by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

“Kids are fucked up! Adults are fucked up, but kids are really fucked up,” cackles Martin Cesar, vocalist of newly-minted Montreal trio Think About Life, before sharing an anecdote from his childhood about checking every last TV station for Batman Returns on the Friday it was released—in cinemas, a concept he didn’t quite grasp at the time.

Keyboardist Graham Van Pelt, whose prepubescent grip on reality was similarly loose, one-ups Cesar with the yarn about the basketball league inside his head (adulation of the NBA being a common factor among the three members).

“I went out on my parents’ driveway every afternoon,” he says, “and I had an entire league with every team in the NBA—except each team had three players who weren’t NBA players, they had their own names—and I would pit the teams against each other for an entire season of playoffs.

“It must’ve looked really strange because I was every player, so I would pass to myself.”

Imagination activation

“It’s very Garden of Eden,” says the band’s drummer, Matt Shane. “You bite this apple from the tree of knowledge when you become an adult, and realize that everything is manufactured in a certain way to manipulate you. Before that, you’re in a dreamland.

“I think that when all of us were children, acquiring these various memories of random events on television and pop-culture occurrences—your imagination is still pretty alive at that point in your life. All that stuff gets blended together into this bizarre worldview that makes no sense to adults, but you see children just occupying it as though it were reality. That’s something we try to tap, to spill out when we’re playing or talking about what we want to do—reactivating that sense of imagination, but using our more adult sense of arrangement and composition.”

To that end, Think About Life have been magnificently successful. Their self-titled debut album on Alien8, which they’re launching this week, is a bristling mid-fi mulch of musical ideas, what might have happened if Philip Glass and Suicide shared a crammed flat on Sesame Street.

“What the Future Might Be” straps a scrappy rap on a fuzzy buzz (thanks to L.A. MC Subtitle), “Serious Chords” is a heartbroken hymn, a lost Nintendo theme and a batcave dance jam all at once, and “Money” is gloriously, uproariously silly and sad. The whole thing’s messy, abrasive, confounding and utterly enjoyable.

A giddy energy permeates the proceedings, an energy matched in the accelerated history of the band. Only fully a trio as of last July (rising from the ashes of Hidden in Buildings and Donkey Heart), Think About Life was already touring with their friends Wolf Parade by October (“I’m not sure we were really ready for that,” says Shane, “but it all worked out—kind of”), and will join Art Brut on the road this month.

High speed and slow motion

Developing the band on fast-forward leaves little room for second guesses, which suits the trio’s creative approach perfectly. “We definitely embrace the accidental,” says Shane, and Van Pelt concurs. “I’d overanalyzed every piece of music I’d ever written before this band. I would meticulously arrange things over months, and come up with something I hated at the end. Now, it’s just the opposite with these two.”

Blurring the distinction between the informed experimentation of avant-garde “free music” and children’s dumb, rambunctious spontaneity—and then hammering the results into something tangible, without suffocating its spark—is no small feat.

It’s inevitable that such tactics will generate some odd juxtapositions. “If you look at the Chicago Bulls, it goes really well with Philip Glass, for some reason,” says Cesar, and you know what? Their album’s ninth track, “Slow-Motion Slam-Dunk From the Free-Throw Line,” proves him right. Likewise, Think About Life’s central, centrifugal synergy, the collision of pop and anti-pop, in fact places them precisely where they want to be, at the calm eye of a storm they’re happy to let others ride.

“The best cutting-edge stuff, I find, is just on the very fringe of what’s popular,” says Shane. “It’s not out in left field, because then it’s in a different realm, it’s subcultural. I always liked the stuff that’s just on the edge.”

“Exactly the point we’re at right now,” adds Cesar, “is the most comfortable point to be at in terms of that line right there. I don’t want to go too much on one side or the other, but just stay within that circle.”

CD launch with Japanther at Club Lambi
on Saturday, May 6, 9 p.m., $10

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