terça-feira, 30 de junho de 2015

No Way Out with Betrayers - An Interview


Diretamente do Canadá vem a garagem ácida, regada a fuzz, psicodelia moderna atrelada com a psicodelia clássica 60´s e muito rock de garage do Betrayers

Let The Good Times Die o debute dos caras é avassalador, um eletrochoque em alta velocidade acidez em estado bruto.

Bom para momentos de exorcizar demônios e almas penadas sejam elas o que queira que forem.

O Betrayers é a prova mais viva e intensa de que quando houver uma garagem, fuzz, sexo, drogas e barulho o rock esta salvo.

***** Interview with Betrayers *****



Q. When did Betrayers started, tell us about the history...
We started playing together about four years ago, most of us were just learning our instruments so that early stuff is pretty scrappy. Basically we just wanted an excuse to get together every week to hang out and listen to records. Since then we've done a full-length LP, a couple of 7"s, and some touring in Canada and Europe, and we're gonna try to finish the next album before the year is through.

Q: Who are your influences?
I can't speak for everyone, but I'm influenced mostly by 60's R&B, bubblegum, and garagebeat groups. The Kinks are, in my opinion, the most perfect band of all time... To me the songs sound amateurish and teenage and yet are still completely soulful-- "When I See That Girl Of Mine" is just a totally perfect dum-dum love song. Mostly early, primitive rock n roll is what does it for me but I dig some contemporary bands too, the Allah Las, Night Beats, White Fence, the Liminãnas, and La Luz often get played in the van.

Q. Make a list of 5 albums of all time…
It's constantly changing, but if I were sent to prison tomorrow and could only take 5 records, they would be:

Little Ann- Deep Shadows
The Kinks- Kinda Kinks
The Who- Sell Out
T. Rex- the Slider
and
Darker My Love-Alive As You Are

Although the last one isn't a "classic" record like the others, I think it's a pretty moving modern-day psych record and was criminally underappreciated on it's release. I lived in the UK for a while and Darker My Love toured out there a lot around the time this was released-- I was like a total deadhead for this band, I'd go and see 'em six nights in a row even though I had to be up at the crack of dawn for work. If you like the more polished stuff on the White Fence records you will definitely like this album, I can't recommend it enough.

Q. How do you feel playing live?
We're pretty lucky in that we haven't had too many clunkers-- sometimes you get a lousy soundguy or the club treats you poorly and it's hard to feign excitement but I figure if people have paid to get in, we better damn well try our best to entertain them. They could've done anything that night so I want to make it worthwhile for someone to have left the house.

Q. How do you describe Betrayers sounds?
Short songs, mostly influenced by Nuggets-era garage rock and bubblegum acts. Psychedelic, but not in a relentless, blistering way, it's a little more warm and stoned and laid back.


Q: Tell us about the process of recording the songs?
Most of our stuff gets recorded at this studio in Chinatown called Riverdale Recorders. Our friend Scott runs it and it's just a really relaxing place to make records. Everyone can play in the same room together, which is how we prefer to do it, and there's a big kitchen where you can hang out or make something to eat or have a little grass. We record everything live off the floor, and then take another pass for vocals and the odd guitar solo. Typically we'll play the song three times and just keep the best cut of the three, but sometimes you get it in the first go and sometimes it takes a little longer...

Q. Which new bands do you recommended
We've done a fair amount of touring with the Lad Mags, a girl-group/garage/soul act we like a lot... We've also toured with the Backhomes, who do a Suicide/Spacemen 3/Stooges thing. They're just two people but they have a huge sound. The Radiation Flowers are another prairie band we play with sometimes, they play some really dreamy shoegazy psych stuff and they are probably gonna take over the world soon. Edmonton, where we live, has a lot of killer bands going at the moment, I would recommend anyone reading this to check out Faith Healer, Power Buddies, Calvin Love, the Wet Secrets, the Archaics, Witchfinger, the Tee-Tahs, Black Mastiff, Slates, Switches, Jom Comyn, Stepmothers... Lots of really hardworking bands who are touring and putting out albums and making our city proud.

Q: Which bands would you love to make a cover version of?
I'm trying to do more singing in French, so I would love to cover something from Serge Gainsbourg or Françoise Hardy. "Nothing To Be Done" by the Pastels might be a cool one since it's got the male/female tradeoff that we sometimes use... I like covering stuff that's quite different from what we're typically doing, putting it through our own filter and taking it somewhere else.

Q: What´s the plan for the future....
So far we've done nearly everything ourselves-- from building our own silkscreening rig so that we could print t-shirts to putting out our own records to to booking our own tours... It's satisfying to be totally self-sufficient but it would also be nice to have some help from a label or a booking agency or someone who is more organized than we are. The stuff we've released so far has come out on tiny labels who are run by amazing people but I'm still running our mailorder outta my apartment-- I would love it if someone could just go into a record store and find our shit rather than having to track it down online. They roll their eyes at the post office whenever I show up with a bunch of records under my arm, so if anyone else wanted to be subjected to that kind of scrutiny I wouldn't complain.

Q: Any parting words?
Yeah-- if you like music and you want to play in a band, start one. Most of us have zero formal training, but probably neither did any of our heroes. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a shredder by any stretch of the imagination, but the thing about garage rock or punk is that you don't have to be a virtuoso in order to make great music, you've just gotta have good taste. Some of the greatest bands ever were just kids who had no idea what they were doing-- if they could do it so can you, so if you want to play music, figure out a way to do it. Then come to Edmonton and play a show with us.
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Thanks

https://thebetrayers.bandcamp.com/
https://www.facebook.com/betrayersband