instrument.

For LINES+, Morgan wanted to experiment with 4DSOUND technology, the hardware and software that powers the various experiences and environments at Sound Space. It uses 40 speakers assembled from floor to ceiling, all pointing towards the centre of the room.

“I think it really highlights the immersive quality of the audio,” he explains. “It’s quite different than two stereo speakers pointing at you from a stage, where the sound is very one-directional. I mean, we’re so used to that and that’s how most venues are set up. But I think this creates an environment which is more in tune with a kind of internalized listening, such as headphone listening.”

Morgan fell in love with music as a teenager growing up on Vancouver Island. He was into the Clash and the Velvet Underground. At 13, his uncle gave him his first guitar. Morgan started playing in punk bands and, later, after moving to Vancouver, joined Destroyer as its drummer. It was during Morgan’s time at SFU, though, when he discovered an entirely new world of electroacoustic music that changed his life.

Through sound ecologist Hildegard Westerkamp—a professor at SFU’s School of Communications—Morgan was introduced to the idea of listening to sounds in a natural environment. It redefined his understanding of what music is, what its role can be, and how it connects to our physiology, as well as the natural world around us. He began studying under Barry Truax, a pioneer of granular synthesis, which layers samples at different speeds, volumes, and frequencies. Truax made a profound and enduring impact on Morgan.

“Barry was huge for me in my life,” Morgan emphasizes. “I learned so much from him. [Granular synthesis] is still used quite often in electronic music today and I’m using it in my set [at Sound Space]. 4DSOUND has granular synthesis built in. His legacy is everywhere. I can’t really underscore it enough.”

Morgan laughs as he remembers a serendipitous thing that happened a few years ago at a show in Milan. A woman approached him after his set and insisted he needed to meet someone. “She pulls me aside and takes me over to meet Barry Truax. He was there on a speaking engagement at the university next door, and they had convinced him to go see this concert from some, you know, Canadian. It turns out I was his student. It was really an awesome moment.”

Sound Space will be another full-circle moment for Morgan, as Westerkamp is also featured on the festival lineup. Morgan has long been considered a luminary in his field, but as he stands among the figures who influenced his music, it’s impossible not to think about the ways in which his own work will impact the next generation, what it will offer them, and the new pathways it may carve.

For his part, though, Morgan just hopes that those who experience LINES+ are able to truly get lost in the sound.

““It takes a bit of an effort, as a listener, to reach that,” he says. “It’s almost like meditation...And I don’t meditate that often, but I’ve reached that point of deep concentration and of being swept away by the sound where you feel really like you’ve gone somewhere, on some kind of journey. And I hope people get that out of it.” GS

Loscil hopes LINES+ audiences get truly lost in the sound. Ben Didier photo.

Part of the New Forms Festival, Sound Space runs until December 18 at Performance Works.

MUSIC/POP EYE Meet the new band, same as the old band

By V.S. Wells

It’s the 20-year cycle, baby. Everything old is new again. The low-rise jeans and over-tweezed brows of Y2K are back, as is the looming fear of another recession. But this time, we have the added knowledge that climate change probably, actually, will obliterate us! If only Al Gore had won Florida.

But one layer of nostalgia isn’t enough.

In our irony-poisoned times, so too is music experiencing the return of sparkly synth pop and metal bombast that are unmistakably ’80s. And what about the groovy, psychedelic duds packing out

Urban Outfitters with ’60s callbacks?

Time is collapsing. It’s a temporal tiramisu. Are we the cream or the cake?

Nowhere is this kitchen sink mishmash of generational nostalgia stronger than in Netflix shows like Stranger Things and Wednesday, which have hit on a winning formula of making today’s teens really resonate with the shit that the creators loved when they were young. Case in point: the music.

After Season 4 of Netflix’s cash-cow franchise featured Kate Bush’s “Running

Up That Hill” and Metallica’s “Master of

Puppets” in climactic scenes, both tracks experienced a huge popularity bump. It’s kind of like what The Sopranos in 2007, and then Glee in 2009 did for “Don’t Stop

Believin’”: suddenly Journey’s iconic 1981 power ballad was everywhere, albeit in the latter instance as a weirdly soulless cover that felt painstakingly crafted in a

Hollywood lab to extract as much fandom obsession as possible out of theatre kids.

While it’s not to the same extent,

Wednesday has also brought about a bit of a streaming bump. There’s new attention on The Cramps’ 1981 track “Goo Goo

Muck”, as the titular character dances to the spooky bop during her magic school’s prom. This track itself is a cover. Originally it was performed by Ronnie Cook & The Gaylads in 1962, and it’s a pop culture crime that a band with a name that incredible somehow doesn’t have a

Wikipedia page.

And here we have the 20-year layers, yet again. The Cramps covered a song

The Cramps and Kate Bush have been discovered by a new generation of TikTok kids.

that was around when they were growing up. Wednesday is created by two men in their mid-50s who might remember The Cramps’ psychobilly surf-punk from their own youth. Four episodes are directed by a man in his mid-60s who, yes, does happen to be Tim Burton, AKA the man who made every movie that millennials thought were just so deep when they were 14. (Does The Nightmare Before Christmas have a lasting cultural impact, as evidenced by the fact Blink-182 was using it as a model for whiny-piney love songs in 2004? Yes. Is living “like Jack and Sally” actually an aspirational thing? No, the Pumpkin King spends the whole movie ignoring the only person with half a brain, and then they sing half a song together. That’s love, folks!)

And Stranger Things is helmed by two men born in 1984. They don’t know what it was like to be a teen in the ’80s; they’ve just imagined it, based on all the Spielberg movies they loved that were about teens in the ’80s. They’re nostalgic for what it was like to be coming of age at the same time they’re born, the way teens now are nostalgic for the early ’00s.

Gen Z thinks boob tubes and butterfly clips are cool because they didn’t live through it. And buying into that vision

Wednesday has been a perfect delivery mechanism for the acts of yesteryear.

of the ’80s from Stranger Things is like learning about the ’60s by listening to the Monkees. It’s all rose-tinted. It’s the facsimile of a facsimile, the vibe of a vibe, a mixtape that’s been passed through so many hands that Ronnie Cook & The Gaylads has been rubbed off the tracklist and only the best-known names remain.

When the present day is unsatisfying—and, truly, is the present day ever more unsatisfying than when you’re a teen?—of course the past seems better by comparison.

Which makes me wonder where we’ll be at in 20 years’ time. Will the kids of 2040 be watching TikTok montages and recreating Jenna Ortega’s viral staccato dance scene? Or will today’s teens be the tastemakers, crafting smash-hit shows about their barely-remembered pre-9/11 childhoods when all we had to worry about was the Y2K Bug and boy band wars, making their own kids relive the noughties nostalgia we’re currently contending with?

To be fair, they’ll probably still be blasting “Running Up That Hill.” That’s not the ladyfingers or the marscapone: it’s the espresso. GS

MUSIC Local Discs

Stuttr: Stuck in the Muck (Early Onset)

Adult angst is alive and well. Society has become saturated with discomfort and anxiety, leaving many of us agonizing over the mundane routines of having a job and mindlessly scrolling through the week’s trending and triggering social media broadcasts. Enter Stuttr, the Vancouver noisy post-punk band serving as a voice for 20 and 30-somethings feeling curb stomped by the menace of modern society.

Combining frenzied guitars, meaty bass, pounding drums and spastic vocals, Stuttr has tapped into the strangeness of human behaviour, commenting on it without being preachy nor pretentious. The multi-racial, multi-gendered quartet— featuring members Jono Delivuk, Brie Dunphy, Ralph Cabebe, and Heather Ross— has been gaining traction in Vancouver’s music scene for its loud, eccentric live performances. The buzz started long before the release of Stuttr’s catastrophic debut EP, It’s A Kadoozy. Now, the band delivers an erratic expulsion of dread, anxiety, and reflection with its follow-up, Stuck in the Muck.

“Medicate” opens the record with dissonant chords and a defeated vocal cadence. It’s high-energy, yet sorrowful, and frontman Delivuk’s signature screech gets more distressed as the song progresses.

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The track is a cheeky comment on feeling the need to latch on prescription medications to solve all your problems, even ones as insignificant as running out of hair gel or being called a “Karen.”.

“2 B Tangoed” is a frantic follow-up that opens with an almost circus-like guitar -lead, the track confrontational and pissed off. It’s hard to say if Delivuk is calling out a specific person or people, or perhaps having an internal dialogue with himself. “Nebraska” sees the band mellow out into an almost shoegaze-y realm with an atmospheric slow-burn that builds into the musical equivalent of a horror film, everything ending in a wall of aggressive noise. It is simultaneously the calmest and most agonizing track on the record.

Overall, Stuck in the Muck shows diversity and evolution in the band’s sound, expanding on the musical cadence that makes Stuttr so different. It speaks to the experience of being a young adult in the age of social media, expensive housing, and being in a constant state of uneasiness. -Johnny Papan

Co-op: Reward System (Independent)

Naming the first song on your album “Less Fun” — as Vancouver trio Co-op has on its latest project, Reward System— seems like a bit of a gamble. On a gut level, the title doesn’t instill much confidence. Now, five years on and a few releases down the line from the group’s self-titled debut EP, could this be a sly admission of a veteran band entering artistic decline? Thankfully, this proves to be more bait-and-switch than selffulfilling prophecy.

Granted, the piece isn’t exactly a barrel of laughs — propping itself up on a discordant shimmer of guitar, canyon-wide piano chord ambiance, and vocalistguitarist Evan Law Gray’s eerie note that “a lunatic smile is burning inside me all the time”. But it’s nevertheless an intriguing, immersive crash course in Co-op’s often senses-stirring polyrhythmia.

The nine-song Reward System generally runs on irregularly metered beats and the ping-ponging relationship between Gray’s effects-warped guitar and bassist Liam Shiveral’s dub-like burble. “Magic Eraser” is the band at its twitchiest, drummer Stefen Ursulan working through the tune with magnetic panic; “In Descending” likewise crashes through a litany of time signatures with reckless abandon. On the other side of things, a mauve airiness permeates postpunk ballad “Only Time,” where traditional drums are muted in favour of a percussively melodious marimba.

Reward System’s greatest gift, however, is its penultimate “Notional Joyride.” Oddly, it’s the number that finds the usually spindly Shiveral leaning into a onenote groove, Gray’s vocals completely in absentia, in their stead a hypnotic hiccup of oscillating synths and the grand jubilation of a pair of interlocking guitar lines practically grinning their way through the speakers. While promising less fun up front, by the end of Co-op’s Reward System, the risk/reward ratio is slanted heavily towards the latter.