Landing Sound

-"Opening for The Town Heroes was The Wax, a band who wears the likes of The Smiths and Placebo on their sleeves and who’s different-yet-familiar sound managed to get the ever-growing crowd tapping along. Playing to a rather intimate audience, Phyl La Ferriere’s eerily haunting vocals complimented the fast fingers of keyboardist James Spray to create a sound reflecting a more aggressive Radiohead. The boys of The Wax loved to dance and the close-knit audience seemed to thrive off of La Ferriere’s energy. Chants and clap along were well received by everyone who made it to the Seahorse early enough to see the show kick off."

by Corey Beetham - Guff Magazine

The Wax release a new album of electronic-rock on the city, Friday at the Marquee
by Matthew Ritchie

For recording artist Phyl La Ferriere, Quebec City may be a great place live, but it's not the ideal city to make it as a musician.

"I wouldn't say it's the right place to start a band, La Ferriere says.

So he left home and enrolled at Montreal's Trebas Institute to study audio engineering. But upon graduation, it was time to find an internship. That's when Craig Mercer of the Jimmy Swift Band invited the young engineer to Halifax to help record their new album.

But once La Ferriere landed on the east coast, he soon discovered it was the ideal music scene to settle down and start fresh.

"I just realized there were so many good musicians in Halifax," he says. "I thought it would be the perfect place to start a project."

After receiving an emerging artist grant from Tourism Nova Scotia in March 2011, he met classically trained synth-keyboardist Adam McLellan. Together, the two would form The Wax, an electronic-rock hybrid that blends La Ferriere's love of down-tempo electronica with Peter Gabriel and Metric.

The duo hit the studio last summer to record its debut album, Waiting Room, at Riverport's historic Confidence Lodge recording studio. Recorded by Colin Crowell (JSB, Rich Aucoin), La Ferriere took a hands-off approach to the engineering of the album so he could focus on songwriting and arrangement. "I hate doing two things at the same time," he says, laughing.

After laying down the vocals at home in Halifax, the band spent a year mixing and mastering. In that time, the group recruited St. FX jazz-grads Doug Scurfield and Greg Melchin to round out the live band and provide the chops necessary to recreate La Ferriere and Spray's time signature-shifting vignettes.

People took notice, with the group featured in Under the Radar and performing as semi-finalists at Toronto's Indie Week.

With a solidified line-up, La Ferriere says he and McLellan are ready to think about the next album and hope to expand their sonic palette. "We're both interested in sound," he says. "That's what brings us together." - The Coast

THE MEMBERS OF HALIFAX band the Wax are working hard to become rock stars with their electronically-infused tunes, but they might become film stars along the way, too.

On Saturday night, the Wax launches its new CD Waiting Room at the Seahorse Tavern, but it’s got another shot at notoriety in the works with a nightclub scene in the upcoming William MacGillivray film Hard Drive, where their performance provided more than just background music.

“It was a blast, there was actually a staged fight that broke out during our set, so that made it memorable,” says Wax keyboardist and vocalist James Spray.

“That was so weird, because we had to pretend playing along to our recording that was playing in the monitors, and it was so different for us,” adds guitarist and singer Phyl La Ferriere.

“We had to become actors, basically, and we couldn’t look each other in the eyes or we’d just start laughing.”

Going by the amount of footage captured by the award-winning director of Life Classes and Ron Hynes: The Man of a Thousand Songs, it seems like the Wax gets its fair share of screen time in Hard Drive, a title that also reflects the band’s determination to succeed.

“I think they liked our energy, that’s what Phyl brings to the stage and we all feed off of it, right away,” says Spray. “We get our drive from this guy being at the helm. I don’t know what happens when he gets on stage; it’s like he just drank a pot of coffee or something.”

You can feel that energy on Saturday at the Seahorse with the Wax and their guests the Dead Tenors, Runaway Dawson, Sonny Newman and a post-band DJ set by Wax collaborator Adam McLellan, a.k.a. Snug. Originally from Quebec, La Ferriere credits Nova Scotia’s Jimmy Swift Band with drawing him to the East Coast, curious about the kind of scene that could spawn such a unique hybrid of rock and electronic sounds.

He began recruiting band members online, and the lineup evolved between the recording of Waiting Room at Riverport’s Old Confidence Lodge studio and its current roster.

“When I got this guy, that’s when everything changed,” says La Ferriere, pointing at his classically-trained pal Spray. “Suddenly I had a partner who could help take us as far as we could go.”

So far, the steps are going well. Besides filming Hard Drive last fall, the Wax also made the Indie Week Canada showcase competition semifinals in Toronto — necessitating a drive back there from Montreal after thinking they hadn’t made it in — and received some positive feedback from international delegates at East Coast Music Week interested in helping the band take its music further.

“I always point to Metric. If a band like that can make it in Canada, the Wax is sort of like that,” says La Ferriere. “I’m not a girl singer. I guess maybe that could help, but that’s the best example we can shoot for, and it’s cool that they’ve made it that big for a band from here (Canada).” -by Stephen Cook - The Chronicle Herald

The Wax is aiming to bring the best of rock and electronic together, creating a sound that's intense, with lots of different sounds.
It may be an unlikely marriage, but The Wax pull it off.

"It can be hard to manage; it seems like rock people like rock, and electronic people like electronic - they don't like each other that much," said frontman Phyl La Ferriere, laughing. "But we're trying to bring the two worlds together." The Quebec City native formed The Wax a few years back when an internship through his audio engineering course sent him to work with Halifax indie/jam/electonrica/rockers The Jimmy Swift Band.

After living in the city for a bit, La Ferriere knew he was in fertile ground to launch his own project.

"In Quebec and Montreal, you ask everyone and they all play hockey, not one person doesn't play hockey, otherwise it's almost weird. Well, here in Halifax, everyone plays music. It's just in the culture," he said when we reached the band late last week.

The Wax are preparing to release their first full-length album, Waiting Room, in August or early September. Produced by Colin Crowell (Rich Aucoin, Jimmy Swift Band), the album displays the group's knack for blending elements of electronica, rock and pop. La Ferriere says he likes the way the record turned out, but can see the band's sound shifting further toward the synthesizer.

"I like having vocals, and I like original ideas, but sometimes we find it hard to find original ideas with just an acoustic guitar. So that's where you have the electronic and synth, you have no limits for sound," he said.

And like any other pulse-driven music, it's best live. "It's not the kind of music you can ignore, not like background or bar music to just drink beer to. It's pretty intense with lots of different sounds."

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Fredericton Check out Halifax-based The Wax when they play The Capital, 362 Queen St. in support of Fredericton's The Westerburg Suicides and Coral Bear on Thursday, June 14. The show starts at 10:30 p.m. and is free until 11 p.m., then you're looking at $5. - Here (Jon Macneill)