Merriment
and mortality

The Darling DeMaes play peppy acoustic
pop about heartbreak, empty sex and death

STRANGELY HAPPY AND SAD:
Erik Virtanen (right) and the Darling DeMaes

by LORRAINE CARPENTER

“I googled dead porn stars,” says Erik Virtanen, explaining how he named his band. “She was an Olympic diver for the Czech team who injured her back and couldn’t dive anymore. She needed money, so she turned to porn and got super famous really fast, but then got a brain tumour and died at the height of her fame, at the rock ’n’ roll age of 27.”

Much like the contrast between the band’s pretty moniker and, as Virtanen put it, its “perfectly odd and tragic” origins, his songwriting pairs superficial levity and embedded dread.

Alongside Tasha Cyr (vocals, glockenspiel), Alec Ellsworth (bass), Sami Kizilbash (drums) and Marc-André Mongrain, aka Buz (electric guitars, mandolin, melodica, vocals), Virtanen documented a dozen such songs on A User’s Guide to Raising the Dead (Songs of Spring), an independent record produced with Mountain City studio’s Joseph Donovan and Adrian Popovich, released last November. Previous incarnations of half the songs appeared on Winter Keep Us Warm, an eight-song demo recorded in early 2007.

Although only one of these, “A Day in Her Life,” was altered significantly (the “Obituary Version” appears on the newer record), Virtanen observes that A User’s Guide has been widely perceived as sombre, whereas the EP was deemed by most to be “upbeat and happy and peppy.” The difference?

“I think it’s the artwork and the title,” he says. On the cover is a photo of lush greenery with graves in the distance, shot in Mont-Royal cemetery; inside, “statues bringing each other to life,” care of photographer Robert Klein, who let the band’s music be his muse. For

Virtanen, inspiration came from a variety of sources—from the Beatles, David Bowie and Nick Cave to life’s little triumphs and tragedies. “She Took Off Her Glasses” was the song that set the template for the Darling DeMaes.

“I was singing a tag from ‘Be My Baby,’ which is a nice song about boyfriends and girlfriends, but [my] words were about knowing that everything is sort of ending, and going along with it. It sounds like joyful stuff, but really, if you listen, you’re hearing a song about using a girl for sex.

“Music is a ghostly thing,” he adds. “When you perform, you sing about people or times that aren’t here anymore. Art will bring lost things back to life, over and over. Sometimes it can be strangely happy and sad at the same time.”