Something fishy

>>The Carps shoot for fame but hate the trends

HOOKS AND LINES: The Carps

Scarborough, Ontario’s Jahmal Tonge tells me that he and Neil A. White met as kids in “one of the most Bible-beatin’, soul-hollerin’, callin’-Holy Ghost, spirit-fire [Pentecostal] churches.” Tonge’s pipes certainly attest to that, as their band, the Carps, evokes an angst-ridden Lenny Kravitz moaning to a lo-fi dance-punk outfit. The thoughtful 25-year-old spoke about the slings and arrows of seeking mainstream appeal while evading flashy fads.

Jahmal Tonge: The idea was to make something completely different, but that appeals to as many people as humanly possible. But that’s also what kind of does us in. The most important thing is that I want it to be critically successful. For me, that’s very important. I’m always on the Google blog search, seeing what the general consensus is.

Mirror: Does that play at all into the image you project with your graphic design and look?

JT: It’s funny, Neil and I were doing merch design today and we were like, “We want everything to be in black and white,” because we sensed that unfortunately we were getting thrown into this whole bright-coloured hipster American Apparel garbage that I hate so much. There are all these constructions that we make in our mind about style and fashion that mean so little.

M: But it sounds to me like you do think about those things a lot. You said you’re looking to appeal to people, and I think if you jump in with that kind of thinking, you’re naturally going to encounter the fact that fashion and fads are an enormous part of what makes critical acclaim.

JT: I think that’s the eightball we sit on. The last thing in the world I want to be is a fad band. I don’t want to appeal to people based on the fact that one song sounds like a Crystal Castles tune. As much as we analyze things and make specific choices about what we wear and how we present ourselves, the most important thing is to be as honest as possible. We didn’t set out to join any fad. We literally just do what we do.

DJ set at Blue Dog on
Friday, June 6, 10 p.m., $5