Status: Single
City: Halifax
State: Nova Scotia
Country: CA
Signup Date: 11/13/2005
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Wednesday, November 26, 2008
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..November 13, 2008 | ..The Maynards' date with destiny
They
don't want to be big, but after three albums and almost 10 years of
dance parties, The Maynards rule the dance floor and our indie music
hearts.
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| | by Sue Carter Flinn | |
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 Animal collectors: The Maynards new album, Date and Destroy, "leaves" the competition behind.
with The Maynards, they pick you up at the door. The Maynards actually
ring my doorbell---no honking from the curb or impatient text messages
from this band.
At first impression, you'll probably think, like
me, that they're all cute with really good hair and eyewear. This night
the trio is dressed up in nice sweaters and smiles. Then they shyly
pull out a gift: A wrist corsage with a bright pink rose and a shiny,
silvery band that snuggly fits over my fall jacket sleeve. (Although
they don't know this, pink roses express fun and happiness.) They have
already made the plans---we're taking a g-rated trip to The
Chickenburger for milkshakes (sharing), onion rings (mutual
onion-breath in case of first-base action) and chickenburgers (because
that's where you are).
"Judy's Turn To Cry" plays on the
juke-box---Lesley Gore's follow-up to "It's My Party," where Johnny
comes back, sees her dancing with another guy and gets into a huge
scrap. How appropriate. The Maynards' new album Date and Destroy, which
comes out Tuesday, is all about dancing and dating, minus the punches.
We
get our food (they even pumped ketchup into those little paper cups for
me) and take our trays to an empty table to get to know each other
better. For almost 10 years---since 1999---The Maynards have made the
dance floor sweaty with scraptacular art-house garage punk about boys,
girls, kissing and dancing. Made for college radio and NSCAD students,
the trio has been compared to Bikini Kill and Sleater-Kinney, plus a
dude. The band was born out of the ashes of the infamous Halifax rock
scene of Sloan and Thrush Hermit, after the music industry attention
waned and the pressure eased, the attitude became more about having
fun. In the late-'90s there were a bunch of bands like Rick of the
Skins and The Maynards who took a more lo-fi approach to their music.
 Heath Matheson
guitarist/vocalist Heath Matheson had been playing music for about
seven years before the band formed. On stage, he's as intense as a
throbbing neck vein, focused in his pursuit of filling the floor with
bodies. Bassist/vocalist Kristina Parlee moved to Halifax for
university, then got into seeing local bands, but it wasn't until about
1996 that she picked up an instrument, playing in her first band The
Hotties (apparently there are about four copies of their tape in
distribution). It's her vocal style that has drawn the most
Sleater-Kinney references. Matheson and Parlee "crazy talked" about
starting a band, and even had a practice, but it wasn't until Chantal
Tardiff, originally from Cornwall, Ontario, came along did band make
three.
"There was this young band of boys playing music at the
time. The drummer was eight years old or something. I was like, 'if he
can play drums, I can play drums,'" Tardiff says, dipping her onion
rings into ketchup. Even as a kid she liked music that made her head
bop. "So I got this idea I wanted to learn."
They practiced in Matheson's upstairs apartment until the downstairs neighbour got pissed off.
"It
was cool," Parlee says of the early days. "I had been in this other
band before. It was pretty basic. And so I wasn't that accomplished a
bass player and Chantal was just learning drums, but Heath had been
playing guitar for years. He was a level beyond what we were at."
Matheson
interjects: "Hmm. That's not how I felt about it. I was really excited.
I had been in blues bands and rock bands because in Fredericton, there
was no such thing as an originals band at that time. It was dire. It
was fun to not be in a cock-rock band. Bands with boys, I don't know,
there was a lot of posturing. I felt like the intentions weren't always
as pure in a band with boys."
"What about a band with two girls? Are the intentions as pure?" Tardiff asks coyly.
Leaning
back off his stool, Matheson exclaims, "Pure! In a very different
way...it was fun to be in a band with people who were just excited to
be in a band. It's just a matter of time that you can do something
before you get a little jaded and a little apathetic towards it. Music
for me---my raison d'etre was to play in front of people and get
excited and make people dance. That's almost my entire motive for
playing music. There's nothing like being in a place full of people
that are going nuts to your music. Chantal and Kristina were pretty
psyched to make dance-rock. It was a good fit. They've kept me from
being more cock-rocky. I think I needed an estrogen leveller."
They
played their first show with Matt Reid's The Confidence Band. When The
Maynards came onto the scene, Matheson recalls that dancing at shows
was out of vogue. (Parlee shoots back lightening-fast, " but voguing at
shows was popular." The Maynards always laugh at each other's jokes.)
Frustrated, Matheson started bribing people by giving away cigarettes.
"It was incredible. You offer to give one cigarette away and 40 NSCAD
students are vying for this one cigarette." Then it became cigarettes
and beer, candy, giant novelty cheques, certificates and a wrestling
belt during a No-Cases show.
So the dancers multiplied and the band
stopped the rewards, mostly because "we outprized ourselves." Until
now: Matheson impulsively purchased a friend's '83 Honda Civic, and is
thinking of giving it away as a huge dance-off prize at their CD launch
show on December 5 at Gus' Pub. He's trying to avoid thinking about it
too much---the plan has some pretty big holes---but he's really excited
to paint "Dance Party" on the side of the car.
 Chantal Tardiff
to make, but the band has been performing some of the songs for two
years. The first track, "Spinny," is like an indie kid's romantic
dream, with Tardiff's great drumwork echoing a heartbeat: Instead of
running through fields, love is all about spinning around on the dance
floor, until everyone disappears and you just want to lie down. Then
it's all Matheson: undercover as a loud-mouthed boasting punk "C.I.A."
Friends of The Stolen Minks will love the almost call-and-response
stylings of "Art Attack," that shifts from screaming to pretty whispers
and back to yelling again, with a nice mix of Parlee and Tardiff on
vocals. The album is a bit different from their two earlier albums as
they all share more singing duties this time around; in the past it's
mostly been Matheson and Parlee.
"If you sit down and listen to
a Maynards album, usually the person who sings the most on it is the
person who brought the most to it," Tardiff reveals.
"That's one
of the most interesting things about our music...we can give it three
voices and three parts, put three different vocals in---we don't have
to play it quite as straight as a lot of bands do, with a singer and
accompanying musicians," says Matheson. "I think if you listen to all
our records, there's not one who stands out."
By now The
Chickenburger has emptied out, the onion rings have been eaten and the
jukebox is silent. But the conversation continues, turning to The
Maynards' writing process. Everyone has busy lives so it's infrequent
that the band pens songs as a group, although Matheson says inspiration
comes from anywhere. "Like, Chantal will say something funny and cute,
and it will rhyme and be awesome, and we'll go write an entire song
based around this one phrase. Sometimes lyrically or musically the
entire song is put together. Or we'll just spontaneously come up with
it." Parlee gives Matheson credit for bringing whole songs to the
table, but he goes modest and denies being the front guy or leader.
Although
all the band members are well past high school age, they're not so far
detached from the emotional highs and lows of dating and its
potentially destructive consequences. In many ways, this new album is
about growing up, both as a band and as people.
Matheson has a
theory. "I find that strangely, not intentionally, a lot of records
become concept albums. Like the first one was named The Maynards Stole
Your Lunch Money and it was---I think we had a lot of issues about high
school we had to get out---it was this complete high school concept
album. The next, Break Out the Makeout, I think that we were all
entering, well, not all of us, well, a certain number of us were
gung-ho..."
Tardiff cuts in,"...were coming out of long-term relationships. And wanting to cut loose."
Matheson
agrees. "Yeah, and it kinda became this love song to dancing and
partying and making out. This one, Date and Destroy, is the natural
progression of what happens after you either destroy, or get destroyed
by what you wrought. But still in the theme, it's still a party record.
From start to finish, it's dancing, but at times it's screaming and
sadness and bitching and moaning. My thought is that if we make three
or four more albums, we'll have a complete rock album. An entire rock
opera."
Parlee: "Then it will be senior citizens' rock."
Matheson: "It will be The Maynards: R.I.P."
No one likes that title. But Married to the Maynards, Soccer Mom Maynards and Retirement Party Maynards get a lot of laughs.
 Kristina Parlee
The Maynards began playing, they had a hard time finding bands with
whom they had things in common with, music-wise. But the scene is much
different now. The north end and venues like Gus' Pub have replaced
downtown as the epicentre of indie music, and there's something special
simmering---everyone who plays in a band or loves local music is aware
of the vibrancy. Just look at 6015 Willow, the recently released DVD of
20 Halifax bands performing (The Maynards bake cookies in the kitchen),
most of whom are friends and chums.
"I feel like there was a second
explosion that didn't quite crack the popular culture the way the first
one did, but I think it's just as interesting and maybe even a little
bit more charming because there no expectations of breaking out or
being found," says Matheson. "A lot of people who were attracted to
Halifax because of the first one, that first wave put Halifax on the
map and all these wonderful people came. Halifax had quite the
reputation and it drew all these fantastic people and it turned into
this lovely music scene that we're lucky to be part of."
There's
a sense that this band exists solely for these friends to hang out and
to make audiences dance their asses off. They downplay their
popularity---Tardiff says it's a pretty big compliment when people tell
them that "I totally put on your album last night to get ready to go
out to a party, or I totally had a make-out party at our house and we
listened to your album."
Their goals are modest: to have shows,
CDs and tour around with other musicians. And they all love "hijinks,"
like playing hockey in a garage with Windom Earle and Vancouver's Fun
100 last February, to the tune of "Thunderstuck" on a toy keyboard.
Cops came after the roman candles started getting tossed around.
Parlee
says, "I think what was hard at some points with this record is that we
achieved most of the goals we had for ourselves with the last record.
It wasn't that we weren't motivated, but we had charted in Halifax
really well and charted in Canada---we played shows in Toronto,
Vancouver and Winnipeg, Ottawa. And we had been on the CBC Radio 3
podcast and distributed by Scratch, so we had done all these things. It
was hard to know how this record would fit in."
"Break Out the
Make Out had achieved all the success of a small, obscure Halifax indie
rock band that likes to party," says Matheson. "It had done everything
we wanted it to do."
The band plays their cards close to their chest,
avoiding personal questions by making distracting jokes. It's the only
time they stumble over their words. If this was a real first date, this
tactic would be sketchy, but with The Maynards, it's simply part of the
party persona. They do reveal a not-so-secret secret: the band is
trouble with a capital T.
"We can't help it. We're like trouble
magnets. We're an innocent little party band that's usually based on
high school romance and heartbreak. But we get in trouble all the time.
They've
been pregnant like three times," he points at Parlee and Tardiff who
burst out laughing at the ridiculousness of it. So does Matheson. "No
one knows who the father is. Oh wait, I went off my talking points,
didn't I? We don't get in trouble."
He gets serious for a
moment. "One of the nice things about our band is that we all have
different certain skills that make us a good unit. Where one person
lacks, the other pulls it together."
Tardiff: "We have a band dynamic and we all step up into specific roles."
Parlee: "I think we're all very different but it works well together."
Tardiff: "It's like magic. Synergy."
Matheson:
"We have a good dynamic. We're three, we're a tiny band and when we
arrive, we can all sleep in the same double bed. We're this completely
modular little band and a lot times we tour without equipment, so it's
us, our suitcases in a bed."
At the end of the date
before we head home, there is a visit to the Titanic graves at the
Mount Olivet Cemetery because Titanic is such a dreamy romantic movie.
(In theory, this is cute, but again, in reality, taking a first date to
a cemetery on a foggy night is a crappy idea.) There's no awkwardness
at the door, but it's early and I'm left wanting more: perhaps a
makeout session followed by a dance party.
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Sue Carter Flinn is arts editor for The Coast.
She doesn't kiss and tell.
The Maynards' Date and Destroy
comes out on Tuesday. You have a couple of weeks to master the dance
moves in time for their CD release party on December 5 at Gus' Pub. | ..
4:12 PM
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