BeatRoute Magazine B.C. print e-edition - November 2016

THe Pack a.d.
examining the spectra of human burden
PHOTO BY REBECCA BLISSETT
Becky Black and Maya Miller continue to radiate positivity,
even on their darkest album to date.
Five alaRM FUnk
Frank Zappa meets Hedwig meets the mating dance of the silverback gorilla
KRISTINA CHARANIA
Rule #1 of the best friend and bandmate
codebook: when asked to strip naked
and be filmed while tied to a cold, hard
surface for half a day, one must always
oblige. This rule is particularly true
when you’re local badass duo The Pack
A.D., and you have a knack for creating
wicked music videos.
Take the science-fiction inspired
video for “So What” – the first single
off of the band’s latest offering, Positive
Thinking – which starts with green alien
hands examining vocalist and guitarist
Becky Black on a surgery table with
lighting wands. Eventually, these aliens
pierce her neck with thick-needled gnarly
syringes that look as if they’re covered in
extraterrestrial earwax. (Yum!)
“I think this video was [drummer]
Maya’s idea, and…well, I don’t know
why I agreed to it,” chuckles Black.
“The studio we were in [for the video]
also had really high ceilings, so it never
heated up in there. I had a wet sheet
draped over me for a couple of hours
and shivered a lot.”
“But, I love the video,” Black
concludes. “Science fiction just gets me.
I’ll always be a fan.”
Despite its title, Positive Thinking
is easily the band’s darkest release to
date. It’s also the most methodic of
their six albums, with polished song
infrastructure that extinguish the wild
guitar riffs, pounding drum lines, and
fuck-you attitude that define the band.
Together, the album’s eleven songs act as
a lens focusing on the spectra of human
burden: cases of quietly aching depression,
lethargy, biting loneliness, suffocating and
monotonous jobs. Highlights include
the pulsing rage of “Yes I Know” and
90’s grunge “Skin Me”, whose lyrics ooze
apathy (I’m made of metal/plastic heart/
attack my mind) and complement
Black’s droning, sung-through-grittedteeth
vocals.
From late October through the end
of November, the band is touring – pissing
rain, post cards to fans, and thrift store pit
stops included – in Canada and the US
with a small string of shows in France and
Germany. Fittingly, their hometown show
is their last one. “I’m looking forward to
sleeping in for a week, playing some video
games, and then doing holiday stuff [after
touring],” says Black. “Hopefully, it’ll be
nice and relaxing and not terribly, I don’t
know, cold. I might be working on some
material over the winter and recording
too, but who knows. Nothing’s set yet.”
The Pack A.D. perform at Fortune Sound
Club on November 26.
JENNIE ORTON
Among the many domestic visceral
thrills of Vancouver as a city—the
zip lines, the suspension bridges, the
whale sightings, and the bathrooms at
the Cambie—there is the experience of
seeing the throbbing behemoth that is
Five Alarm Funk. A self-described “pack
of howling funk musicians hopped up on
tainted ice cream,” 12 pieces wide Five
Alarm Funk creates a show that is utterly
relentless: a rare unhinged primate turf
war that can cause even the most “over it”
Vancouver hipster to cash in their fucksto-give
in favor of getting really sweaty.
“The driving force of the group, the
energy and the feeling of the passion
that we get from the audience is what
drives the band,” promises band-leader
Tayo Branston. “Together in this harmony
of sweat and noise and movement; it
makes for a wonderful life.”
This uncool amount of joy and
abandon has served Funk well as they
have spent the better part of the last
decade touring Canada while selfpromoting
and releasing albums and
developing a fan base capable of very
successful crowdsourcing ventures; the
most recent of which funded their yet
untitled new album and their hope of
expanding their touring efforts to the
southern states.
The album, set for a spring 2017
release, has been described as “less
chaotic” by Branston. “It has some
serious pure funk. More in the realm of a
dance record than say Abandon Earth, our
last record, which was like this heavy metal
psychotic gypsy adventure.”
Even the most ventilated of venues
stinks of that smell that was perpetually in
your high school boyfriend’s room, sweat
and pheromones and enthusiasm and sweet
sweet freedom.
“Everybody kind of leaves it at the door
at a Five Alarm Funk show,” says Branston.
“You’re there for the pure enjoyment of it.”
In a world so full of affected songs and
affected singers, it behooves us to attend live
Five Alarm Funk shows to remind ourselves
what life, hard work, and catharsis really feel
like; and to support this band of gypsy
baboons and their dream of invading our
neighbors to the south and loosening
them up in their time of great need.
Five Alarm Funk plays on November 10
at the Imperial.
PHOTO BY MAGGIE MACPHERSON
Five Alarm Funk transforms bars across the nation
into Pantheons of sexuality unseen by man.
November 2016 MUSIC
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