aaamusic | On 23, Oct 2014

AAAmusic: Who are you and where are you from?

Tyson McShane of Slow Down Molasses, from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada. We are off in the middle of the Canadian prairies 2000km from Vancouver and 3000km from Toronto. It’s a lovely place if you can make your way here.

AAAmusic: What inspired you to get into music?

I actually got a very late start to playing music. The first time I played guitar was at age 17 and the first time I played in a band was at age 23. I grew up in small-ish city on the edge of northern Saskatchewan and it really did not seem like there was any possible way for me actually to play in a band, between a lack of people who liked similar much (i.e. anything somewhat independent) and a lack of examples of anyone actually playing in a band that played their own songs. Both those things seemed like a far off, big city thing. Then I moved to Saskatoon and fell in with a great crowd of people who all played in bands and who knew all the bands I loved. It really kind of amazed me that to realize these types of people existed in our isolated part of the world. It meant I could spend hours trying to replicate the wonderous noises I heard on records from Mogwai, My Bloody Valentine, Sianspheric, and Slowdive.

AAAmusic: What have you done?

Our last album, Walk Into The Sea, we released ourselves and it managed to get some really nice attention that resulted in us playing all over Canada, touring the UK a couple of times, and Europe once. It really amazes me considering how isolated from the music industry that we are here in Saskatchewan how many places we have played. A huge highlight for me was getting invited to play End of the Road festival in 2012. They seem to book all my favorite bands, so it was quite amazing to get to play the festival and stick around to see bands like Mogwai, The Walkmen, and The Fall.

We recently released the first single off our new album, ‘Burnt Black Cars’, that I am incredibly proud of. We had the amazing Jace Lasek of The Besnard Lakes mix it and it really has become something we are all very excited about. We can’t to finally release the full album.

AAAmusic: What are you like live?

We’ve become a fairly intense, somewhat aggressive live band, especially considering how most of our music is somewhat dream-pop-esque. The last couple years of touring has really refined our live show. It tends to be a fairly focused affair, with barely any breaks and most songs jammed into each other with ambient or feedback passages. It also tends to get a bit loud!

AAAmusic: What makes you different?

That’s a good question. Sometimes I’m not sure myself! I’m really happy with our songs and how we play them. They fill both my love of delay and feedback drenched noise rock, while also having clear, anthemic melodies breaking through the layers of reverb and distortion. Live I like that we tend to play quite aggressively, despite some of our songs being more on the dreampop-ish side of things. People seem to respond well to that.

AAAmusic: Physical vs Downloading vs Streaming…How do you listen to music?

Vinyl! Vinyl! Vinyl!  Well that and digital. We love vinyl and I love sitting at home and listening to records, but obviously records aren’t that portable, so I do tend to listen to downloaded mp3s for much of the day. I haven’t really embraced any streaming services just yet (except Daytrotter! I love it and tend to listen to their sessions very regularly!). Spotify actually just became available in Canada. It’s been quite funny touring internationally the last couple years as many festivals will have Spotify playlists, but I could not access them to listen to who else is playing!

AAAmusic: What have you been listening to?

I’ve been on a big Mogwai and Sharon Van Etten kick for the last year or so. Both of them I tend to listen to almost daily. It seems like they counterbalance each other quite nicely. As for new discoveries, I’ve been quite loving the Ought album, More Than Any Other Day. They are a great new band from Montreal on Constellation Records.

AAAmusic: What are your aspirations for the future?

The next big thing is the European/UK tour we are heading off on. We’ll be playing BIME in Bilbao, Nouvelle Prague in Prague and doing a series of shows around those festivals in the UK, France, Netherlands and Germany. The tour will coincide with the release of a 7” of our new single ‘Summer Sun’. That all leads into the release of our new album, Burnt Black Cars, which will come out next spring.

Questions answered by: Tyson McShane (guitar/vocals) of Slow Down Molasses…