These are some guys. These are some serious guys. These are some guys who take their name from a Jane Austen novel, but play one of the most deafeningly loud and intense live sets you are likely to catch in this town. These are some guys who are so ballsy as to openly and thoroughly admonish their first album when their second record is still a very long way away from release. These guys, these Darcys, these The Darcys are a bunch of bearded, well-dressed dudes with English degrees and currently, they are one of the most exciting and interesting bands in Toronto with an extremely promising new release on the horizon that is making a lot of people salivate in anticipation.
These The Darcys are five of some guys who tout a brand of thick, effects-heavy indie rock that occupies a bizarre middle ground between the dreamy, ethereal soundscapes of nineties shoegaze and the primal, lumbering anthem rock of Constantines. Their self-released first album, Endless Water was famously recorded in a children’s museum in Waterloo and they recently wrapped up recording their second full-length with the Dears’ Murray Lightburn on production duties. And and and – let’s be honest here, this plug was inevitable – these are the guys who were so gracious as to headline this very publication’s One-Year Anniversary Party at the end of September.
These are great guys who proudly tout Heidegger as a primary influence and send their bass player to wait for them at shows by himself, armed with little more than a broken hand and a copy of In Search of Lost Time. These are the dudes who are all from Toronto, met in Halifax while attending university and moved back to Toronto, subsequently incurring the fate of being forever thought of as a Halifax band. Yes, these guys are some guys.
Last week I sat down over some beer with two of these guys, Drummer/Webmaster/Booking Agent Wes Marskell, and Multi-Instrumentalist/Non-“Guitarist”-Guitarist Jason Couse, and most of the above-mentioned things were discussed, some at greater length than others. Of the new album, the title of which is yet to be officially released, they spoke extremely animatedly. Tremendous excitement surrounds the mysterious record’s release and the band appears to be almost overwhelmingly proud of their work.
“It’s a totally different beast,” says Jason dryly, from behind a vast field of moustache, “It’s so, so different. I feel like it wasn’t made by the same band.”
“Well, it’s not,” interrupts Wes, “there’s a new member.” [guitarist Mike Le Riche]
Continues Jason, “There’s a new member, but I don’t think that it owes to that specifically, it’s like we all kind of had a mental shift at some point where we were all finishing school, getting out of school, getting out of Halifax.”
“Plus,” says Wes, “I would say we worked almost a year and a half on the songs before recording them. Some of the songs for the other record, we had only demoed a month before recording. The one song from that time period got cut immediately by our producer when we went into the studio, he said ‘This is shit.’”
The new album, recorded in Montreal’s Mountain City Studios as of this writing hasn’t even been mastered yet, but it appears as though the intense process by which it has created a product that not only has the band brimming with anxious pride, but also seems to have yielded a whole new group in its wake. Both Jason and Wes described to me the lengths to which they have gone to distance themselves from their earlier material and how severely content they are as a group in the moment. It also appears as though the guidance of Murray Lightburn has had a tremendous influence on the way the band, which by the way is rounded out by singer-songwriter/guitarist Kirby Best and bass player Dave Hurlow, operates.
“Murray was a Hail Mary sort of thing,” says Wes, “I had sort of contacted him a few times before and contacted the Dears, all to positive response but it never really went much further than that. We had talked about going on tour with them and playing with them, but we weren’t really prepared. Then finally he said ‘OK, I’ll do it [produce the album], if you can convince me to do it. So write fifteen songs and we’ll talk.’”
“No further details after that,” adds Jason, “We’re not talking about money, time or place. Nothing until you show me fifteen songs.”
Wes goes on, “Right, and this was a year and a half ago when he said ‘Write me fifteen songs, bring me the head of a songwriter and we’ll talk from there.’ I remember about six or seven months later, I’d sent him four or five songs. But we really took our time, we would do three or four versions of every song until we finalized the exact way we would want to present the song. And we talked a lot about how we’re not going to do reinterpretations of songs or change them for the live setting, this is the absolute best we can do them, we can’t alter them anymore than they’ve already been altered. And then we’d send it to him.
“Some of the songs had five or six versions, the first song we wrote for him we did eight versions of before we sent it, and it was the last song we sent him and now it’s the first song on the album. We had sent him six songs before he said ‘Ok good, keep going.’ We’d been giving him one a month for six months and nothing; we thought for sure he wasn’t going to do it. Then I didn’t hear from him again until the fourteenth song and he just said ‘Keep writing.’ We got to the fifteenth song and hadn’t heard anything else, so we were re-sending him songs, better versions of songs. So we were on tour and he called me and he said, ‘We’ve got to talk the logistics of making this record.’”
“We weren’t even sue if he was serious, he might have been stringing us along,” says Jason.
“From saying ‘Write me fifteen songs’ to ‘Let’s press record,’ I maybe talked to him twice, never on the phone, just short emails and then all of a sudden he says ‘This is the budget, this is where we’re going to do it, this is what I’m thinking.”
“Come to Montreal in a month,” says Jason, “You have four weeks.”
“We were in Winnipeg so had a month to finish the tour from Winnipeg, get home..."
“Make sure all of our gear was set up properly, make sure everything sounded right..."
“Deal with our living arrangements, quit our jobs, move out of our house, drive to Montreal, find a place in Montreal. We had a month to do all of that. Murray’s got this magic about him where you never know what he’s thinking and when you think you know, half of the time he’s fucking with you to get something out of you. With him the best thing he ever did was not talk to us because it made us want to do it better, like we’re finally going to write a song and he’s going to say ‘This is really great.’ And he was, the whole time, he would hear the songs and love them and even he told me this later. But if he had told us then, we would have stopped trying, we would have relaxed.”
Wow, that was a really long dialogue.
But I do think that that was an important part of our conversation, because it demonstrates a tremendous growth within the group. It’s clear that the Darcys are so abundantly proud of their work because they had to change their work ethic a lot to accomplish the results they wanted. They employed a catalyst to change the dynamic of the band, to challenge them and take them in new directions. This extends to the point where they now refuse to play most of their old material on stage and publicly denounce their last album on a regular basis.
This is both very admirable and extremely ballsy. I can definitely appreciate the Darcys’ desire to distance themselves from their previous incarnation, to redefine themselves and push themselves towards endless growth. At the same time, to openly admonish a record that they are still technically touring and to throw so much confidence behind an album that is in still in post-production is a deliciously audacious move. Long story short, I dig their moxy.
“I hate that record,” says Wes flatly, “There’s a couple songs that I like, I think that the last three songs are really good and the first song I really like.”
“There’s something very troubling about being involved in every step of something like that,” says Jason, “To write it, record it, mix it and sit through every single step of it and know every in and out of it, there’s no discovery left to make with it. With this one, it was different because not every single one of us would be in the studio all of the time, so someone could have done something that you wouldn’t know about and then he does the mix and adds all of these different layers and things happening. You don’t know if they’re there or in your head, things come and go so you can really become a fan of it and enjoy it more.”
“We sort of instated this necessary critical distance from it this time. With Endless Water, we were there and the songs were new. We recorded them, we mixed them and then they were done. We really didn’t take the time to go “Oh, that sucks, what the fuck are we doing? We should change that.’ And then the record was done and it was on CD and we were like ‘Oh fuck, that sucks, what the fuck were we doing?’ But it was already done. I feel like that record could have been a great EP.”
I can tell you straight up, that through their extreme passion for their new-found sense of self as a band and their redefinition of the way that they do things, the Darcys have certainly convinced me that they are a band to keep track of and this new record is going to be severely awesome. Nothing is better than change and growth, especially when it comes to art, so it pleases me very much to see a band so devoted to their own evolution. I realize now that I haven’t discussed the actual music that they play all that much here, but I can tell you that the Darcys are really great and you should jump on the bus.
