Once you’ve listened to an album hundreds of times, read everything there is to read about it, and seen it performed live on multiple occasions, how do you get even deeper and closer to that album? In the case of Alvvays’ latest record, you might try slurping the sweet sugary drink that gave Rev its name.
The band’s third album, “Blue Rev”, has made such an impact in its short lifespan just mere months after “Blue Rev’s” release, many publications crowned it as the very best album of 2022. It enchanted the likes of other musicians like Belinda Carlisle, Keanu Reeves, and Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy, whose acoustic dissection of “Pharmacist” O’Hanley called the “cherry on top” of their album cycle (“It was beautiful, devastating”). It led to sold-out shows in North America, Europe, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand. There was a breathtaking performance on the “The Tonight Show”; an exchange with Narduwar; and the band got the creator of their favourite video game to make them a music video.
Even on Late Night, I was colouring the drum skin with a Sharpie at, like, three in the morning before we flew out,” Rankin says, belying the magnificence of the “Belinda Says” performance. “We’re still on our hands and knees, piecing things together, and pulling pedals out of Mono bags on the airport floor.
Guitarist Alec O’Hanley says, reflecting on “Blue Rev” for its one-year anniversary and concurrent vinyl reissue. “You don’t know until you go down the garden path whether there’s a beautiful meadow at the end, or a dump,” O’Hanley agrees. And while each song on “Blue Rev” ended up a verdant meadow, a couple of dumps had to be passed en route, such as a bridge section to their Smiths homage “Pressed,” which was ostensibly left among the soiled couch cushions and rusting tricycles. “We spent, like, two days trying to graft that in there,” O’Hanley says. “It kind of sounded like Laurie Anderson or something. Usually when we get into the weeds it’s because we haven’t listened to Molly [Rankin]. She’s got a good sense for what’s a viable route and what’s just meandering.”
“We try to subject our songs to the same scrutiny as the bands we hold dear, like The Smiths or even ABBA. We’ll truly look in the mirror, holding up those giant records, and try to get there. And we never do, but because we have at least unflinchingly attempted to, we get somewhere reasonably cool.”
Elsewhere, innovative techniques included taping iPod earbuds to hi-hat cymbals and to vocalist Rankin’s throat, various layering experiments, and recording straight through all 14 songs with only 10-second pauses between each. “They had to keep playing as if they were playing a live show; it just gets you out of your head a little bit,” Everett explains. Also in his toy chest was his artificial skull microphone, which mimics the human head for binaural recording. “His grasp on the science of sound is really interesting; he has one foot in the future and one foot in analog tape, and that’s really exciting to me, how those worlds collide,” Rankin muses. “Shawn remarked to us that he hadn’t met people who were quite so willing to do the deep dives—either tonally or arrangement-wise or emotionally, I guess—in some time,” O’Hanley adds. “I think we’ve found another kindred Canadian buddy in Shawn.”
The only topic on which they diverged, at least initially, was the album’s track listing. “In the beginning, he thought our sequence was bonkers and now he’s like, ‘It’s perfect—I can’t believe we did that at 6:30 in the morning,’” Rankin laughs. “But I was actually crying at the time because I was so devastated that we were having to do it in that state of mind after spending so long writing and making the album.”
Opening with the fighter-jet Fender Jaguar tones of “Pharmacist,” “Blue Rev” begins to wind down with quite the opposite: “Pretty quiet out here, it’s abundantly clear / That no one’s been coming for me / No encouraging sounds, helicopters or hounds,” Rankin whispers on penultimate track “Lottery Noises,” an electric piano cooing beneath her. The one-two-three punch of “Pharmacist,” “Easy on Your Own?,” and ebullient fan-favourite “After the Earthquake”—the opening that Everett refers to above—gradually gives way to these more reserved offerings, beginning with the gossamer night breeze of “Tom Verlaine” at number four and continuing from there to smile and sigh in roughly equal measure.
The bared punk spin-off “Pomeranian Spinster” (one of Everett’s favorites) to sink into anything other than the stirring, Carlisle-inspired fable of new beginnings; for the mordacious machine-pop of “Very Online Guy” to release into anything other than “Velveteen” in all of its silky, sorrowful glory.
The Fat Angel Sings 