Interview: The Sweet Homewreckers @ Clark Hall Pub, Feb. 8
The Sweet Homewreckers are like the band next door, except actually good—when’s the last time your neighbour’s basement jazz-fusion band got complimentary reviews in Exclaim! and Chart or hit #43 on the Earshot charts for national campus and community radio? Nice work for six Trent students, if you can get it.
“Those are really exciting reviews … I get a little pissed, I think, that we’re always compared with ’90s bands, but we sorta flaunt that, so I guess you can’t really be too dismissive of it,” said Cam Malcolm, the Homewreckers’ singer and guitarist, on the phone from Peterborough.
“It’s funny, they hit my influences on the head, like the Exclaim! review where they said I sound like a mix of Wayne Petti [Cuff The Duke], Matt Murphy [The Super Friendz, The Flashing Lights] and Joel Plaskett—which is kinda weird ’cause they’re, like, all my favourite singers.”
Naming your band after a Thrush Hermit record and writing a song called “Nineties On Your Side” isn’t exactly being sneaky about your influences, but it’s surprising how out-of-step with the times From The Letdown To The Comearound sounds for a regular rock ’n’ roll record. Neither self-consciously cute, intentionally difficult, or anywhere in the neighbourhood of Sam’s Town or Cookie Mountain, everyone else’s rush to the cutting edge or cooler trends has left the Homewreckers able to scavenge the ghost towns of ’90s indie rock, Haligonian and otherwise, at their leisure.
From The Letdown emerges intimately familiar with but occasionally bored by classic pop songwriting, and its willingness to fool around on the side should win over those who aren’t seduced by the band’s plentiful hooks or distinctive trumpet section. After all, it’s not a (counter)revolution if you can’t dance to it.
The Homewreckers—also including bassist Robyn Letson, guitarist Neil Hirsch and drummer Mike Scott—formed in spring 2005. Trumpet players Melissa Pengilly and Dianna Thoms became permanent fixtures after playing on the band’s home-recorded Sweet Casualty EP that fall.
Malcolm’s Hamilton roots led the Homewreckers to Steeltown’s Put On Your Drinking Cap Records for their first full-length, which was engineered by Aron D’Alesio of The Ride Theory.
D’Alesio also provided a potential title for the record that didn’t quite make the cut: “Jewels From Across The Ocean,” said bassist Robyn Letson. “That’s how Aron D’Alesio described Cam’s songs once.”
Malcolm’s high school music career didn’t seem to hold such glittering promise.
“I was sort of a jazz nerd kid. I played bass in the jazz band,” Malcolm said. “… I was in a band called The Langston Heights … I sorta wrote all the pop songs, and the other guys wrote all the Fugazi-type songs. … But I never did anything really serious in Hamilton, it was more just having fun.”
The album kicks off with the ridiculously catchy lead single “Wild America,” which vividly recalls the sardonic, horn-laden retro pop rave-ups of Beulah—as well as the 1996 film that brought hordes of Jonathan Taylor Thomas and Devon Sawa fans into movie theatres.
“Definitely the Jonathan Taylor Thomas movie was an inspiration, at least its namesake,” Malcolm said with a laugh. “I sort of realized that [reference] after the fact, but then I liked it so much I decided to keep it … I actually did go to see Wild America too, which is interesting.”
The Homewreckers are filming a video for “Wild America” later this month.
“We … wanted to make it sort of like a Wes Anderson-esque type movie where we show a lot of books being opened,” Malcolm said. “We’re hoping to do it in this library in Trent, this sort of older library. It’s basically this 150-year-old house.”
Between the just-the-hits attitude of “Wild America” and “Amplification,” the Homewreckers balance romantic, widescreen ambitions (“City on a Hill” and “Comeover Girl”) with short film attention spans, then bring a Pavement-esque slouch into more understated songs like “Head Shots.” Malcolm’s history/politics concentration at school sometimes has the album as lyrically backward-looking as it can be musically.
With all six in their final year at Trent, the band still hasn’t solidified their plans for the future.
“We don’t talk about it all that much,” Letson said. “I mean, the thing is that none of us have plans to go to Australia or anything like that. We’re all going to be around. But it is a hard issue to kind of face, especially because things are going really happily and well for us right now … We’re hoping to keep playing throughout the summer. We applied to play at NXNE … So we’re just gonna keep going until it really doesn’t make sense anymore. …
“We’re not one of those bands who’s playing because we think we’re awesome, we’re playing because we’re fans of music and we love going to shows where the band’s having a good time and the crowd’s having a good time, and that’s pretty much our incentive for playing a show,” she said.
Malcolm said the band is enjoying a leak of the forthcoming Apples In Stereo album, New Magnetic Wonder, but aren’t sharing any other current common ground.
“I don’t think we’re really listening to anything new … It sort of takes us a while to listen to new music too, if you couldn’t tell already. … All our friends are telling us to listen to the new Of Montreal record, and we’re like, ‘We’ll get to it, we’ll get to it eventually.’ … We’ll get to it once they’re broken up, and be all, ‘Oh man, you gotta put out a new record!’ ”
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Charlemagne and De Rigeur are also on Thursday’s bill at Clark. Doors open at 9 p.m.
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