July Talk’s music focuses on interplay of founding duo
It was almost a year and a half ago that Peter Dreimanis first heard Leah Fay in a basement bar in Toronto.
Back home after multiple European tours with Eamon McGrath and The Mohawk Lodge, Dreimanis was pondering what to do next when he was struck by Fay’s sweet, baby-girl voice and unique sense of style as she strummed an acoustic guitar.
“I think she had face paint on and was wearing this bike helmet,” he said with a bemused chuckle.
“She looked like a completely crazy person. I tried to get her number, but she dismissed me. When I tracked her down a week later, she was a bit more willing to listen.”
What Dreimanis heard in Fay was what he had told his ex-bandmate she was looking for in a future project. To that end, both he and Fay began refitting songs written before they linked up, changing them to become what Dreimanis calls “conversations.”
The interplay between the two, whether on record oronstage ,became the focus of the band, an interior relationship drama played out to drums, keyboards and guitars. Sound complicated? Well, July Talk, which has grown to include Ian Docherty, Hosh Warburton and Danny Miles, was never a band in which the members were going to simply get together in a rehearsal room and knock out some rock ’n’ roll, even if their sound is very rock ’n’ roll.
“It was always very thought-out,” admits Dreimanis, an Edmonton native who moved east a number of years back.
“Both Leah and I knew that we had something special when we met, and we knew exactly what we wanted to do. I always think about this band from Toronto called No Dynamics, which I thought was the smartest punk band name I’d heard in long time. Well, the feeling going into July Talk was the exact opposite. We wanted the dynamics of the songwriting to match the dynamics of the personalities, so there had to be complete stops and absolute silences in the music.”
You can hear all of this in the band’s first single, Paper Girl, a throbbing piece of rock ’n’ roll nastiness pivoting around Dreimanis’s snarled accusations and Fay’s smirking answers. It’s riveting, theatrical stuff, full of spite and malice, and undeniably catchy.
They still have a punk rock edge to them, a taste for chaos that lends their live shows a measure of uncertainty.
At a CD release party for their selftitled debut, Fay mentioned to Dreimanis five minutes before the show that she would be walking out into crowd, where friends would pour beer bottles full of fake blood on her.
She then made her way back on stage, where the two launched into a song that was equal parts synth dance-pop and dark lyrics.
“It’s a great deal of fun to play these songs in that way,” Dreimanis said with some relish.
“There’s something really organic about how we do it. It’s not as forced as it might sound. We try and stay away from figuring out what it is that we do.
“We don’t talk about it, we just get on stage and do it.”