Spark it up

Toronto’s Quest for Fire sought a satisfying psychedelic sound, and found it

FLAME GAME: Quest for Fire

By JOHNSON CUMMINS

The word “psychedelic” has elbowed out “angular” as this year’s favourite buzzword for music hacks and blogging armchair critics. Of course, in its current use, the word has now become applicable to anything from searing noise and swirling pop bands to progressive metal. Toronto’s Quest for Fire, though, conjure up the original root of psychedelia with the raunch, muscle and oscillations of Hawkwind and Comets on Fire, and Pink Floyd’s sensory panorama, all resting on a simplistic, plodding Spacemen 3 thump.

Quest for Fire’s eponymous debut album is chock full of the good stuff, with the average song transcending the standard pop format and reaching destinations up to the eight-minute mark. Though this is their first LP, the band’s sound comes across fully realized, and despite my weak comparisons above, they possess a signature sound, something a band usually get to once they’re already a couple of records deep.

“I’m really happy that we really took our time getting our sound before starting to play shows,” says guitarist Andrew Moszynski. “Even at this point, I think we’ve only done about 15 shows. Our first show went so disastrously, with the promoter tearing up all our money and tossing it on the ground, so we kind of took our time after that. At least things are getting better than our first show.”

If it sounds like Quest for Fire are just young bucks still cutting their teeth, their pedigree includes some of the most road-seasoned bands to come out of Canada. The line-up includes two ex-members of the Deadly Snakes, a member of the recently defunct Cursed and a member of No No Zero.

Listening to Quest for Fire’s laid-back, reverb-laden psych, it’s nearly impossible to trace this lineage back to their garage rock and hardcore days, and Quest for Fire wouldn’t have it any other way. “I guess there has been attention paid to the bands we used to play in, but I think that after people hear us, they have a hard time to picture what the Deadly Snakes or Cursed would even sound like. Thankfully the ‘supergroup’ thing has only been thrown around a couple of times—thank God. I don’t think any of us really want to push that at all. We would just like to be known as a good band.”

Although Quest for Fire currently plants its stakes in the Big Smoke, Montreal has played a big factor in the band’s career. After they blew minds at their second show ever, at 2006’s Pop Montreal (which got shut down by authorities once the band hit their last note), a fair amount of buzz erupted. By the time they had returned to Pop Montreal in 2007, local label Storyboard wasted no time and quickly inked a deal with the band.

“We had known Scott [Lewis, Storyboard owner and guitarist for Vancouver transplants Barn Burner] for quite a while. We met him outside of the Roky Erickson show at Pop Montreal and ended up sleeping on his kitchen floor. He brought us out to Montreal for our second show ever, and we got really drunk at a boozecan and just kind of drunkenly negotiated a deal at five in the morning. We’re all really happy because Scott really cares about his label, definitely a lot more than other people we know who have labels. He treats us like kings, so we can’t really ask for more.”

With $100, Deloro and Wooly Leaves
at le Divan Orange on Wednesday,
July 30, 9 p.m., $8