by LORRAINE CARPENTER

"Montreal's starting to get really fun!" exclaims Giselle Webber, the frontwoman for one of this city's feistiest young rock bands, the Hot Springs. Born in Halifax, raised in Vancouver and Toronto, the singer/guitarist made her way to Montreal because, "Um, there was this really cute guy here [giggles], so I moved, and I decided to start a band."

Having played in punk bands since she was 13, Webber initially wanted a break from performing. She pursued a behind-the-scenes Svengali role, looking to build an all-girl band from the ground up.

"I wanted to be a producer, find these really hot chicks and teach them how to play guitars," she says. "I was trying to write really simple songs that you could handle when you're just learning to play your instrument, but I started to like the songs so I ended up keeping them for myself. That's what started up the Hot Springs."

Persisting in her quest to become a pop producer, Webber enrolled in audio engineering school to learn the tricks of the trade. "I learned how to use all this fancy gear and then I was like, ‘I can't afford to fucking buy any of this equipment! All I have is a fucking guitar!' I didn't intend to start up another rock band - I was doing hip hop, minimalist techno, I was playing with these old jazz guys, but in the end I went back to rock."

Swiss miss

After recording a demo with Julien Mino from Malajube - whom she's currently working with on an as-yet-unnamed "pretty" side project - Webber teamed up with guitarist Rémy Nadeau-Aubin, drummer Karine Lauzon and bassist Frédéric Sauvé. Though the Hot Springs was only forged just over a year ago, their spiky cool riffs and gritty pop appeal has earned them an audience, both for their recently released debut record, a five-track EP called Rock Partouze ("rock orgy"), and for their steamy live shows. And to think she nearly gave it all up to study politics in Geneva.

"Geneva's a really boring town," Webber says. "I didn't know if I was gonna stay here, but the first band I saw in Montreal was this old man on bagpipes, this 14-year-old kid with a Misfits shirt, this guy with dreadlocks and pigtails juggling knives and this little four-year-old girl marching back and forth like a soldier, and they had this kinda Skinny Puppy beat. My friend beside me said, ‘Oh, there's a band in Quebec City that sounds exactly like these guys.' I was laughing my ass off 'cause it was the most fucked up thing ever and there were 200 people there for them. That's when I thought, ‘Mmm, maybe this would be a good town to make music in.'"

Support your local scene, man

Behind the Hot Springs' sweet hooks and sing-song melodies is a punk heartbeat, an intensity embedded in their serrated riffage and Webber's sexy snarl. Despite the benefits of DIY schooling, Webber doesn't take her punk past seriously.

"I played in this band [in Toronto] called Hood Rat for six years, and we were pretty cool, man," she says sarcastically. "We talked about the system and the punk scene. Every one of our songs was like ‘Fuck you, you're not good for the scene,' and the next song would be like, ‘Help your scene, start up a fanzine!' It's crazy. When you're really, really involved in the punk scene, with anarchists and activists, that's your whole world. It's kind of cool to be outside of that now."

After moving to Montreal, Webber joined Eksniilo, a hardcore band that also featured Mino and Nadeau-Aubin. The Hot Springs and Malajube have created a MySpace account for Eksniilo so their fans could hear their old band, but, Webber warns, "It's bad music. At the time I thought it was really cool to just scream, but it sounds so bad."

It's a long way from hardcore screaming to jazz crooning, and although Webber's vocals with the Hot Springs fall somewhere in between, she has developed a range to cover all the bases.

"About five years ago, I started singing on really old jazz records, trying to figure out how the divas did it. You can contort and find these extra pockets of air in your sinuses and deep down in your gut, and eventually I learned that you can sculpt your voice in these crazy ways by fucking up sound inside your throat. That's my favourite way to sing."

With La descente du coude, Jesus and the Headliners and Kickers at l'Hémisphère Gauche on Friday, May 20, 9 p.m., $6

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