The last time I talked to 20-year-old rock chick Britt Black she was Brittin Karrol, high school student and guitarist for BC teenaged girly rock slash pop punk outfit LiveonRelease, who saw a modicum of success when their tune I'm Afraid Of Britney Spears made it onto the soundtrack of Dude, Where's My Car?
"We broke up two and a half years ago," she says, "and I was wondering what I was going to do with my life."
She wound up playing guitar for Bif Naked for two years � Black's dad is Bif's manager and co-owner of her Her Royal Majesty label. Now she's bringin' on the harder rock with her quartet.
"With LiveonRelease I had to write teenager pop, and I never really liked the songs I played. I wanted to do something closer to what I listen to."
She likes stuff like Slipknot and the Used, but her stuff is, thank god, a little easier listening than that. She also digs Audioslave. There's no accounting for taste.
Being a frontperson, she says, is a new and challenging experience. "When you're just the guitar player, you can put your head down and have your hair in your face, but a frontperson has to relate to the crowd.
"I'm just figuring out what I'm supposed to do onstage and how charismatic I have to be."
SJ wasn't born the Wordburglar. Four years ago he just up and abandoned his old moniker, the flakier, itchier Dandruff.
"I think when you hear �Wordburglar,' it gives you that comic book feel� and it rhymes," he says. "Word-burglar." Well, not that last part, but so what?
At his CD release party, he donned a black and white jumper and proceeded to spit rhymes from behind a black mask with two cutout eye slits. But don't get your hopes up.
"The costume only comes out at special events," he says.
This is because of the heat generated by the thing as well as his desire to be taken somewhat seriously. SJ is, after all, a comedian, a trickster hawking punchlines as lyrics. In his personal manifesto, Burglaration, he hurls lines like "Gargle with garlic and still come funky fresh" or "You couldn't rap if you worked at gift shop / so just stop" over a sparse drumbeat and some slinky bass licks.
Hell, he ain't out to make a million, just to entertain audiences with his combination of nouns, verbs and a taste for the absurd.
Sometimes good things can come out of a bad situation. Take the band Beneath Augusta.
Naming it after an old Kensington Market underground after-hours club, Matthew Cromarty and Michael Brennan founded the band shortly after the breakup of their space-rock quartet, Mellonova.
Though the band's only a year and a half old, they've managed to sign a deal with Aporia records and tour England, Scotland and Canada.
Their well-received debut album, You Gotta Come Down Sometime, described by bassist Clay Jones as brooding indie rock, came out in 2004.
"The five of us have fairly different musical backgrounds and tastes, and the final result reflects that diversity," says Jones.
Beneath Augusta's live show is definitely their selling point. Jones says they sound very different live than on the record.
"Our sedated sound is much more aggressive onstage," he says by way of warning.
By the third or fourth time you listen to the shimmering orchestral folk-pop of Christine Fellows's beautiful new Paper Anniversary (Six Shooter) album, you start noticing something peculiar: although there's a certain circularity to some of the lyrical themes (returning home, pining for a faraway love) and sonic motifs (a particular glockenspiel chime, an idiosyncratic vocal cadence), the disc avoids repeating the obvious.
"I'm one of those people who can only really repeat a chorus twice and then I feel like a boob," admits the Winnipeg-based singer/songwriter.
It's not like her songs suffer for it. Paper Anniversary follows up 2002's well-received The Last One Standing with gorgeously detailed narratives that range from karmic connections between accident-prone victims in an ER to bleary-eyed airport goodbyes, all told in Fellows's effervescent soprano croon.
Her vivid lyrical anecdotes are more like stark short stories than conventional songs, similar in style to the deft prose-poetry of the Weakerthans' John K. Samson � who happens to be, not uncoincidentally, Fellows's husband.
"I've tried to write more fiction than I have in the past, or tried to communicate something more concrete," she says. "I've always been a little bit afeared of the details of fiction, of creating a character, cuz it seems like such a crazy thing to create a human. And the characters on the album do come and go a lot. I guess I was pining more."
Montreal is turning into a hot spot for indie pop bands. But despite their opening spot for Ben Lee on his 2004 tour and fierce connections to the burgeoning Quebec scene, the members of Pony Up! all hold day jobs ranging from cutting hair at Coupe Bizzarre to selling CDs at HMV.
In the all-girl outfit, two sisters (keyboardist Laura Wills and drummer Lindsay Wills), two childhood pals (bassist Lisa J. Smith and mixed-bag Camilla Wyne Ingr) and guitarist Sarah Moundroukas trade off on singing, songwriting and jams.
Pony Up! sound like the soundtrack for the greatest sleepover you've never had. On the song Heard You Got Action, for example, band members Wyne Ingr and Laura Wills talk locker-room: "Let's talk baseball / Didja slide into second? / Did ya hit them all?"
Their confessional, humorous lyrics � chronicling their fascination with actor Matthew Modine and washing clothes at Marlon Brando's laundromat � are chick-oriented without alienating the other 50 per cent of the population.
"For some reason if you're four or five girls and you get up onstage without guys, people think that's pretty shocking," Laura Wills remarks over the phone.
"Our audience is made up of 17-year-old girls and 40-year-old guys," says Moundroukas. "I guess 17-year-old girls like our music and 40-year-old guys are dirty."
During a recent hometown cd release party, Edmonton's the Floor broke into an unexpected extended encore that included a few classic back tracks.
"We kinda threw some Bunnymen lines into one song, and also an Archies song," explains singer Matt Pahl from his Edmonton pad.
While the Archies and the Bunnymen might seem like unlikely bedfellows, the Floor view musical influences as a continuum on which anything is fair game.
After releasing two well-received EPs in 2003, the band spent the better part of 2004 crafting the deep atmospheres and imaginative melodies that make up their debut LP, Personnel.
Critics in western Canada, where the band has built a sizable fan base, have weighed in with the inevitable tiring comparisons to post-punk and new wave heroes like New Order, but the Floor's new joint crams a kaleidoscope of other influences into a collection of 11 finely crafted cuts.
"We just wanted to make our own statement," says Pahl, referring to the new wave comparisons. "We do have a very open approach to songwriting. To us, melodies span a period of more than 40 or 50 years, not just 10."
Pahl's not keen on analyzing his band's music � he says picking things apart is "bad art" � and sees spontaneity as the key.
"It sounds like such a Pink Floyd thing to say, but we really don't try to make things happen. We rely on inspiration."
Most bands only dream about the kind of success the Junior Pantherz enjoy.
And they've achieved it completely independently, in a tiny city with virtually no local support. Having released four albums and an EP with absolutely no help from a label, the Pantherz give new meaning to DIY.
"If we hadn't done it ourselves, the band would still be playing high school variety nights," says bassist S.J. Kardash from his base in Saskatoon. "As geeky as it may sound, I love the satisfaction of booking a show or selling a CD that we worked really hard on."
Heavily influenced by the likes of Pavement and the Band, Kardash describes the Pantherz's sound as being "dynamic rock with pop details."
Their unique sound has won the Pantherz a dedicated following and allowed them to tour across Canada several times, opening for the likes of the Pixies and Modest Mouse. A tour of the States and Europe is planned.
In the five years since stockholm glam-slammers the Backyard Babies were last in Toronto, the Swedish rock invasion has come and gone. Not that Dregen and his fellow rock 'n' roll delinquents care about popular trends. They were kicking ass in clubs long before Howlin' Pelle Almqvist and his Hives hombres could afford matching spats 'n' ascots, and the Babies will likely be around long after the Hives retire to the back nine.
They've been keeping busy. Two official Backyard Babies live discs, a boxed set of demos and numerous studio recordings have been released in various album, EP and single configurations � in addition to a Swedish-language tell-some biography, Blod, Svett & D�rar (Blood, Sweat & Idiots), and a new tour documentary DVD � mostly exclusively in Europe.
To help fans on this side of the ocean catch up, the Liquor & Poker label has just released the Tinnitus retrospective focusing on the revved-up tunes from 2003's Stockholm Syndrome and 2001's Making Enemies Is Good.
"Not long after we last played Toronto," explains Dregen from his Stockholm pad, "we signed a worldwide deal with RCA/BMG that we thought was great. But as it turned out, our records were never released in Canada or the U.S. The only thing BMG wanted to release in North America was more Britney Spears CDs, so even though they owned the rights to our recordings, they shelved them.
"So the Tinnitus CD is like a best-of, something for people to hear right now while we work on songs for the next album. We've got some new songs that are a bit more direct and fun, so I think it's going to be a good-time rock 'n' roll album. Of course, I say that each time we go into the studio, and then our dark side always seems to come out."
A lot of young bands hit music conferences like NXNE with tons of business cards and an iPod loaded with BTO's Taking Care Of Business.
Nik Kozub, who plays bass in Edmonton's robot rock kings Shout Out Out Out Out (he's also launching a label called Normals Welcome), has a different strategy.
"I don't like going to places like NXNE or SXSE to do business and get in people's faces," he explains. "I'd rather have a beer and hope people come down to the show."
While the Shout Outs kill crowds with their party-till-you-puke live jams, Kozub is also using NXNE to launch the new label and its first release by mood rockers the Floor.
"We have distro through Warner, so that's allowed the label to skip a few steps," says Kozub, who mentions electro/dance labels like Gomma and Output as inspiration.
"We want to be respected by the people who put out the same stuff as us. I want to find artists we can really get behind."
