The Trews stay true to heart, play Frankie's Friday

by Ryan A. Bunch

I was going to write a preview piece about The Trews -- a popular and highly-acclaimed rock outfit hailing from Canada, set to play Frankie's Inner City (308 Main St.) this Friday, January 13 -- so I took to reading the band's bio. Very quickly, I decided I wasn't going to write anything, because there was nothing I could say more convincing than what they'd already written. In the handful of years I've been doing this, this is the first band bio I've come across that employed the phrase “fucked so many consequences” - and it's brilliant. Read on, see The Trews this Friday, and enjoy. Read more at www.thetrewsmusic.com

www.frankiesinnercity.com


Bio:

By the beginning of 2010, the Trews were feeling a little lost. 


The band had been on an upwardly mobile streak since “Not Ready to Go” first came pumping out of Canadian radio back in 2003. They wasted no time piling success on top of success, watching their stature grow with multiple hit singles and an incomparable live show, courting exhaustion while they fanned out across the world and carved an eccentric and stubborn path through an industry demanding that they always “compete.” 


The tensions were audible on 2008’s No Time for Later. The band’s third album was its most accomplished and satisfying. But as a formal exercise in broadening their songwriting chops while making a hermetically perfect studio recording – all while shoveling enough hits into the mouth of the beast – it emerged uptight and dark, maybe even a little claustrophobic. Not insignificantly, the second single was called “Paranoid Freak”. 


As the first leg of touring wrapped up on their sidelong 2009 Acoustic – Friends & Total Strangers retrospective, for the first time in years the Trews found themselves facing time off and a blank canvas. As Colin MacDonald bluntly puts it, “We didn’t really know what to do.” The rest of the tour was months away. The band had forward momentum but nowhere to go. 


Enter Gord Sinclair. The Tragically Hip bassist surfaced amidst this rare period of suspended animation and offered the Trews a little shelter at the Hip’s fabled Bathouse Recording Studio. He said they could cool their jets, make some demos. “And I’ll hang out for a couple days, drink some beer, and listen to what you guys have got going on,” he suggested. It sounded like a holiday to John-Angus MacDonald. 

“We were just looking to run away a little,” the guitarist admits. “And we wanted to do something fun, organic, be a band again, and fuck the consequences, all that stuff.” 


And so bassist Jack Syperek, drummer Sean Dalton, and the two MacDonald brothers faded into the bucolic splendor of Bath, Ontario, where they had so much fun and fucked so many consequences that a couple months later, the Trews had a new album – Hope and Ruin. Or maybe it should be called Order Out of Chaos.

“It was like anything was up for grabs,” continues John-Angus, “And we just needed to get a hold of where we were at, which is why we retreated to Bath. We went there to try and figure out what kind of record was in us.” 


So what kind of record was in them? In contrast to the cinched, vaguely political alt-rock of No Time for Later, the Trews swing low and loose on Hope and Ruin, which Sinclair unexpectedly found himself co-producing with John-Angus. Their customary wall-of-guitar is there on tracks like the explosive and somewhat insane “People of the Deer” – albeit bigger and more visceral than ever – and “The World I Know” puts a perverse twist on the kind of Aerosmith redux the band accomplishes in its sleep. “I’ll Find Someone Who Will” is their patented classic-rock, power-pop hybrid, and naturally more fun than a sugar rush after a blast of nitrous. 
But title track and single “Hope and Ruin” is something altogether different, superimposing chiming guitar and Colin’s reflective-yet-triumphant lyrics onto a pumping disco beat, while the guitar atmospherics of “Stay With Me” are redolent of a certain world-devouring, ‘80s rock giant.

John-Angus puts it best: “It was like our first record again,” he says, of the band’s most collaborative, exploratory, and intuitive effort in years. “When you make your first record, you don’t know who the songwriter is. Those roles aren’t established yet. The band is just trying to be the best band they can be. And we were back there.”  

 


Published: 01/09/2012 7:00 am

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