Fist things first

>>Montreal’s Parlovr come out swinging

V FOR VICTORY: Parlovr

“It’s gonna be a really good record,” insists Parlovr’s Alex Cooper. “I’m normally a very modest person, but it’s sounding great. We’re really excited.”

And so, apparently is Martin Horn, a producer at Digital Bird Studios who has recorded 14 of the band’s songs for less than a quarter of his usual fee. He fell for the distinct but complementary songwriting talents of Cooper and Louis Jackson, collaborators since late 2005, when they shacked up in a Parc-Ex loft called Parlour and promptly lifted its name (the V was added following an informal warning from a U.S. noise-rock band called Parlour).

They made strange bedfellows, however—not literally, as Jackson’s girlfriend lived in the loft too. Yet their relationship has all the trappings of a screwball bromance.

“We had mutual friends, and disliked each other from a distance,” Cooper explains. “He thought I was this little shit hipster kid, and conversely, I thought he was a loser. So we were at this record launch for the band Shamus, and he punched me in the face. I kind of laughed at it, and we talked very maudlin to each other for the rest of the evening. He eventually brought me over to his house and started playing me some Pixies-ish stuff that he was writing. I was completely taken.”

Cooper had been writing songs too, but wasn’t nearly as prolific as Jackson. After a few months of working on his material, Cooper presented a recording to his skeptical buddy, who was “awkwardly surprised.”

“At the time, both of us were going through a really bad period in our lives, and we both wanted to live somewhere new, so we decided to move in with each other.”

“It’s quite strange,” he adds. “We still fight to this day, so much.” Last week’s Mirror cover apparently prompted a debate over electro-pop starlet supremacy (Robyn vs. Annie) that had them “at each other’s throats.” Luckily, they have a cool-headed moderator in Jeremy MacCuish, a drummer who coincidentally defected from Shamus to join Parlovr last year.

Together, the trio (all 26 years old) emit a sound under a constellation of orchestral pop, punk and dark dance music, a style they call “heavy-hearted sloppy pop.”

“I don’t know what our influences are,” says Cooper, “but we’ve all recently re-fallen in love with the ’90s. It’s been a lot of listening to Nevermind again, listening to the bad stuff and the good stuff that we remember from that period, when weird guitar bands were all over the radio. Why can’t that happen now?”

Cooper’s nostalgia for the “alternative” music that infiltrated the mainstream in the ’90s logically extends to the period’s more lucrative business end, at least somewhat. Parlovr are unsigned, and will likely release this record independently. But they strive to support themselves with their music, without breaking their backs with incessant touring. These days, that calls for pragmatic solutions that wouldn’t have flown in the strangely corporate/anti-corporate indie rock world of the ’90s.

“Let’s be realistic here. We all work shit jobs and there’s little money to be made in this industry, so if some car company wants to put our song in a commercial, I don’t think we’d hesitate. We’re not concerned with becoming rock stars, we just wanna be able to live off of what we’re doing.”

With Mathias Mental at Club
Lambi on Friday, May 9, 9 p.m.