Fired up

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This article was published 01/10/2015 (3900 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Losing a founding member can be a near-impossible hurdle for a band to clear, but Winnipeg- and Montreal-based soul-pop outfit Chic Gamine has picked itself up and is preparing to release Light a Match, an album a long time in the making.

The departure of founding member Ariane Jean in early 2014 was a huge setback. Vocalist Alexa Dirks says the split was amicable and they often see each other and sing together. But it resulted in the remaining four members of the band — Dirks, Andrina Turenne, Annick Bremault and Sacha Daoud — re-evaluating their future.

“Eight years ago, none of us knew really what we were getting ourselves into or what we were doing, and we were all in it together. And (Jean) is still part of the band in our mind — she’s still part of this record, she’s part of the history, she’ll forever be part of the future,” Dirks says.

“But we had to ask ourselves, ‘What do we want to do next? Add another member? What do we want it to be like?’ It became very clear, very quickly that we weren’t going to replace Ariane. We weren’t going to try to get another female vocalist to try and do exactly what she does, because we don’t know anyone who can.”

Instead, Chic Gamine turned to a longtime friend, Quebec-based musician/producer Benoit Morier, to help fill the void and bring a new dimension to their evolving sound.

“There’s a whole different layer to the songs now, especially live, because he has this really amazing instrumental knowledge and musical ability that’s been a gift to us,” Dirks gushes. “It’s really helped inform some of these songs… he has all these ideas because he’s a little crafty, weird genius when it comes to certain melodies.”

It’s been five years since the group’s sophomore release, the Juno-nominated City City, and though the quintet has been working on songs consistently since then, perfecting the collection of music for its third full-length album proved to be difficult.

“It’s been a lot of years of developing these songs, performing them, recording them, having them not be quite right and re-recording them,” Dirks says. “And obviously, that’s not what we’ve done every day for five years, but it’s definitely been a lot of work within that time that’s been put into this.”

Light a Match, out Oct. 23, explores a deeper sound than previous albums. There’s still soul and flair, but the tone is more mature and subdued. There are rich layers and intricacies, both in the vocals and instrumentation, that showcase the confidence Chic Gamine has in its new direction. It’s an album painted with the musical equivalent of jewel tones, as opposed to the neon feel of their past work.

Dirks credits some of the shift to the life experiences band members worked through while writing the new record. She says though the new direction may “seem like a shock” to fans, ultimately they have come into their own, musically, and are proud of where they’ve ended up.

“We’ve been a very close-knit, family-style unit for a long time now, and it’s kind of like you never experience anything by yourself anymore. When you go through breakups, when you’re fighting with your roommates, when things are happening in your life and you’re on the road, they’re happening to everybody,” Dirks says. “A few of us went through some pretty tough breakups during the writing of this album and there was just some growing pains for all of us, but it became our story.

“And it’s not solely due to breakups,” she adds. “There’s a lot that was at stake for us making this album, and we felt like we really want this to mean something to us. If we’re going to go into this, and there’s people that have known what we’ve been doing for such a long time, we’re really going to give them something different.”

Erin.lebar@freepress.mb.ca Twitter: @Nirerabel