Contemporary classic

Calgary-bred quartet Braids make Montreal their own and self-produce a stellar debut album, Native Speaker

Sometimes standing ovations feel forced, as if the majority of the audience is simply spurred on by a few front-row keeners, fearing the awkwardness of staying seated and separate from the herd. This wasn’t the case at the Ukrainian Federation last month, when Montreal’s Braids played a brilliant set at a Pop Montreal, opening for San Franciso’s Xiu Xiu. A standing ovation for the sweat act is an extremely rare sight, but Braids’ singer/guitarist and drummer, Raphaelle Standell-Preston and Austin Tufts, have seen it all before—at their own shows, of course.

Free of grand entrances, visuals or theatrical gimmicks, Braids is utterly gripping live, simply because their intricate but accessible compositions are so well-crafted and sonically powerful that one would think they’ve been at it forever. In a way, they have, yet all four members of Braids—rounded out by keyboardist Katie Lee and bassist Taylor Smith—are aged 20 or 21. That said, they’re not merely impressive for young musicians, they’re stunning by any standard, even standing next to their major source of inspiration, Animal Collective.

That Brooklyn band has spawned many copyists, but few, if any, possess the power of Standell-Preston’s voice, which ranges from the coo of a Disney princess to the scream of a behemoth banshee. Then there are Braids’ meta-melodies, textured flutters and undulations, clever, furtive rhythms and delicate, detailed segues, taking the subtlest of cues from contemporary classi­cal, electronic, jazz, pop and world music. It’s a modern sound that promises to become timeless.

GUT FEELING

After a successful run at Pop Montreal and CMJ in New York City this fall, the band announced that their debut album, Native Speaker, will be released on Jan. 18, 2011 by Kanine Records in the U.S. and Flemish Eye in Canada. That’s when their future begins, but their past started eight years ago, in Calgary, in junior high.

“We compared bellybuttons, that was the very first thing we did,” says Tufts, who apparently possesses “an inny with an outty in it.” Standell-Preston giggles and defers to Tufts to tell most of their story, later admitting that she’s a shy interview, which is somewhat surprising considering she could effortlessly take out my eardrums from such a close range if she wanted to.

Back in Grade 8, however, her only public musical emission came through the clarinet, then, in Grade 10, the trumpet, which she chose for its greater volume, and because she wanted to join (her then-boyfriend) Tufts’ jazz band.

Music is practically genetic for Tufts, whose dad was a professional jazz drummer; his mom was a pop singer and his sister plays multiple instruments. Smith was part of the jazz trio, who played gigs around Calgary, while Standell-Preston skipped classes to play guitar and her friend Lee built on childhood piano lessons by developing her keyboard skills.

The first time they all played together, along with their friend Vincent Mann on guitar, they recognized potential.

“We just started jamming and had such a good time that we said, ‘Yeah we should enter a battle of the bands,’” says Tufts. “So we did, that was our first show, and we lost—we lost to a Red Hot Chili Peppers cover band. But, you know, whatever, they had energy.”

PRIMAL SCREAM

Undeterred, the band, then called Neighbourhood Council, delved into “dark dance pop,” but soon entered a more “folky realm” as they jammed and rehearsed. Standell-Preston’s voice had previously been praised by family members who caught her singing ’NSync’ and Britney Spears songs, sometimes mimicking music video choreography simultaneously, but when the band got serious, she had a vocal breakthrough.

“Austin convinced me that I had a nice voice,” she says. “It’s been a really natural thing, I haven’t had any training. It just makes me feel really, really good to sing, that’s the way I express myself.

“[Animal Collective’s] Avey Tare does a lot of screams, so I tried it. The song ‘Glass Dears’ was the first time that I really pushed it out there and screamed.”

“That opened a whole new can of worms,” says Tufts. “Now I can’t get her to stop screaming!”

“Shut up!” says Standell-Preston before they both break out in laughter. “It’s a very emotional song so the scream was therapeutic. From then on, I’ve been exploring, not even consciously, but exploring belting it out.”

IMPENETRABLE

Realizing that the band was personally important enough to merit some serious sacrifice and investment, Standell-Preston, Smith and Lee put off university for a year and got jobs while Tufts finished high school. (Lee is one of only two people to ever turn down the prestigious architecture program at the U of Waterloo.)

“We just practised our asses off for 30 hours a week for all that year and just tried to grow as musicians. It was a very productive time; we ended up discovering a vein of music we felt com­fortable in and we’ve been hacking away at that ever since.”

Mann opted out of the band after graduation and went east to pursue a philosophy degree at McGill. The others followed him to McGill a year later (minus Standell-Preston, who stayed in Calgary a little longer and hasn’t gone to university), but by then, the band was beyond Mann’s reach.

“In that year apart, we became totally impenetrable,” says Tufts. “It’s like nobody will ever be able to join the band again.”

The quartet had evolved so much, and become so tightly woven, that they changed what had been a randomly selected name to Braids, which “has a lot of musical relevance and a lot of emo­tional relevance for us as friends,” according to Tufts.

“What the name embodies is collectivity, everybody’s ideas coming together,” says Standell-Preston.

“We started writing in a totally collective manner. The first song that we wrote like that was ‘Lemonade.’ All the drum parts were co-written with Mike Wallace from Women, and it was just so much more fun getting a bunch of creative minds together and putting them all to work,” Tufts recalls. “One little idea triggered so much.”

GARAGE BAND

As Neighbourhood Council, the band had made significant progress, earning praise from music-blog heavyweights Stereogum, winning a youth songwriting award at the Calgary Folk Fes­tival and playing in front of its huge audience (still their biggest gig to date, size-wise), and being embraced by Calgary’s budding indie community, which produced such bands as Women, Woodpigeon, Chad VanGaalen and Azeda Booth, and the Sled Island music festival, of which Braids remains a fixture. But ever since arriving here in 2008, the band has found just as much support in Montreal.

“We got totally removed from the community aspect of it for the first five or six months and then we got hit with it really hard by being taken under the wings of all the guys from Lab Syn­thèse, which turned out really great—Raph’s now dating one of them,” says Tufts. He also mentions being “absorbed” by the folks at Arbutus Records, with whom Standell-Preston is affili­ated through her side project Blue Hawaii.

“We’ve always had that experience,” he says. “I don’t know if it’s the way we are as people or what, but if we just put ourselves out there in the most honest way possible, we attract really won­derful people.”

Though there was significant outside interest in helping Braids record and mix their debut album, rather than tap the skills of the community, the band turned inward and did it DIY, in Smith and Tufts’ Mile End garage. Balancing schoolwork and gruelling garage sessions, they took nearly nine months to record material written over two years. The result is a refined labour of love that sounds completely professional and cost next to nothing, a successful experiment to say the least.

“We’re not trying to break any ground,” says Tufts, “we’re just trying to figure out how to play the music that’s in our heads. Our music has always been [about] how do we get this out, how do we get this into the air. I think it comes down to us being very in tune with ourselves and our sound.” ■

WITH LAND OF TALK AND SNAILHOUSE AT CABARET DU MILE END TONIGHT, THURSDAY, NOV. 18, 8 P.M., $15

THE NATIVE SPEAKER ALBUM LAUNCH WILL TAKE PLACE AT LA SALA ROSSA ON THURSDAY, JAN. 20. KEEP AN EYE ON MYSPACE.COM/BRAIDSMUSIC FOR DETAILS.

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