Japandroids:

By Luke Simcoe, A&E Editor

Be sitting behind the bar at the
Commodore Lanes on Granville St.,
nursing a lukewarm beer, watching
pins drop and listening to the top 40
R&B spilling out of the bowling alley’s
speakers. My interview subjects are
late, and I’m cursing myself for not
bothering to get either of their phone
numbers. It’s not unusual for music
journalists to get stood up—musicians
and artists are, by their very nature,

a bit spontaneous—and I’m starting

to wonder if I should pack it in.
Fortunately, as I suck back the last of
my beer, I spy Brian King—one half of
Japandroids— bobbing down the stairs
into the alley. I expect to see the other
half— David Prowse—in tow, but he
doesn’t materialize.

Having seen the band perform, it’s
safe to say that guitarist/vocalist King
and drummer Prowse have a fair bit of
chemistry as a live unit. Their setlists
are often uninterrupted, segueing from
the end of one song right into the start
of another, and you kind of get the
feeling that they jam out just as hard in
their practice space as they do on stage.
The reason I mention this because I
had simply assumed they would arrive
together.

After apologizing for his own lack
of punctuality, King informs me that
Prowse is “on Dave time” and will
likely be arriving soon. Rather than wait
around, we decide to rent some shoes
and get rolling. Prowse shows up just in
time to join us for the first game.

I do a lot of interviews at the
Commodore Lanes. I like it there.

It’s a different setting than bands are
used to, it’s licensed, and the act of
bowling gives me an opportunity to do
what some professional interviewers
refer to as ‘blending.’ It puts people at
ease, and it’s a chance to for everyone
to get to know each other before the
tape recorder comes out. It’s also a lot
of fun, although I inevitably lose to
almost every band that I bowl with.
The first game is no exception, with
King trouncing both his bandmate and
myself, despite the fact that he made
us well aware that he hadn’t bowled in
ages. Luckily, I’m able to steal some
of his thunder in the second game, and
actually come out on top—if only by a
few points.

Those few points quickly turn into
a few pints, and soon enough we’re
talking loudly over the sounds of
clanging pins and even more top 40
R&B. Like a lot of up and coming
local acts, the boys in Japandroids are
still coming to terms with the media
machine—“I think it’s hard for us to
take the whole interview thing seriously,
it’s just weird for us to talk about
ourselves,” says Prowse, and trying to
get the band to open up is occasionally
akin to pulling teeth.

I try to lead in with some questions
what the band’s soon-to-be-forthcoming
second EP is going to sound like. Matt
Skillings of Run Chico Run produced
their first record, and Dave and Brian
have been making regular pilgrimages
to Victoria to work with him on their
follow-up. “It’s a little less cohesive
than the first one,” Prowse notes, and
King reluctantly chimes in with “the
guitar sounds are quite different and the
vocal interaction between Dave and I is

 

The song is either an indictment of

our news media, or an ode to reading
one’s morning paper, and when I ask
King about it, he says “being asked
questions about the songs makes me
very uncomfortable.” He then brushes
off the forthright nature of his answer
by joking “if you wanted to ask me
questions about some of the hot girls in
my building I could talk about that for a
long time.” He’s also more than happy
to talk about his mother’s two black

also quite different.” cats: “the black
When asked “Brain sees music as a__ tack.”
when we should a eer Curiously,
be expecting to see ut of a sacred cow, ws everything changes
the record, the pair something to be heard when the tape
shrugs. Like many d ‘ated. b recorder gets turned
bands in Canada, and appreciated, but att Off the record,
they’re sifting never put under the _Brian begins with
through their couch : ddi 99 1 wish we could
to try and scrounge microscope an issected promote our band
together enough without having to

scrilla to get their

CDs pressed. “It’s not really slowing

us down though,” says Prowse before
reiterating that it means they’ll just have
to save a bit more money before putting
the EP out. King notes that it just gives
them more time to write songs, saying
“by the time the EP is pressed, we’ll
have another EP worth of songs ready
to rock.”

The money issue leads me to inquire
about what the pair does when they’ re
not plugged into “the Japandroids rock
n’ roll machine.” Prowse informs me
that he’s a waiter and bartender at one
of the upscale restaurants in Stanley
Park and that King is a “scientist.”
When I press King for a bit more info
about his day job, he simply replies
with “I drop science.”

Anyway dear reader, I’m sure you’re
noticing a pattern: King tends to play
the alternately silent or funny man to
Prowse’s straight man. I run headfirst
into King’s unwillingness to play the
interview game when I ask him about
some of his lyrics. Particularly, I’m
interested in the meaning behind “Press
Corps,” where the lone refrain of “‘press
corps/give us something to wake up
for” is repeated over and over again.

promote our band,”
before launching into a sermon that
pins his passion and enthusiasm for
his band firmly on his sleeve. Talking
openly with him, you get the impression
that he sees music as a bit of a sacred
cow; it’s something to be seen (or rather
heard) and appreciated, but never put
under the microscope and dissected
with the media’s scalpel. Prowse echoes
his bandmate’s sentiments when he
says “we practice a hell of a lot, we’re

   

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the future. 7

Human After All?

putting a lot of time into it, and we’re
taking it pretty seriously, but it’s still
weird to think that people actually want
to interview us.”

I’m also really interested in how the
band arrived at their sound. They’re
noisy, but they’re not a noise band.
They rock, but they’re definitely more
than just a rock n’ roll act. Their songs
contain elements of shoegaze, but
neither member seems prone to staring
at their feet. They seem to occupy all
the cracks and tiny spaces between
these genres, making their rather in-
your-face sound both distinct and
mercurial at the same time.

Prowse says “it’s funny because
neither of us listen to the kinds of
bands that make the kind of music we
make... People have compared us to the
Jesus and Mary Chain and My Bloody
Valentine, which is weird because I
don’t like either of those bands.” King
pipes up again with “there was a time
when I worshipped JAMC like gods,
but they don’t influence me at all.” The
band chocks up a lot of their inability
to be defined or pigeonholed to a lack
of common musical taste between
them; almost in unison, the pair says
“we don’t like the same music at all.”
King points out that he’s not a fan of
indie rock, and professes a love for west
coast hip-hop before Prowse concludes
“T think if we agreed on more music
we might sound more consistently like
some other band.”

It would seem that a shared love
of making, as opposed to listening to,
music is what drives Japandroids. The
creativity and chemistry that results
from it, as well as their surplus DIY
ethos, has been enough to endear them
to the bleeding hearts and bleeding
ears of many a Vancouverite, and the
band has been charting well on college
radio across the country. They also won
their first round at Shindig, the CiTR-
sponsored Battle of the Bands, and are
set to duke it out in the semi-finals on
November 20.

In the end, I was ultimately too nice
to tell them that they’re probably going
to have to do a lot more interviews in