Tag: Chad Van Gaalen

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: JOVM Mainstays Sunglaciers Share Punchy Post Punk Ripper “Fakes”

Regular Nature, Calgary-based post-punk/psych pop outfit and JOVM mainstays Sunglaciers‘ highly-anticipated third album is slated for a March 29, 2024 release through Montréal-based label Mothland. While the material sees the band further continuing to blur the boundaries between polished melodcism and opaque experimentation, the material also blurs the lines between auspicious Romanticism and unbridled dissent. Firmly anchored in the strange and uneasy reality of our time, the album’s songs are laced with a certain optimism, through well-calculated psych elements and vibrant rhythms, creating a unique strange of kaleidoscopic pop.

Continuing their ongoing collaboration with co-producer Chad Van Gaalen, the Calgary-based JOVM mainstays’ forthcoming third album was purposely designed to be enjoyed in many ways, from solitary headphone listening to a crowded live venue, while sonically seeming to nod at Deerhunter, Ought, MGMT, DEVO, Talking Heads and others. The album also features a guest spot from acclaimed Zoon creative mastermind Daniel Monkman. 

“We wanted to make a concise yet explosive record, continuing to find the balance between familiar and novel sounds and approaches. We have not and may never make ‘dance music,’ but we make continued efforts to bring sounds that we like from dance and electronic genres into our own, delighting in the process as much as the product,” the band explains. “We love to play and experiment, defying expectations and discovering new sounds. This record shows how these novel (to us) elements interact with the rock and roll world we comfortably inhabit.

“We want to make you dance. We want to make you think. We want to make you think while you’re dancing and dance while you’re busy thinking. This is an album for the body, brain and heart. It’s compassionate, frustrated, communal and dreadful. In a world of information overload, where everything comes at you at once, Regular Nature is trying to normalize the phenomenon. This is chaotic music for a chaotic world, a three-way conversation between outer self, the subconscious and the mad world. As expressed on penultimate track ‘One Time or Another:’ ‘There’s always somebody talking.’”“We wanted to make a concise yet explosive record, continuing to find the balance between familiar and novel sounds and approaches. We have not and may never make ‘dance music,’ but we make continued efforts to bring sounds that we like from dance and electronic genres into our own, delighting in the process as much as the product,” the band explains. “We love to play and experiment, defying expectations and discovering new sounds. This record shows how these novel (to us) elements interact with the rock and roll world we comfortably inhabit.

“We want to make you dance. We want to make you think. We want to make you think while you’re dancing and dance while you’re busy thinking. This is an album for the body, brain and heart. It’s compassionate, frustrated, communal and dreadful. In a world of information overload, where everything comes at you at once, Regular Nature is trying to normalize the phenomenon. This is chaotic music for a chaotic world, a three-way conversation between outer self, the subconscious and the mad world. As expressed on penultimate track ‘One Time or Another:’ ‘There’s always somebody talking.’”

Late last month, I wrote about “Cursed,” a woozy dream pop-meets-psych pop-meets-post-punk track that features glistening and fluttering synth arpeggios, a motorik rhythm section, an Avalon-era Roxy Music-like guitar solo and hazy and yearning vocals. The achingly nostalgic song sees its narrator discussing a love passing them by with a weary and bitterly resigned sense of regret. “Oh, if I had only known what I know now,” the song’s narrator seems to say. 

“‘Cursed’ is quite probably Sunglaciers’ biggest downer to date. It is a piece about shattered, unsaid expectations, and reflecting on the reality of a situation after it has passed, and all that remains is its memory,” the band explains. “It is a slow dance between regret and acceptance, a song about lost love and lost potential. It is being caught in a moment, blinded by short-term desires, only to wake up on the other side when everything has passed and it is too late to reconcile (“You wish your head could unremember this/ But memory is all there ever is”).

“Fakes,” Regular Nature‘s second and latest single is a Freedom of Choice-era DEVO and Remain in Light-era Talking Heads like ripper built around a relentless four-on-the-floor, angular chorus pedal-drenched baselines and squiggling guitars and atmospheric synths paired with Resnik’s punchily uneasy delivery and bursts of gossip and shit-talking. The song captures the inner monologue of someone struggling to keep up with appearances and with keeping up with others, while recognizing — with an excoriating sense of humor — that practically everything in our lives has a veneer of phoniness.

“‘Fakes’ is a song about performance, artifice, and image,” the Calgary-based outfit explains. “Partly a direct narration of a social scene, partly an inner monologue. It is about how our priorities have changed or are distorted. Instead of who we truly are, the importance seems to be on what we appear to be or how we act. Sometimes these intersect, but oftentimes are at odds. We are desperate to mold a certain self-image, a certain perception from the outside, despite what we really think about a situation. We run a risk of being seen as ‘all style, not a lot of substance.’ All social interactions are performative. We are striving to be seen as having a certain character, whether or not that’s who we truly are or how we believe we “ought” to be. ‘Fakes’ is like the subconscious taking over the controls of someone engaging in society (‘Don’t tell me your thoughts about the weather’), then abruptly turning its focus back inward (‘I’m anxious, always acting up’).”

Directed by the band’s Evan Resnik, the accompanying video is inspired and informed by 90s MTV/Muchmusic music video aesthetics, while also nodding at some of DEVO’s videos from the 80s. Featuring the band playing a sparse, white studio space, at points we see some uncanny mash-ups of their faces and bodies that seem startlingly real and unsettlingly weird.

“Everyone in the band grew up on the aesthetics of 90s MTV/Muchmusic, so it’s no surprise that many of our videos look like they belong to that era,” Resnik says. “When conceptualizing the ‘Fakes’ video, Mathieu (Blanchard) told me he wanted it to be our ‘Big Bang Baby,’ a music video by Stone Temple Pilots. I hadn’t seen the video in years, but the vibe is unforgettable. I freshened it up to fit our weirdness, and adjusted for our complete lack of budget. I tend to go off the rails during the editing process, so I spliced our faces to exaggerate the fakeness. And there are parallels to ‘Big Bang Baby’ that found their way in without my realizing (the old TV, neon colours in the bridge). I think Scott Weiland passed these elements to me from the great beyond.”

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Sunglaciers Share Woozy and Aching “Cursed”

Calgary-based post-punk/psych pop outfit and JOVM mainstays Sunglaciers can trace its origins back to 2017 as a collaboration between its founding members —  multi-instrumentalist Matthieu Blanchard and lead vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Evan Resnik.

The band’s full-length debut, 2019’s Foreign Bodies saw them crafting a maximalist approach that blurred the lines between dazzling indie rock melodicism and icy post-punk experimentalism. The Calgary-based JOVM mainstays support the album with tours with the likes of fellow JOVM mainstays Preoccupations, Omni and Daniel Romano. Adding to a growing profile both regionally and nationally, their material topped the charts of college radio stations across Western Canada.

When the pandemic put their touring plans on a then-indefinite pause, the band shifted their focus to writing material, dedicating 40-plus hour weeks to music in the early months of 2020. Those writing sessions birthed the material on their sophomore album, 2022’s Chad Van Gaalen co-produced Subterranea.

Subterranea saw the JOVM mainstays eschewing the maximalist approach of their previous releases and crafting material with a decided laser focus. The end result was a frenetic, breakneck paced album of material that managed to never overstay its welcome. “The bulk of this album came together during the pandemic and the changing of gears that we had to do,” Sunglaciers’ Evan Resnik said. “I was out of work and Mathieu was working half as much as usual, so we had lots of time on our hands. We flipped a switch and started playing music everyday. It’s a good indicator of how we were writing at the time while we wrapped our heads around some new gear and saw what came out of it. Essentially, we took all of our favourite musical tendencies and put them together. We were listening to a lot of McCartney II at the time and loved how eclectic it was, which led to us mirroring that vibe.”

Regular Nature, the Calgary-based JOVM mainstays highly-anticipated third album is slated for a March 29, 2024 release through Montréal-based label Mothland. While continuing to blur the boundaries between polished melodcism and opaque experimentation, the material sees the band blurring auspicious Romanticism and unbridled dissent. Through firmly anchored in the strange and uneasy reality of our time, the album’s songs are laced with a certain optimism through well-calculated psych elements and vibrant rhythms, creating a unique strand of kaleidoscopic pop.

Continuing their ongoing collaboration with co-producer Chad Van Gaalen, Regular Nature was purposely designed to be enjoyed in many ways, from solitary headphone listening to a crowded live venue while seemingly nodding to Deerhunter, Ought, MGMT, DEVO, Talking Heads and others. The album also features a guest spot from acclaimed Zoon creative mastermind Daniel Monkman.

“We wanted to make a concise yet explosive record, continuing to find the balance between familiar and novel sounds and approaches. We have not and may never make ‘dance music,’ but we make continued efforts to bring sounds that we like from dance and electronic genres into our own, delighting in the process as much as the product,” the band explains. “We love to play and experiment, defying expectations and discovering new sounds. This record shows how these novel (to us) elements interact with the rock and roll world we comfortably inhabit.

We want to make you dance. We want to make you think. We want to make you think while you’re dancing and dance while you’re busy thinking. This is an album for the body, brain and heart. It’s compassionate, frustrated, communal and dreadful. In a world of information overload, where everything comes at you at once, Regular Nature is trying to normalize the phenomenon. This is chaotic music for a chaotic world, a three-way conversation between outer self, the subconscious and the mad world. As expressed on penultimate track ‘One Time or Another:’ ‘There’s always somebody talking.’

Regular Nature‘s first single, the woozy, dream pop-meets-psych pop-meets-post-punk-like “Cursed” features glistening and fluttering synth arpeggios, a motorik rhythm section, an Avalon-era Roxy Music-like guitar solo and hazy and yearning vocals. The achingly nostalgic song sees its narrator discussing a love passing them by with a weary and bitterly resigned sense of regret. “Oh, if I had only known what I know now,” the song’s narrator seems to say.

“‘Cursed’ is quite probably Sunglaciers’ biggest downer to date. It is a piece about shattered, unsaid expectations, and reflecting on the reality of a situation after it has passed, and all that remains is its memory,” the band explains. “It is a slow dance between regret and acceptance, a song about lost love and lost potential. It is being caught in a moment, blinded by short-term desires, only to wake up on the other side when everything has passed and it is too late to reconcile (“You wish your head could unremember this/ But memory is all there ever is”).

Directed by the band’s Evan Resnik, the accompanying video for “Cursed” is a gorgeous, hypnotic and nostalgia-fueled fever dream that makes the familiar — dusty, countryside roads, mountaintop vistas and more — seem surreal and otherworldly. And at its core is a sense of time passing by: The familiar growing smaller in the rearview, the mistakes and regrets looming larger with an unfamiliar and uncertain future in front of you.

“We spent a lot of time in the van this past year. On the tour where I captured the bulk of this footage, we drove over 15,000km in 6 weeks. There was a lot of time quietly spent looking out the window at these amazing landscapes flying by,” Sunglaciers’ Evan Resnik explains. “All I had was my phone, but I had recently upgraded to a new-ish one with a great (to me) camera. I had a lot of time on my hands to play with perspective, and loved seeing these vistas in black and white. I was intrigued by the disorientation I felt when viewing rock formations upside down, and how something could look familiar and concrete, but also alien and abstract at the same time. That’s a feeling I wanted to explore in conjunction with our song ‘Cursed,’ which deals with regret, feelings of ‘what if?,’ and the nature of dream vs imagination vs reality. By the time we got home, I had a lot of nice footage to play with. Denice provided a wonderfully easy and interesting subject through which I could tease out a narrative arc of someone wandering alone through a melange of waking, dream, and memory.”