by LORRAINE CARPENTER

"It was a long time coming." So says Lorraine Muller, singer, songwriter and headmistress of Montreal's Lo and the Magnetics, the quintet that spent nearly two years masquerading as a famous ska band. After almost a decade singing and playing sax with local stars of the up beat, the Kingpins, Muller found herself alone at centre stage in late 2001, assembling a new band from scratch, yet clinging to the old moniker for dear life.

"I was very emotionally attached to everything about the band," she says, "but as soon as we started recording the new record, I said, ‘No, this is not the Kingpins.'"

Muller credits her band with inspiring the name change. Bit by bit, Russ Cooper (bass), Mike Gasseldorfer (drums, percussion), Dan Meier (keys, reeds) and Chris Raz (guitar, backing vox) coaxed the singer into admitting that she was the band's driving force and loosening her grip on the Kingpins' ska aesthetic, a process rooted in the old lineup's then-surprisingly new wave-oriented Plan of Action LP, released in 2000. Though ska is one of the styles woven into Lo and the Magnetics' debut album A Part, the sound reveals a much more diverse and disparate set of musical tendencies.

"The more we played together, the more they started adding their own palette of beautiful colours," says Muller. "Mike has said that you need only ride with us in the van for one day to see where everything comes from. You'll hear Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Kraftwerk, Elvis Costello, Radiohead, everything under the sun. All the things we love are coming out in the music."

Bittersweet strains of jazz, requisite rock-steady beats, the bright sheen of classic pop, a reaction to mainstream manufactured po(o)p and saccharine synthpop en français ("Tachée," featuring Lederhosen Lucil's alter ego Krista Muir), all that and more make up the sum of A Part, and the way Muller tells it, the Magnetics are really on a roll.

"There's something really spectacular happening now in rehearsals, and the chemistry between us has never been better. This record is the birth of something very exciting."

With Creature at Café Campus on Friday, March 11, 8 p.m., $11

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