Juno winners Monster Truck release debut record riding major high

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This article was published 27/05/2013 (4865 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

TORONTO – The four members of head-banging Hamilton rock outfit Monster Truck are not new to the Canadian music scene, having spent the past decade diligently slugging away in bands including Saint Alvia, the Reason and Eaglefight.

But there’s one crucial difference already being felt by the quartet ahead of Tuesday’s release of their debut LP “Furiosity,” and it’s one summed up by bassist/singer Jon Harvey with a succinctness appropriate for a band known for no-nonsense chug-and-slug rock.

That difference?

“I’d say: success,” Harvey says with a smile.

He elaborates no further as his more garrulous guitarist Jeremy Widerman picks up where he left off, but in this case, perhaps no more information was really needed.

For one thing, Monster Truck claimed a Juno Award, for breakthrough group of the year, at last month’s ceremony in Regina, without a full-length album to their name.

And on this day, the foursome is navigating a packed day of press with slight weariness but more appreciation, having encountered enough media indifference with past projects.

Of course, there are plenty of reasons Monster Truck is attracting so much attention. Garnering comparisons to Saskatoon’s shaggy retro-minded Southern rockers the Sheepdogs, Monster Truck is a throwback that mines ’70s riff-rock and sludge-slinging ’90s grunge in almost equal measure, simultaneously inspiring well-earned comparisons to Deep Purple (for whom they opened) and Soundgarden.

And more superficially, the band has a fairly unified sense of style, swaddled as they are in faded denim, dense beards and unkempt manes.

“It’s a product of being lazy,” Widerman says of the band’s hirsute style.

“I don’t like shaving. I just don’t like it,” contributes Harvey.

“I honestly just look like a six-year-old when I shave my beard off,” adds Widerman. “There’s lots of reasons (for our style). There’s definitely that element that we all spend so much time together, there’s just a natural unifying trend that happens. It’s not really a conscious decision. It just kind of happens naturally as a result of spending so much time together and hanging out together. We shop at the same stores.”

The band came together in similarly organic — even coincidental — fashion. “Monster Truck” was the group’s nickname for drummer Steve Kiely’s “loud and crappy” van. They joked that it would be a good name for a band. Two days later, they were having their first practice.

For years, they had mused on starting a riff-rock band, just idle chit-chat while hanging out and “smoking lots of joints.” They talked about it more than they meant to do it, but once the moniker emerged, everything else fell into place.

The band would be a “cover band with no cover songs,” Widerman explains. It was a lark, and one that they didn’t necessarily take all that seriously at first.

“It was just for fun,” Harvey explains. “Beer money.”

But things started to happen fast. In previous bands, Widerman and Harvey agree that they were somewhat strategic in their thinking — they would try to land a video on MuchMusic, or try to secure a foothold on radio — but this time, none of those concerns seemed relevant. They just played, since after all, what chance did Monster Truck have to succeed?

“Once we stopped caring about it, those things started coming after us,” Widerman recalls. “And it kind of was like, we had these tour offers and these show offers and people wanting us to go here and there. We had to reassess what we were doing. Are we going to go for this all the way? Are we going to buy a van? Are we going to take time off work?

“(We) kind of just decided that was something we wanted to give one last shot at.”

Harvey and Widerman don’t adore the idea that Monster Truck is simply plumbing the past. At the same time, they’re quite open in citing the modest roots of some of their songs. For instance, the seed for the single “Sweet Mountain River” was planted with keyboardist Brandon Bliss’s honest appraisal of a picturesque upstate New York waterway as a “sweet mountain river.” The next logical thought?

“Let’s call our song that and let’s write it so it sounds like Mountain,” Harvey explains.

Still, Widerman doesn’t like being referred to as a revivalist.

“To us, it’s a combination of all the best elements of rock,” he said. “We really love classic rock, but at the same time, we grew up in the grunge era and we kind of evolved into listening to punk and all that.

“Being a throwback band or just doing a rehash of the ’70s only,” he added, “it’s almost like a cop-out really because there’s been so many other great things that have happened.”

And good things have sure been happening to his group of late.

They can hardly believe it. Certainly, if you could go back to the band’s nascent stages and tell the band’s then-disillusioned principal members of their impending good fortune — Juno wins, high-profile tours, major-label distribution — you would have been promptly dismissed.

“I would have laughed in your face,” Widerman said. “But the bigger shocker to us, would’ve been Slash is going to wear your shirt onstage. I’d be like: ‘You are high. You are so high. There’s no way that’s going to happen.’ And like, you’re going to open for Deep Purple — there was no way that they are even going to know the existence of me for their entire life.

“Those moments were those things that you never count on or expect and when they happen it’s just one of the sweetest things. And we couldn’t be more grateful for the opportunities we’ve been given.”