Ska-punks SubCity back out on the streets for reunion

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This article was published 11/04/2024 (546 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

There’s no quit in SubCity, even if the Winnipeg punk-ska group broke up 12 years ago.

The six-man band picked the worst possible date — March 27, 2020 — for a reunion concert that was supposed to shake off the cobwebs from its 2000s-era records, including the 2005 debut EP Out on the Streets and the 2009 album Where’s the Noise?.

”We’d done all the promotion, everything was lined up. Two weeks before the gig, well, we know what happened in March 2020,” Johannes Lodewyks, SubCity’s guitarist and vocalist, says, referring to the COVID-19 pandemic, the aftershocks from which continue to reverberate through the performing-arts world.

”It was funny at first. We thought, ‘We’ll delay it six weeks, we’ll delay it a couple of months, then six months’ and then all of a sudden, here we are four years later.”

It’s taken all that time for Lodewyks, bassist Darwin Baker, horn players Rob Goodman and Darryl Reilly, keyboardist Kevin McLean and drummer Alain Guilmette to synchronize their schedules for a second chance at the reunion, which takes place Saturday night at the Park Theatre. Paige Drobot, the psychedelic rocker, opens.

Lodewyks says they have an epic set planned for Saturday’s concert that will hearken back to the band’s beginnings in 2002, when they formed the SubCity Dwellers amid a rise in ska and punk music in the city.

“We all played in different bands at the time: the Barrymores, the Afterbeat, JFK and the Conspirators, the Racketeers,” says Lodewyks, who was 16 when SubCity began and had to sneak into clubs to perform. “We wanted to form a different sound, something a little bit heavier.

“There was a lot of poppiness going on and we wanted to be a little more darker, a little more political. There was a lot of hunger for that kind of style of music in Winnipeg.”

By 2009, when Where’s the Noise? came out, SubCity had dropped Dwellers from its name and embraced a in-your-face sound similar to Gogol Bordello, the raucous New York punk group fronted by Ukrainian emigré Eugene Hütz.

“That was an especially important one for us,” Lodewyks says. “Not only was it our last studio album but that was the height of our touring days. We were playing all the time. We wrote something like 25 songs for that album because we had five songwriters in the band at that time.”

Live!, which was recorded from SubCity’s final show, March 9, 2012 at the West End Cultural Centre proves to be a musical time capsule that will be unearthed on Saturday.

While age might have cooled some of the band’s early fire — howling on the mic isn’t as easy at 38 as it was when Lodewyks was 16, he admits — but they’ve become better musicians in the past 12 years.

Most of the band members continue to perform with other groups; Lodewyks plays bass with the Noble Thiefs, Baker is part of the country group the Crooked Brothers and McLean plays keys in William Prince’s touring band.

Guilmette has become a music teacher, but it wasn’t difficult to grab the sticks again.

“While he’s been a musician all this time — he doesn’t play the drum kit as much — but he sure picked it up pretty quickly,” Lodewyks says. “He’s still got the chops, and that goes for everybody.”

Family commitments were a big reason the band dissolved; teens like Lodewyks had reached their late 20s by 2012 and SubCity was no longer the top priority it had been when they were touring across the country.

SubCity came of age during the era of compact discs and cassette mixtapes, but in preparation for the 2020 show, the group uploaded its material onto streaming services.

That includes Wanted, a track McLean wrote in 2009 that wasn’t released until just before the postponed 2020 reunion gig.

“We had to get with the times and catch up a little bit,” Lodewyks says. “Not only the old-schoolers who went to our shows back in the day, but we wanted to bring new fans.

“Maybe the old-schoolers will bring their kids now.”

Alan.Small@winnipegfreepress.com

X: @AlanDSmall