/https%3A%2F%2Fnightlife.ca%2Fapp%2Fuploads%2F2011%2F06%2Funsettlers-beyond-circus-sideshow-103765.jpg)
Standing alone on their island made for eleven are Montreal’s The Unsettlers. Over four short years they have delivered, all on their own and with little industry backing, two stellar albums (The Unsetllers and last fall’s double record Oil & Blood) and have played countless concerts and stages here that still have their fervent followers’ tongues wagging.
Now what sets them apart from most are their sounds – an Old World polka dance meets a New World waltz that trolls through popular song, Klezmer, ragtime big band jazz, dusty country trails, gypsy folk, the blues and the beat – and sights – an eleven-strong veritable orchestra, featuring a real-life contortionist, horns and strings, with a look attuned to the Barnum and Bailey circus-goers of yore: smart suits, cool hats and flapper dresses.
This is a far cry from the early days as explains Baltimore Washington (B.W.) Brandes, one of the band’s founders and one of its three principal songwriters. “When it started it was just a reaction. I had all my gear stolen in Vancouver by a cab driver. I was playing electric guitar at that point in time. It was more in the worlds of Frank Zappa…and then I got an acoustic guitar…and I started getting more into the folk stuff,” he mentions.
“Then my friend who didn’t play piano, Dustyn Lucas who is still the piano player for The Unsettlers, said ‘I’ll learn how to play piano if you want somebody to play with.’ It was just the two of us. And now there are eleven of us, and we’re a mid-sized orchestra at this point in time. I had no idea (it would get to where it is today).”
Few bands can claim to be armed with three songwriters in their fold, a fact to which The Unsettlers know they are blessed. “Santosh Lalonde (ED: also of Bad Uncle fame) is an incredible songwriter and an incredible frontman. A brilliant performer. We have similar tastes in music but different approaches. He adds shock value to his lyrics and has this ability to deliver them in an extremely maniacal way,” explains Brandes. “Brie Neilson is an incredible songwriter with a gorgeous voice, who’s extremely easy to listen to and play along with….It’s nice to switch it up and have four different lead vocalists, three different songwriters.”
To this Brie supplants: “It adds variety which is good in terms of reaching out to different people…It allows more people to relate to it or enjoy it in different ways. And it keeps it fresh because we’re all pretty different…It keeps things interesting.”
All in the Family
The driving force behind what they are as a band to our ears and our eyes is an artistic vision that derives from something we all strive for. Something we all need. Friendship. The bonds run deep and wide within The Unsettlers and, after talking to members, it’s easy to see it’s about much more than just the music, as they seem from the outside to exist in a place they have created all their own where their art meets their real lives.
Brie Neilson explains it as this: “Basically, there’s the collective nature of it because there are so many of us. It’s not just the music, but the whole theatrical aspect and the family aspect…A lot of us have been roommates. We hang out with each other when we’re not playing music…We very much enjoy each other’s company.” To this list you can add marriage, coupling and even ex-coupling. B.W. meanwhile sees their inspiration as such: “We’re all artistic weirdos like any other artist out there. But we try to change it, stretch the boundaries,” he mentions. “If we have ten minds to draw from, we should be able to come up with a couple of good ideas.”
This may explain why it actually hasn’t been a huge hassle to keep so many musicians together for such a long period of time, contrary to the normal rules of the music game, where band membership rankings are akin to dog years. “We’ve all been able to give each other space,” Brie says honestly. Other issues do exist though with having so many numbers. “Keeping the band together is really easy because we’re all such good friends, so that’s no problem,” says Brandes. “It’s moving the band around for more than three days at a time. It’s just too expensive to do it independently. Hopefully we can find some rogue millionaire who will buy us outright and put us in his mansion and we’ll just sit there and play weird shows for him when he wants.”
From the Big Tent to the Small Stages
The band’s somewhat limited travels nonetheless brought them to a pretty unique setting, the Carnivale Lune Bleue, a 1930s-style carnival based on the HBO series Carnivale. This took place last summer in Quebec’s Eastern Townships where they lived in close quarters and worked their way through a seven-week run as the bizarro house group. “We definitely bonded more,” says Nielson. “So we had to deal with the other sides of our personalities that aren’t show-related or rehearsal related. So that was pretty key.”
B.W. Brandes takes us inside the sonics and the minds. “It gave us an atmosphere that our music just settled down in. The music, it belonged somewhere, as opposed to just a fleeting ninety minutes at a live show. We could be the characters or the people that we are all day long and the music fit in with everything that was going around, the environment that we were in.”
If you’ve never seen them live though, the stage is where The Unsettlers truly shine like crazy diamonds. The beautiful music, outfits, ideas and art intersect to create truly inspired and one-of-a-kind performances. “We almost need two months between shows in Montreal to do everything that we want to do. We haven’t been playing as often as of late because we were recording and we wanted to save all our bullets for the launch at the Rialto (in November 2010),” mentions B.W.
“The whole circus thing is cool and it fits really well with the artistic vision of the band but we don’t want to pigeonhole ourselves as a circus act all the time. So we’re trying to come up with new ways to reinvent the live show. You kind of have to come out to see us live to see what we’re up to.”
The Unsettlers
June 25 | Club Soda (FREE)
1225, St. Laurent
June 26-28 | Savoy du Métropolis (FREE)
59, Ste. Catherine E.
all four shows are part of the Montreal International Jazz Festival
www.theunsettlers.ca
