In 2008, Vancouver-based indie-rock quartet Ladyhawk will unleash a veritable media assault on the public. In March, the group released its sophomore album Shots to widespread acclaim. Plans for extensive touring in both the United States and their native Canada are in the works. With a little luck, the band may even find themselves on tour in Europe this summer. Best of all, Let Me Be Fictional, a film documenting the recording of Shots, is making its way around film festivals. It’s a jam-packed schedule, alright, and it’s going to be hard not to notice Ladyhawk this year.
Directed by Mona Mok and Rob Leickner, Let Me Be Fictional is a no-frills look at the recording sessions for Shots. This concept initially surprised the band. “I thought well, who and what is this for and why would anybody want to watch this?” says singer/ guitarist Duffy Driediger. “Rob and Mona approached us about making a film. At first we were like, ‘OK, sure?’ I was kind of wary about the idea. I felt like having cameras there was going to be kind of weird. No one likes to have a camera pointed at them all the time. I guess some people do, but I don’t really. It was definitely weird, but it was an interesting experience.”
Largely avoiding the kind of non-musical struggles and interpersonal turmoil common to documentaries (see: Metallica’s Some Kind Of Monster) Let Me Be Fictional is a consummate fly-on-the wall recording film, strictly about the band and their music (and their affection for cheap homemade sangria. Their recipe was thoughtfully included with the DVD). Driediger continues, “I’ve done a lot of recording in the past by myself and with other people. I kind of take it for granted what it’s like to actually go and record. When you play in a band, you can forget that not everybody plays in a band and doesn’t really know what’s involved with making a record.” It’s a unique look at the process of rock record making, one usually visible only to studio interns and band entourages.
When you play in a band, you can forget that not everybody plays in a band and doesn’t really know what’s involved with making a record.
Of course, Let Me Be Fictional might not be as effective if the band hadn’t been recording their best and most ambitious songs to date. Shots marks tremendous growth for Ladyhawk as a band, and for Driediger as a songwriter a natural progression from their promising 2004 self-titled debut. Driediger says that in the early days, “I had written all of our early songs and originally played them solo and acoustic. When we formed a band, we just figured out how to play them as a band. We didn’t really have much of a concept of what we were going for except to play loud bare bones rock music.” Comparatively on Shots, Driediger remarks, “I think a lot of it was a matter of us becoming a better band, or being a little bit more experienced and knowing what we wanted things to sound like.”
Their first record was generally favorably reviewed, and earned the young band comparisons to the likes of Neil Young, Dinosaur Jr., and Ladyhawk’s heroes, Chicago indie rock trio, Silkworm. “Silkworm was a band that we’ve been compared to and that we compare ourselves to. We all feel they were just the most amazing and most underrated band ever.” But despite the positive reception, the intertwining guitars and propulsive rhythms showed a band with obvious talent but without a distinct voice.
An age-old axiom states that you have your whole life to write your first album, and perhaps a year or two to write your second. Thanks to extensive touring and practice, this seems to have worked in Ladyhawk’s favor. With Shots, Ladyhawk sound like no one but Ladyhawk, and the more experienced band positively soars. “I think over the last three or four years, we’ve started to try different things and arrange things more. I think we’ve really tried to ‘evolve’ in a certain way. I don’t what direction that is except that we’re less inclined to wear our influences on our sleeves.” He adds, “Playing out on the road can also change the way you play together as a band.” The best examples of Ladyhawk’s newly developed personality are the album’s opener “I Don’t Always Know What You’re Saying,” and “S.T.H.D,” a pair of guitar firestorms that explode with passionate phrasing and near-perfect hooks.
Along with improved musical chemistry and songwriting, Shots comes with intriguing new sonic ideas. Part of this can be attributed to the band’s longtime engineer Colin Stewart, who on Shots contributed more than ever to Ladyhawk’s vision. “He’s on the same page as we are musically. We’ve got a really good working relationship with Colin where we can just say, ‘Hey Colin, I want this guitar or vocal to sound like it’s coming through a cheese grater from 30 years ago, or like someone’s channeling it through a Ouija board,’ and he’ll say ‘OK, I got ya.’ He’ll just know what we’re going for. He doesn’t really put himself into his recordings, but when we can’t come to a decision on something he’s really good at saying ‘I think it sounds best like this.’ We wouldn’t be able to do it without his hands in the pie.”
As seen in Let Me Be Fictional, the album was also recorded in a rather unique space. The Whitehouse in Kelowna B.C. is an old farmhouse which the band thought would be ideal for recording. With no proper toilet and relative isolation from outside world, the band investigated all the sonic possibilities of this one of a kind space. “If we’d recorded that album in a normal studio, it wouldn’t have sounded like that. I think we definitely wanted it to not be safe sounding, we wanted it to be weird sounding. We wanted the guitars to be really loud and in your face and for everything to be kind of rough and kind of fucked up sounding.” Indeed, Stewart’s non-invasive recording style and the unique Whitehouse lent themselves to a huge, spacious, and occasionally spooky recording quite unlike anything else today.
Shots closes with “Ghost Blues,” an epic, eerie meditation on day-to-day interactions with ghosts, a topic featured extensively in the film. Driediger explains, “I was living in this small town, in Eastern B.C., sort of a hippie town. The town’s really weird, and there’s a lot of ghosts and a lot of weird stuff, and everybody has ghost stories. I had weird ghostly experiences while I was working there. I was working at this restaurant that was really haunted. Crazy shit would happen every single day, and you’d kind of take it for granted.” Those ghosts are used thematically throughout the Shots album, which could be called snapshots of a band from a strange and wonderful world where nothing is exactly normal.
After such a hectic year coming up, it seems that Ladyhawk might want to plan a vacation in advance, but Driediger’s work ethic, for now, seems to be intact. “I’m kind of always writing. I’m not a very prolific guy, it takes me a while. So I’m hoping to do a bunch of writing on the road. This summer I plan on sitting around with a guitar a lot.” In the meantime, we have Shots to tide us over, which Driediger says, “is best enjoyed loud with an ice cold glass of ghetto sangria.”
– Mike McGovern
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