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Twin Town High (vol. 8) |
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Small Sins: Big Within
Thursday 22 June @ 02:40:47 |
 by Steve McPherson
“I find myself always getting tired of these different spaces,” says one-man-band Thom D’Arcy via cell phone when I ask him about the process behind recording Small Sins’ self-titled debut effort. “As soon as I figure out what’s wrong with them, I feel like I can’t work there anymore. Lately it’s this one air vent that’s really been pissing me off. I can’t find a ladder high enough to go block it, and I keep doing these vocal tracks and I can hear the fucking air conditioning and it’s really getting to me. That’s why I’ll have to move. But it’s been something equally retarded at any space I’ve been in.”
The peripatetic D’Arcy recorded the tracks for Small Sins in different venues around his native Toronto and did most of the heavy lifting himself. A veteran of the Toronto music scene at the tender age of 26, D’Arcy had done time in a number of bands before deciding to go the solo route. “I was really just trying to prove that I could make a record on my own,” he explains, “and I had some pride issues and some confidence issues. It was very important that I could do all this by myself and take all the credit and now that that’s kind of out of my system.”
And thus was born The Ladies and Gentlemen, a band name that D’Arcy eventually had to abandon in favor of Small Sins when the record labels came calling. When you’re an independent band, sharing your name with a couple other bands isn’t much of a problem, but when Astralwerks is going to be releasing the record, they like to avoid those kind of conflicts.
I listen to a lot of music, but Small Sins came as a bit of a surprise. I had meant to throw in the new Mojave 3 CD, and within the first couple tracks I was becoming shocked at their new direction when I realized that the sleek, stripped-down tracks and whispered vocals that explode into harmony-drenched choruses were coming from a different band altogether.
The thing that will catch you immediately about Small Sins is, well, the catchiness. Standouts “Stay,” “She’s the Source” and “All Will Be Fine” take the hooks of bubblegum pop and toss them in a rock tumbler, smoothing the edges and revealing a deeper luster. It’s pop music that you can sing along to but so stripped of excess that it achieves a nearly crystalline sheen. If that were all there were to the album, though, it wouldn’t be too different from the clutch of tight, cleanly-produced, distortion-eschewing indie rock that’s been washing up on my desk recently. Fortunately, deeper album cuts like “Too Much To Lose” wear D’Arcy’s Spoon fetish on their sleeves proudly. Spoon’s made a career out of making pop minimalism feel creepy without being cold, complex without being busy. When keyboard lines unfold like empty highways, the drums counting time like the dotted line down the middle, deviation from that singlemindedness sounds like a revelation. “At Least You Feel Something,” which I initially thought the weakest cut on the album, has recently become one of my favorites. At first, I thought its gently strummed acoustic guitar and roomy vocals conflicted too much with the aerodynamic feel of the rest of the disc, but it’s one of D’Arcy’s finest lyrical moments, including the Verve-paraphrasing “Spent some money/ but the drugs don’t work/ they just make you more angry at me/ You’ve never felt this way/ At least you feel something.” Combine those textural and lyrical sensibilities with an ear for wonky little flourishes such as the drill-like sound that signals the chorus on “Stay,” and it comes as little surprise that D’Arcy counts both Spoon and Wilco as just about the only contemporary bands he really draws inspiration from.
He might be a pop virtuoso, but D’Arcy isn’t a conservatory musician. “I can’t solo on guitar,” he says. “I can play every instrument, but I can’t play any instrument really well, so once in a while, I need a little pizzaz. I value myself as someone who can arrange things and make all sorts of little things work together, but not a virtuoso at anything. But I got to actually title [the guitar] solos.”
Yup, it’s true. If you look in the liner notes, the guitar solos bear their own titles like “Burt the Dog” and “Velvet.” There’s even one which must draw its inspiration from the movie “Lost in Translation” called “Santori Time,” although I think the Japanese beverage manufacturer spells it “Suntory.”
The kind of quirkiness that leads to titling guitar solos is evident in the lightness of the album’s touch, a quality which you can’t often associate with self-produced, self-played solo efforts. In a gentle sing-song, D’Arcy delivers lines like, “If you hurt this girl again/ I think I’ll punch your lights out,” and “We talk like lawyers talk/ standing on the sidewalk/ and I came out to smoke/ and not stand like a robot.” The protagonists in these songs should be familiar to anybody who has spent their share of time in bars and clubs, but his heroes aren’t the ones getting drunk and passing out in the stalls; D’Arcy’s characters seem more like the quiet ones at the end of the bar, half wanting to mix it up with the brighter lights, half wanting to go home to work on their album.
Taking this project from the bedroom to the stage—or as D’Arcy tells it, from the basement to the bedroom to the living room to his parents’ place while they were on vacation to a string of rehearsal spaces to the stage—has changed the songs. “There’s songs that have different chords and different progressions and different lyrics, even,” says D’Arcy. “I got together with the guys and we decided how the songs would work best in a live context and there’s no rules. We don’t have to try to recreate the record if we don’t feel like it. And with that burden lifted off you, there’s some really cool ideas that can keep the songs really fresh, but generally they’re a little bit more rocking. The songs take on quite a new life.”
I spoke to D’Arcy the day before the first show of this tour, so the question of how the tour had gone so far didn’t seem particularly germane. His take on touring generally, however, reflects the kind of appreciation for balance and space required to pull off a successful solo record whose best traits are its least obvious. “If I was just at home working all the time, it would just get frustrating and boring,” he says. “You need to take breaks and one is always a break from the other. It always seems fun when I come back home and it always seems fun when I’m leaving.” ||
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