by LORRAINE CARPENTER

“Urgency” is an adjective that gets thrown around a lot these days, what with the ubiquity of jittery indie-rock bands following in the footsteps of Gang of Four. Toronto’s Femme Generation know a little something about urgency, having toured in a decommissioned ambulance until it blew up on a pitch-black highway, but their take on post-punk is more casual than most, though not exactly calm. Following last year’s smokin’ EP, Circle Gets the Square, the band outdid themselves with their debut album, Brothers and Sisters, Alone We Explode, a title lifted from bathroom-stall scratchiti. Produced by Fembots’ Dave MacKinnon, the record integrates rubbery punk and soulful swing, jarring guitars and chiming keys, and as singer/guitarist Bernard Kadosh explains, it’s all about unity.

Mirror: I’m curious about your album title. What does it mean to you?

Bernard Kadosh: It feels like a rally call for unity, and it encompasses the feeling of camaraderie and team spirit that we subscribed to for recording the album. The album is very different from the EP in terms of the collaboration between band members. There’s vocals from everybody, for example.

M: What about the larger picture?

BK: Isolation is everywhere. I see it in urban sprawl and the ubiquity of automobiles and Myspace accounts. There’s so much fear and isolation between people. It’s a basic problem with our current societal paradigm that the focus is on the individual, and we’ve lost the idea of what humanity as a collective means, or how it’s important to the planet. Why is music important? Why is commerce important? Why is procreating important? It doesn’t mean anything if everybody’s in their own bubble. I don’t have the answers, but it’s something that concerns me.

M: Speaking of isolation, how did you end up recording the album in a barn in Shelburne, Ontario?

BK: It was owned by a friend of mine from high school. We used to go up there and just get lost in the woods. His father had a bunch of crap there, so basically, for the price of us coming in and organizing this junk, we got to stay there for five days.

M: Sounds like the premise for a horror movie.

BK: It kind of felt like that. It was really eerie and weird, and we fought quite a bit, but we managed to hammer something out. I was pretty surprised by the results.

M: I understand you recorded the EP in an abandoned arena. Are you guys hooked on unconventional recording spaces?

BK: Well, there would be benefits to working in a studio—you can make mistakes and fix them easily. It was so frustrating in the barn ’cause everything was live off the floor, there were microphones everywhere, so if one person made a mistake, you couldn’t go back and punch in a little guitar part or a little drum part, it was in all the mics. But at the same time, there’s nothing that beats that feeling of working somewhere that’s never been touched before. We can go to a studio where 100 bands have recorded, it’s very impersonal, but that hockey arena and that barn will be ours forever.

With Most Serene Republic, Hexes & Ohs and Kickers at The Main Hall on Friday, June 2, 9 p.m., $10

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