Fembots > 21st Century Porch Music

[M]

One of the bands I've been listening to for a while now and look forward to seeing live for the first time are the Fembots. They'll be playing this Saturday at the Pop Montreal Festival but will also be in a town near you (maybe) in the near future.

"21st century porch music"... I like that analogy... and I believe it was Kevin Drew of Broken Social Scene notoriety who helped in that coining / association... in reference to their latest album "Small Town Murder Scene", he stated that their music is compiled of "Beautiful arrangements that make you want to be on a porch forever." I'd have to say on a porch of an old farmhouse, bundled in a sweater on a grey and windy fall day, given the eerie yet beautiful quality of their music.

Bio, tour dates, link to a listen, and a dated eye magazine article on the group are included below for those that are interested.

BIO

"Twenty-first century porch music"

Small Town Murder Scene is the second release from Toronto duo FemBots. Founded in 1998 by Dave MacKinnon and Brian Poirier as a home recording experiment, FemBots quickly outgrew the studio to become a critical favourite of the Canadian independent music scene. This record finds the band moving beyond their nnovative “budgetronica” to explore a darker, more roots-based sound. Old staples of the FemBots arsenal such as found sounds and answering machine messages are still present, but take a back seat to piano and acoustic guitar. Small Town Murder Scene also showcases the duo’s growing strength as songwriters.

FemBots have opened for the Dirty Three and toured extensively in Canada, with American tours planned for Fall/03.

"The FemBots are a constant revelation. They create some of the most moving, unexpected, inspiring, and genuine music I have ever heard." - John K. Samson, The Weakerthans (Epitaph)

"A surprisingly sincere set of folk hymns, with MacKinnon rising to the fore as a powerfully soulful singer." - Stuart Berman, Eye Weekly

"Sits nicely on the shelf alongside Nick Cave, Tom Waits and Mercury Rev." - Jason Schneider, The Record

Sounds

Click here and have a listen.

Dates

9/25/03 - Guelph, ON > Trasheteria w/ Cuff The Duke

9/27/03 - Montreal > Casa del Popolo for Pop Montreal

10/02/03 - Toronto > The Horseshoe Tavern w/ with Mathew Barber, Hawaii, & The Uncut.

10/30/03 - Halifax > Hell (as part of the Halifax Pop explosion)

10/31/03 - Quebec City > Campus Charlesbourg w/ the Weakerthans and Carnations

11/01/03 - Montreal > Le Spectrum w/ the Weakerthans and Carnations.

11/03/03 - Ottawa > Barrymore's w/ the Weakerthans and Carnations.

11/04/03 - Peterborough > Trasheteria

11/06/03 - Toronto > Lee's Palace w/ the Weakerthans and Jim Bryson.

Sound affects: FemBots trade weird noises for sweet nuances

written by STUART BERMAN for eye magazine - 03.20.03

"Oh man, there's nothing worse than being a weird band in the Prairies," says Dave MacKinnon, who is one half of a weird band called FemBots, but who is actually a very normal guy doing normal-guy stuff like drinking Guinness and eating pizza with his best buddy/bandmate (the also-quite-normal Brian Poirier) in one of their usual College Street hangs.

But give these two a tape recorder -- preferably a reel-to-reel model made in 1964 with one malfunctioning spool -- and strange sounds start filling the air, like ghosts from old, warped country 78s haunting a RadioShack, singing harmony with answering-machine messages and toy dolls. And while MacKinnon and Poirier are guitar and piano players by trade, they also play a mean balloon and plunger. So when you're in a band whose lists of instruments reads more like a dollar-store inventory sheet, well, there's a good chance you're going to be a tough sell in Saskatchewan.

"In Regina, we ended up playing to our friend who was selling t-shirts to nobody," MacKinnon says, "and we were being drowned out by karaoke from the room next door."

"Yeah," Poirier adds, "we don't have a drum set to drown out the guy who's yelling, 'You're in the jungle baby! You're gonna diiiieeeeeeee!'"

Sure, living in Toronto minimizes their encounters with other would-be Axls, but FemBots have found that being a weird band in this part of the country ain't no cakewalk either. While their super-freaked 2000 debut Mucho Cuidado earned them props from Can-indie all-stars like The Weakerthans and Lowest of the Low (both bands regularly jam in MacKinnon's Clinton Street home studio), the record didn't secure proper distribution till long after its run on the Canadian college radio charts was over. Their excellent new Small Town Murder Scene disc, like its predecessor, was another three-years-in-the-making piecemeal project, and once again, FemBots are paying for it out of their own pockets.

But like their music, FemBots' survival has everything to do with making something out of nothing. Where much of Mucho Cuidado was funded by royalties from a UK bank ad that used one of the band's songs -- an unreleased leftover the duo had previously deemed a throwaway -- the funding for Small Town Murder Scene came from even more uncanny sources. In a peculiar turn of events, producers of the Nickelodeon teen series Caitlin's Way commissioned a 10-year-old song by MacKinnon and Poirier's first band, the long-dead Dig Circus, as the show's theme.

"You never know the shelf life of your music," MacKinnon says. "Another good chunk of money for this album came from an unfinished song we had that got used on this web browser called MusicMatch. It's just a big harmonica solo and a chorus, and it sounded so much like a Rolling Stones song that it was unusable to us."

"We've been recording every single thing we've done since we started playing together," says Poirier, who's been collaborating with MacKinnon since their teens. "We catalogue everything -- you never know when you'll need it again."

It's somewhat disheartening that the FemBots' cast-offs earn them more money than their actual records, but MacKinnon and Poirier don't seem to mind, because they know they've just made one beaut of an album. Though the duo insist no concepts were invoked in the making of this record, Small Town Murder Scene unfolds like a classic film noir in which you can smell the sweat, dodge the tumbleweeds and hear the blues being sung from front porches in the distance.

FemBots' found-sound finesse is still on ample display -- "The Transit Song" features bizarre vocals taken from a friend's collection of family home recordings made in the '60s -- but instead of being deployed to subversive (or annoying) effect, here the sonic chicanery adds emotional depth to a surprisingly sincere set of rustic folk hymns, with MacKinnon rising to the fore as a powerfully soulful singer.

And where the first album sounded like the product of mad scientists locked in the lab after-hours, Small Town Murder Scene is a warm, communal gathering: guests include Weakerthans drummer Jason Tait and Bob Wiseman fiddler Julie Penner, and the standout title track is a clap-along hootenanny that plays like a Canuck cousin to the Stones' "Sweet Virginia."

"With our music, it's really hard to distinguish between production and songwriting," MacKinnon says. "I've been in bands where you try to add your weird sound effect to the finished song, whereas with the first FemBots record, we built the song around the weird sound effect. If you're going to make it strange, make it strange from the very beginning and build everything around that. But this one's not quite as over-the-top as the first record."

"We're still very much about salvaging sounds," Poirier says, "but all the old gear is fried. The one machine that was the backbone of all the loops on the first record, this old Philips reel-to-reel machine, it's dead. That's the problem with stuff that's not meant to be used as an instrument: you use it night after night and it doesn't last."

But one piece of equipment FemBots aren't sad to see go is their cassette-decked crooner Teddy Ruxpin, whom the band initially brought onboard to sing a cover of The Weakerthans' "Illustrated Bible Stories for Children" at a Horseshoe gig three years ago. However, fearing that their lil' cubby buddy was hogging too much of their spotlight, FemBots made a ruthless decision: Ted is dead.

"Every bit of press we got had something to do with Teddy Ruxpin," MacKinnon says, "so there was a conscious effort to get away from that sort of thing with this album."

So what happened to the poor guy?

"He's in the basement," Poirier says. "It's creepy -- his eyes are half open. He looks like he's had a stroke."

[Jesser]

the fembots sound super-awesome, i just checked out that link, i am for sure going to go see their show in peterborough. thanks for the info!

[M]

Nice... enjoy... let me know how it goes.

[thomson]

fembots are totally worth checking out. they get a fair amount of airplay on CBC radio 1 and they knocked my socks of at Hillside this summer. go see them if you can.