In-between days

>> The lights brighten for Toronto’s idiosyncratic dream-poppers Sully

by RUPERT BOTTENBERG
nHands up, those who remember the Random Media Core operation out of Toronto. Run by the hubristic visionary Byron Wong, its record label Random Sound was home to Space Ace, My Brilliant Beast and the excellent Sully, once of Ottawa. Random had a solid, overarching sensibility, a very adult electromanticism that played an admirable counterpoint to the tired bar rock and greasy kid stuff so prevalent in the Canadian indie (or semi-indie—Random got hitched up to Nettwerk) scene. It was a good idea—maybe too good.

“It was a good thing at the time,” recalls Sully singer Becke Gainforth, “but in the end it sort of destroyed everything. It all fell flat on its face, including the whole scene that they had essentially created. Yeah, they had a lot of great bands and great things going on, but it was essentially one guy with a lot of money who just liked music and wanted to have free rein over it. From an outsider’s perspective, that seems pretty awesome. But when you’re on the inside and someone’s giving you all the money and the tools you need to create your music, they end up, in a strange and creepy way, having control over you, too.”
Sully’s new, fully DIY album Bright Lights charts the Random meltdown in that it began as the band’s effort to generate the pop hits the label wanted and finished as the album they always wanted to do. Gone is the ethereal, shoegazer guitar wash behind which they once hid. Replacing that is a more focused sensibility, coherent lyrics (always carried by Gainforth’s distinctive vocals) and song structures, and at the same time a more adventurous exploration of the options available.

“The songs span over four years, so right there you’ve got a diversity that you wouldn’t have on an album that was created in six months to a year. At the same time, we had the world’s harshest critics, Wong or Nettwerk or whoever, saying, ‘We want a radio hit.’ We had a lot of pressure on us to write coherent pop songs with accessible lyrics. We wanted to do that but in our own way—we love pop music, but we didn’t want to conform and be the band they wanted us to be, which was like, Sixpence None the Richer. So these songs took on a life of their own through the years.”

A very palpable life—Sully have always struck a remarkable, fluid balance between melancholy and indignation, engagement and disassociation, never settling on any extreme. “As people, we’re like that too. We think very negatively, but we always want to have this positive outlook. So it’s this constant battle between the negative thoughts and trying to create an ideal, positive existence, in a sense. It’s this continuous struggle that never gets extremely negative or positive. It’s this weird state of in-between. No matter what, we have this creepy undertone and could never aspire to be Sixpence None the Richer. We just can’t go there. At the same time, we can’t go to the other, polar opposite of depths of despair. I don’t think it can be one or the other.”n

With A Vertical Mosaic at Barfly on Friday, Dec. 28, 9pm, $6