The Floor - Edmonton's post-punk luminaries -
"Delayed Reaction"
by Stuart Trew, The Ottawa Xpress. July 21, 2005:
Edmonton's The Floor usurp the new wave army while no one's listening.
How's that saying go? If no one hears you scream, do you actually make a sound? What if it isn't a scream but a kind of reverberated echo from the past? A dark and beautiful techno memory of a Cold War that never really died but lives on in the anxiety of a new generation. An anxiety with beat and melody so irresistible that you want to brood but have to dance instead. You might not know it yet, but you are aching to hear this music.
The Floor are quite possibly the best post-punk/new wave band Canada has ever produced. Yes, ever-not just the sycophantic revival centred in Toronto, but anything and everything from about 1979 onwards. And they've been screaming from inside an Edmonton "Bunker," as they call their basement recording space, for three years: a debut Doll EP in March '03, an indie album called Autonomy Off/On later that year, and the full-length Personnel, released this year on the Normals Welcome label. If we haven't heard any of it yet we can largely blame a backward Canadian radio culture. But it probably has as much to do with geography.
The Floor guitarist, synth player, and producer on Personnel, Graham Lessard laughed when I asked him if it was difficult touring from Edmonton.
"We play in Calgary regularly and we play in Vancouver several times a year as well, although even Vancouver . it's a hell of a drive out there," he said in a recent phone conversation. "So yeah, there's not many [tour stops] and we try also not to play too much at home
either. We try to be efficient about it I guess, rather than prolific."
That mentality seeps into their sound, which, roughly speaking, is a rethinking of 1982 new wave through the hindsight of diehard shoegazers. The influences are obvious, from Garlands-era Cocteau Twins, Modern English, Duran Duran and early Cure, to My Bloody Valentine, Ride and New Order; Lessard doesn't shy away from them. The Floor are candidly post-punk and openly pop-oriented.
"I think we tried to combine some of the elements of all those styles," he said, after explaining how on Personnel the band took some of their previously "austere and heavy sonics" in a more shoegazing direction. "Obviously everybody who hasn't been living under a rock for the past five years is aware that post-punk is cool again [but] the new post-punk bands have never really influenced us other than for us to try and differentiate ourselves, and I think that this album's a lot darker and it's a lot more textured and a lot heavier than this new crop of new wave music."
Personnel isn't merely darker than, say, the U.K.'s Franz Ferdinand, The Killers or Bloc Party, bands whose sex appeal seems to sum up their very existence. For lack of better words, it is more authentically desperate. It shuns postmodern angst for romantic engagement with lyrics that grasp for the truth in experience. It's not a philosophical exercise, said Lessard, but an accurate interpretation of the music.
"I think that [vocalist/guitarist Matt Pahl is] trying to create something that sounds interesting and intelligent and sonically pleasing and aesthetically correct, as well as honest and not artificial at all," he said. "[The lyrics are] very measured and distanced as well as being introspective and honest. I mean there's an honesty there but it's not like a guy in a sweater with an acoustic guitar kind of honesty. It's very careful."
Lessard also told me he and the rest of The Floor-Pahl, drummer Dan Carlyle, and luminary bassist Paul Arnusch-take the same kind of care with their individual sounds. It's not a matter of plugging and playing, even though at heart they are a guitar band. Effects pedals have been mastered, vocals reverbed, and toms overdubbed so that post-production is a matter of painless tinkering.
"A lot of the sounds on Personnel are sounds that we got right at the source," explained Lessard. "Matt is really an expert at getting crazy and fantastic guitar tones and he's definitely a shoegazer in that respect, that he's paid a lot of attention to his sound, and actually I think everybody in the band would fall into that category. We are all interested in the textures we're making right off the bat. It's not like I was sitting in the control room pulling the strings or anything like that."
Whatever he did in the Bunker paid off. What he didn't do means their free show at Zaphod's August 1 is going to shellshock us all. It's The Floor's first time in Ottawa, although they came close last month when they played a Normals Welcome showcase at North By Northeast in Toronto. Booking shows here is notoriously difficult, Lessard said, slightly comforted that Showcase Mondays at Zaphod's has featured some top-notch up-and-coming bands in the past.
As our conversation ended, Lessard came up with a possible third reason The Floor's screams had yet to be heard east of Alberta.
"It also seems like, along with every other big city, in Ottawa there's a huge punk and hardcore scene. Considering how many of those bands there are and how similarly they all sound, it's pretty easy to get shows if you're part of the army."
Yes, the thrash of distortion (and the twang of alt-country for that matter) can be deafening at times. I supposed we should thank Zaphod's for this small (and free) mercy.
