COVER: After the fire

Montreal’s Pat Jordache, set to re-release his debut LP, Future Songs, speaks out about the city vs. the music scene, careerism vs. art

BEHIND THE SILVER DOOR: Pat Jordache (centre) and the Jordaches
Photo by MARILIS CARDINAL

Between the tipsy tenor croon and falsetto back-up vocals, the chugging rhythm and melodic guitars that vamp like good-natured mantras, and the warping, skewing and echo effects that foist it all into a slightly surreal, lo-fi vortex, the music of Pat Jordache isn’t immediately recognizable as party music, nor is it what most might think constitutes a “Montreal sound.” But it is both of those things—it’s what the kids are dancing to in the wee small hours, and it’s the kind of experimental indie rock that young, educated musicians are pouring their hearts into. It won’t win anyone a Grammy, but nobody really gives a fuck.

For those who are wondering who the hell Pat Jordache is, don’t bother looking him up under J. His surname was lifted from an American jeans brand that was briefly hot in the ’80s, and as with the Ramones, his bandmates are Jordaches too.

If you don’t know band leader Pat Gregoire either, the Toronto native played guitar in Islands (Nick “Diamonds” Thorburn’s post-Unicorns project) but was let go in a mass firing in early 2009.

“I cut my teeth playing for Islands. I learned a whole lot about what it means to be a working musician,” says Gregoire. “It’s a weird lifestyle, being on the road all the time and giv­ing yourself to someone else’s project. At a certain point, it was not creatively satisfying.”

He was also a member of an eclectic collective called Sister Suvi, but that band dissolved in 2009 too, when bandmate Merrill Garbus relocated to Oakland, CA, to pursue a relationship as well as work her solo project, tUnE-YaRdS, in her native United States.

“My life changed pretty dramatically,” Gregoire explains. “At first it was really hard to face up to, but it was actually the best thing in the world. I had a year-and-a-half of staying put in Mon­treal, slowing right down to develop a new relationship with music-making, the product of which was this record.”

HAIRCUTS AND VAMPIRES

Future Songs is Pat Jordache’s debut album, to be released on April 26 by local label Constellation. The record was complete over a year ago, when Gregoire suffered a major setback— his laptop was stolen one afternoon at Smoked Meat Pete’s on the West Island, and the only back-up he knew of was an early master that he’d made, which he describes as “a jackham­mer home job.”

“There’s an old saying that mastering your own record is like taking your sister to the prom,” he says. It was good enough to release on cassette, but the new version is a pre-master Medi­afire file that Gregoire unearthed and presented to renowned producer Harris Newman for remastering. “It’s the same record but it’s so much better,” Gregoire says. “There’s a level of clarity to it and all this nuance that comes out. It got a sweet haircut for the big release.”

It was the original Pat Jordache cassette, however, that attracted experienced players to what had been a strictly solo affair.

“I had some weird issues about playing with other people. I’d been a hired gun with Islands, and Sister Suvi was a really collaborative band. I loved those bands, they were great while they lasted. But it was essential to be on my own for a while and focus, to figure out what I wanted to do and not have any diluting influences. For a long time, I was pretty puritanical about play­ing by myself and only relying on myself.”

Eventually he warmed to the idea of a band, with one condition: “I made a rule that they have to approach me, like a vampire having to be asked into the house.”

The Pat Jordache band was initially a trio with two drummers (Philip Karneef and the Acorn’s Jeffrey Malecki, who’s also a Mirror’ contributor), then a quartet (minus Malecki, plus Rory Seydel of Shapes and Sizes, and Thom Gillies of Silly Kissers), now a quintet (plus Patrik Winkelbrunn). “We’ve gotten a little more rococo, I guess, adding all these guitars and synthesizers and getting a little carried away,” he says, using the word “rococo” in all seriousness, and explaining that the band’s tour circuit and venue preference remains punk rock.

“We still do house shows when we go on the road. It’s a pretty sweet thing, way better than going to a town you’ve never been to and playing in a club that has a great sound system but no audience. It’s awesome to play in somebody’s living room to a bunch of friends and kids. It’s pretty much what we’ve been doing here in Montreal for the last year.”

SCENE NOT HERD

Pat Jordache was the unofficial house band at the Silver Door, a loft space on Parc Avenue, where musicians and DJs lived and worked and partied. From their studio, dubbed the Doghouse, they’d roll their gear into the next room, set up and play for their friends and friends of friends, usually between 2 and 6 a.m., with dancing continuing till nearly noon.

“Those shows were amazing,” Gregoire recalls. “That’s the kinda stuff that’s really good for the music scene, a low-pressure atmosphere where everyone’s really receptive. Kids at shows now dance their faces off, they get so into it. When there’s that kind of generosity, performers want to give so much more.”

Silver Door was shut down last October due to the same kind of licensing issues and noise complaints that have plagued both quasi-legal spaces and legit venues such as Casa del Popolo and Cagibi (where Gregoire works part-time), both popular sites for young bands since they don’t charge rent.

“It’s shitty when you see what the city’s done with the Quartier des Spectacles, where they’re trying to foster the arts and music in such a top-down, ass-backwards way, dropping $300-mil­lion on all this infrastructure in a neighbourhood that nobody goes to anymore. And then, because there’s all these business interests behind that, they sic their dogs on all the places that are thriving uptown.”

Shuttered venues such as the Silver Door and Lab Synthèse helped to incubate elements of the local scene that are currently being recognized in and outside of the city, such as Braids and their peers that make up the roster of Arbutus Records. But the buzz that Braids has earned, not to mention the global acclaim that Arcade Fire achieved, are apparently far from the minds of the average young musician playing Mile End lofts.

“No one’s looking to get famous off [those shows]. You don’t even wanna advertise too hard ’cause you don’t wanna bring too much attention on yourself, so a lot of the shows are really word of mouth, down-low, hush hush. I don’t wanna be exclusive and cut people out, but it’s good at an early stage to have a crowd where it’s almost all your friends.”

In the wake of Arcade Fire, ambitious musicians began to move to Montreal rather than Toronto, and plenty of homegrown musicians joined in, attempting to jump on what seemed like a band­wagon ride to fametown. Gregoire, who moved to Montreal in 2003, witnessed all this from the inside (as a member of Islands) and the outside (Sister Suvi) simultaneously.

“Suddenly there was this sense that any one of us, overnight, could go off and have their wildest dreams come true, and that’s a weird place to be coming at music-making from. Now, there’s no sense of that. They’re all kids in this scene, they don’t care about Arcade Fire, that was before their time, it has no bearing on what they do. It is a lot less ambitious and com­petitive than I saw the scene get for a few years; it has a lot more to do with mutual support and friendship and community-building. That’s been so good for this town.

“When I got the job at Cagibi, I noticed that the things people were excited about wasn’t some buzz band that was being jammed down their throats, they were excited about what their friends were doing, and I got to be part of that community. That’s been invaluable, that’s why this band has been able to do as well as it has, it has really strong local roots. There’s such a healthy, vibrant scene here—Montreal is an amazing place to make music right now.” ■

ALBUM LAUNCH WITH PLAY GUITAR AND MOZART’S SISTER AT CLUB PARC AVENUE (DISCOTHÈQUE TROPICALE) ON THURSDAY, APRIL 21, 10 P.M., $8

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