Alvvays survives theft, flood, lockdown, a bit of panic

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This article was published 08/03/2023 (1313 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Computers are so handy until the bits and bytes of data they store vanish and we lose a company spreadsheet, a selfie with a celebrity or the first draft of this story.

Hard work and creativity gone in a frustrating flash.

The Toronto-based rock group Alvvays, which plays tonight at the Burton Cummings Theatre — doesn’t just feel your pain, they’ve lived it.

Vocalist Molly Rankin was robbed of the tape recorder she used to store song and lyric ideas, and her partner, guitarist Alec O’Hanley, lost a laptop that held demo tapes during a break-in when they were putting the early work on new songs for what would be their 2022 album, Blue Rev.

A flooded basement around the same time also damaged some of the band’s equipment — there was also the COVID-19 pandemic that caused delays — and that meant Alvvays had to clear one hurdle after another to get Blue Rev to the listening public.

“We didn’t really have much time to sit around and feel bad for our ourselves,” Rankin says in an interview with the Free Press. “Thankfully, for me, I don’t think that we ended up losing that much. It’s hard to ignore your imagination as it runs wild and thinks about the hours and hours and hours of trial and error that is out there somewhere.”

The thoughts Rankin had transferred to that tape recorder were snapshots of creativity that are gone, even if Rankin and O’Hanley were able to recall some of her ideas on the tape or the songs on the laptop.

“Just trying to go back and create that energy or that specific zest you had when you’re writing that sentence, it’s hard to put yourself back in that mindset, so there are little things that are hard to replace,” she says.

But replace they did, and it’s impossible to tell there were any mishaps whatsoever in Blue Rev, a collection of fast-paced fuzz-tone guitar-rock that has earned Alvvays accolades from music magazines such as Pitchfork, which named the single Belinda Says its song of the year in 2022.

“I’ve learned not to dwell,” Rankin says. “There’s been so much other stuff that’s happened since then and life just moves so quickly I just try to enjoy every day.”

The record also earned Alvvays a Juno Award nomination for alternative album of the year and an appearance on the Tonight Show in January.

Rankin says the band, which also includes keyboardist Kerri MacLellan, Abbey Blackwell on bass and Sheridan Riley on drums, rolled with the punches and kept moving forward, urged onward by Grammy Award-winning producer Shawn Everett, who previously has worked with Kacey Musgraves, the War on Drugs and the Killers.

“I think that we’ve been pleasantly surprised with the reaction, and whatever feedback that we’ve been exposed to has been really positive,” Rankin says. “Sometimes things land with a thud for reasons outside of your own control or things you don’t objectively know about your own output.”

You wouldn’t know Blue Rev — it’s named after a vodka cooler Rankin says tastes like cough syrup — was the result of bad fortune with previous tracks. It’s packed with high-tempo tracks with a new-wavey feel, beginning with the opener, Pharmacist, which ends with a guitar solo packed with urgency, to one titled Tom Verlaine, which was released just a couple months before the Television frontman’s cancer death on Jan. 28 at age 73.

“It was so sad,” Rankin says. “Obviously he made some really incredible things in his lifetime that people can hold on to forever.

“We spent a lot of time listening to the first two Television records and if there’s anything to be gleaned that we could actually accomplish, guitar-wise, that would resemble something he would do, that would be incredible.”

Alvvays — it’s pronounced Always, imagine the two “v’s” are a “w” — last performed in Winnipeg in 2014 when they released their self-titled debut LP, and while their profile has risen since then, and band members have entered their 30s, Rankin says they’re the same bunch.

“Everything is so trend-based and it’s sort of important to cultivate a certain celebrity in order to resonate, but we’ve skirted around that as much as we possibly could and tried to put out songs we felt really good about and nothing really feels like it’s not us,” she says.

“I’m still in the same apartment I have been since we’ve started this whole thing, which I’m holding onto for dear life.”

Alan.Small@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @AlanDSmall