When news broke that popular Montreal outfit The Unicorns had broken up, the hearts of hip little kids everywhere began to crack; thankfully, soon after, the grapevine began buzzing. First came Th' Corn Gangg, a not-terribly-unexpected compilation between two-thirds of The Unicorns (Nick Diamonds and J'aime Tambeur) and noted stars of the LA hip-hop underground (Busdriver, Subtitle and Vick Booz). After a live show in LA, not much seemed to be happening with that, but then fans caught wind of another project: Islands, a pop group (in the Montreal/indie/Pitchfork and HSB sense), composed of Nick, J'aime and who-the-else-knew-and/or-cared-at-the-time.
Things quieted down for a while, with fans anxiously awaiting any new material that they could get their hands on. Two songs were released on teh internets early on, but then, nothing else. Waiting. Waiting. And, wouldn't you know it, with a wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am, the Islands album was set to be released on April 4th (the 3rd in Europe, you early bastards). Gearing up to hit the road again with Metric in the US as well as their headlining tour in April and May (be on the lookout for confirmed dates soon), J'aime took some time out to answer a few questions.
Hate Something Beautiful: Your full length album, Return To The Sea, will be released in North America on April 4th through an upstart label, Equator Records. Can you tell me about the relationship you guys have with the label?
J'aime Tambeur: Equator Records is a brand new label that was just started by a sort of husband and wife team out of Montreal. They're old friends of mine, I've known them for years here. I met Matt while he was working at a record label here called DKD. When I first met him, he was just volunteering there, trying to get his foot in the door, and within about a year he had worked his way up to the president of the company and he had completely turned the label around to something that was making money. He's a really dynamic and intelligent individual and when I heard that he was interested in starting his own record label, I thought it'd be a good spot to take our project, since we had talked to him for a bit and he was really, really,excited about what we were doing. We're on the same page and it's been working out really great. We're the first thing to come out on that label and we hope it's going to be a success for both of us.
HSB: I heard you guys re-mastered the album in England for the European release ---
J'aime: Well, we actually mastered it first in England because we actually had our European deal first. When we wanted to make the record, Nick and I had spent about a month just in my apartment making demos and working up songs and we had more than enough for a record, but we had to figure out how we were going to afford to record them for real. Nick put in a call to Jeff Travis from Rough Trade who has been our European label for The Unicorns and he gave us the money without even really hearing anything. He gave us enough to record and so we've had the European deal for even longer. So they mastered it first and then we re-mastered it for North America.
HSB: Besides the mastering, is there any difference between the European and North American releases?
J'aime: There might be a difference in the vinyl master? I'm not entirely sure. We're doing a kind of special trick, a new thing that's never been done which I can't really reveal yet because someone else might snake us on it. At least for the North American one, we're trying to get it done for the European one too. The guy who's doing the North American vinyl master said that he could do it. We described the process and he said that he could do it, whereas for the European one, they said they didn't know if the guy had done it before. Besides that, everything should be the same.
HSB: What is the current status on the members of the band? Recently, I heard that you added two string players and a bass clarinetist?
J'aime: We did the record just with our friends from Montreal, just people we knew coming in and playing different instruments that we thought would sound good. When we were finished, we realized that we had to put together a band to play all this stuff so the plan was to get just absolute maestro prodigy-kids who can do anything. We've been really lucky, we found, in addition to our bass player, who is one of the best bass players in the world, we found another rhythm guitar player, Jim Guthrie, who is a genius songwriter in his own right. We managed to get two kids who focused on strings and also played woodwind and keyboard. We've got someone playing clarinet and oboe and viola and violin. We'll be playing cello soon. We don't actually have a cello right now but we will soon. One of our guys can play the cello quite well and as soon as we have the money to buy a cello, we'll be using that.
HSB: There is a number of guest appearances on the album. Can you tell me who all is on there and how you guys got together with them?
J'aime: Everyone who plays on the record is a friend. It was entirely that. It was like, when we wanted someone to play bass clarinet, I got my friend Frank Lozano who is a local jazz legend here, I guess you could say. He's a professor at McGillie and one of the best reed players in the city. He just came down and recorded it for much less money than he would have gotten for other records. We wanted to have Richy Parry [Arcade Fire] involved from the beginning. Nick used to live with him back when we all used to live in this building up in St. Henry, Montreal together. We've known all these guys for a really long time and it's all just friends who we asked to come in and do different stuff.
HSB: A lot of people wonder why “Flesh†and “Abominable Snow†are not on the full-length?
J'aime: Well, the thing is, at the end of the day, I just think that they didn't fit in with the sequencing of the record. We have about seven other songs that we recorded that didn't make it on the record. It's not because they're not good enough songs, it's just that when we sat down and plotted the record, they didn't fit in. I'm sure they'll get released eventually.
HSB: What was the recording process like for the album? I know much of it was done in your apartment.
J'aime: Well, the first half of it was done in a place called Breakglass Studios, which is owned by this guy named Jace Lasek who is in this band called Besnard Lakes [link], which should be busting out anytime soon. That was recorded all to a two-inch tape on a nice little piece that he has. We did most of the vocals and tracks there. We filled up about fifteen tracks worth of tape of every song and then we dumped it all into Pro Tools. The second half was done at my apartment which, luckily, was pretty empty at the time. We were able to put padding on the walls of one room and then use another room as the control room, and we did strings and a lot of the vocals, horns and stuff like that.
HSB: How have the crowds been reacting to your sets so far?
J'aime: So far, it's been pretty good. We just got back from a Canadian tour with this band Metric [link]. We're continuing on to the States tomorrow, I guess. They have a huge following in Canada so there were really big crowds and the crowds have been fantastic and really, really nice and we really couldn't ask for a better response.
HSB: You guys opened for Beck [link] last year. I assume that the majority of Beck fans have no idea who you guys were, while I'm sure many of the Metric fans at least were familiar with The Unicorns, if not Islands. What were the Beck crowds like?
J'aime: Yes, that's definitely true about the fans. We did one show here in Montreal at the Bell Centre, and that was different because it was in Montreal and everyone knew us out here. We also did a bunch of shows down in the Southwest of the United States. That was great, the response was fantastic. We did a show in Phoenix at this state fair that was huge. Afterwards, outside of the hall was this fair, you know, like carnival grounds and we were walking around afterwards just having fun and people were coming up to us thinking we were Beck. They didn't even know, they had just come to the show because I guess they go to the big shows. They were like “Oh, you Beck kids were great! You guys are really good!†and we just kind of accepted that and went with it. We all had our laminates that said Beck on it and so we could back it up somehow. I guess the response was still really great. Everyone's been really good. I'm hoping that most of the hatred that will be directed towards us will be on the internet where we can ignore it while when we play live, people can be nice and will continue to be nice.
HSB: How often do people shout out for you guys to play Unicorns songs?
J'aime: Way, way, way less often than I was expecting. This whole tour that we just did, only one person yelled out “Unicorns!†at one point. Besides that, no one else has yelled out son names or anything. They were really, really good about it.
HSB: When you guys write songs for Islands, do you purposely try to distance yourself from a Unicorns kind of sound?
J'aime: The thing is, we didn't really have to purposely distance ourselves. The thing is, all of the Unicorns songs that people knew, those songs are like two years olds at least, by the time we started to work on this new stuff. Some of them are three or four years old. But really, though, just going in and making the music we wanted to make and not putting any restrictions on it whatsoever, it was so radically different from what The Unicorns had been doing anyways because people change over time and you don't just wind up writing the same songs over and over again. We let ourselves have a richer palette of sounds to work with. We brought in, you know, really, really confident musicians so that we could make a really well-performed record. It comes across sounding very different to me. Not because we purposely tried to not do something but because it's been a long time and things change.
HSB: Well, what is the writing process for a song like? Who writes the songs?
J'aime: Well, on this record, a lot of the songs were written differently. Some were just written by playing songs in rehearsal. Someone will have a lick and then someone will develop it. Sometimes Nick would come with a couple of ragged parts or ideas and we would just work them out together as a song. Nick wrote all of the lyrics on the record but most of the music is pretty collaborative between the two of us. We spent every day for over a month just hammering out a month and then every day for about two months getting them recorded. Every song, really, has come about by different means.
HSB: In regards to Th' Corn Gangg, will anything further be done with that?
J'aime: Yeah, we keep releasing things sporadically. Right now, we're really just doing remixes since that's all we have time for. We're going to take a little time off after we do our own tour in April and May. When we get back from that, we'll have about a month and a half off before we tour again and so I think that Nick and I will get as many beats finished in that time as possible. We'd really like to put a record out because the perception now is that Th' Corn Gangg is something we did in the mean time between The Unicorns and Islands, which is not really true. It was always meant to be an outlet for our mutual love for rap music and our desire to be a part of that world. I don't think it's something that we want to forget about at all.
HSB: What was it like working on the North American Hallowe'en Prevention Initiative [link]? That had just about everyone in it.
J'aime: My involvement's was certainly a lot less than Nick's. He wrote that song with another guy named Adam Gollner in Los Angeles while I was still in Canada. I helped make that happen, like I came down and recorded some of the vocals and put some legwork for it because he's my friend and I want to help him out, but that was definitely more his project than mine. But I mean, I was around for a lot of it and it really just got by and really, I think what the most amazing thing about it was to find out what a small world we lived in. It seemed like anyone that we thought of who would be cool to be on the song, somehow through a friend of a friend of a friend, we were able to get in touch with them and mostly everyone said yes, which is great.
HSB: One last question which I ask everyone I interview. Do you prefer Coke or Pepsi?
J'aime: I don't drink pop. Neither does Nick. We prefer groovy hippy drinks and lattes. We're both pretty serious and health conscious people who try to avoid junk foods as much as possible.
Special thanks to Dana at Biz 3
Don't forget to hit up:
http://www.secretunicornsforum.com/
http://www.myspace.com/islandsareforever
