Outsiders in their own town: Beatroute Magazine Sept 2008
12/10/2008 By Sebastian Buzzalino
On the bottom corner of one of their multiple web pages scattered across the internet, Ahnabith Gish lists some of their generic influences. After having described themselves as “Alternative Avant-Garde,” they describe their music as “Dramatic Prog Melodia,” not without a little tongue placed firmly in cheek.
Unfortunately for fans trying to get a sense of the band’s music before actually listening to any of their material, “Dramatic Prog Melodia” does little to catch the spirit of the band’s highly progressive and experimental music. As an amalgamation of the members, a sort of gestation entity within, Ahnabith Gish is very much an anomaly in the Calgary music scene.
“We don’t really fit into any of the cliques around Calgary bands. We’re not loud enough for the metal crowd and we’re too loud for the indie pop rock crowd,” explains bassist Ben Middleton, somewhat dejectedly. “At imes it’s a little bit hard as far as morale goes, I guess.”
Featuring heavily complex songs that range from disparate to cohesive, from mellow or aggressive, with nearly endless pastiche of styles intertwined within, Ahnabith Gish cannot even purport to have a single collective band history.
“We started with an acoustic trio and there was this sort of revolving door thing going on - we had a lot of guest musicians, ” says Middleton.
Barely even part of the first EP, Locus, Brought, Speechless, Pathetic, save for a five second bass line that he wrote, Middleton became the replacement bass player as they began to write the new album Are Wakeours Leep.
“I came up with the name for the LP in the shower,” Middleton explains. “I was still naked when I called [singer] Dario [Hudon-Verrelli] to tell him about it.”
As can be expected from the songs themselves, the writing process is a similarly collective, wide-ranging experience. For the most part, say Middleton, they start with the music, with the chord-progressions and melodies, and then Hudon-Verrellli goes off to write the lyrics. To come up with the actual melodies, the four get together and jam, bringing their own riffs to the mix and trying to out them all together in a cohesive way.
“I think the influences in the band are more on each individual. We don’t listen to exactly the same music, so we all have our own personal influences and bring that to the table when writing,” elucidates Middleton of the writing process. Arguably, the, the very lack of collective influences is, in part, what creates the highly progressive nature of the tracks: when each individual is coming from a different background with no singular unitary goal to work toward, the result is indeed the avant-garde tracks on Are Wakeours Leep.
|
