B-Lines

What were Vancouverites with Music Waste passes to do last Friday? With over 30 bands spread out between countless venues, concertgoers had some serious decisions to make about what to see for night four of the local festival. With scores of punk gigs, folk shows, and DJ nights competing for attention—not to mention concurrent art openings, comedy performances, and movie screenings—there’s a good chance that at least a couple of Music Waste performers got lost in the shuffle. Fortunately, Vancouver’s own B-Lines weren’t one of those bands. The quartet stepped onto the Astoria’s stage more than ready to take on the near-capacity crowd’s cheers—and even a couple of jeers.

“Take that!” singer Ryan Dyck shouted as he whipped an empty beer bottle at a heckler seconds before the ensemble barrelled into its gleefully violent set.

The gangly frontman’s wild mood swings made the act’s performance extremely unpredictable. Most times, he’d wriggle his rail-thin frame around like an oversized Muppet to B-Lines’ hyper-speedy tunes, a sugary-sweet take on early ’80s hardcore. Other times, however, he’d be scrambling for more ammunition to hurl at fans and band members alike. At one point the singer grabbed a Pilsner out of some booze-hound’s hand while crowd-surfing and pitched it toward Bruce Dyck’s drum kit, spraying shards of glass everywhere. Launched back on-stage, the vocalist pulled a full-on Iggy as he rolled on top of the broken glass, leaving a sizeable gash on his shoulder. Bassist Adam Fothergill and guitarist Scotty Colin looked concerned about their cohort’s cuts, but opted to keep playing after he quickly picked himself up from the ground.

B-Lines have only a couple of MySpace uploads and a promo video for Music Waste to their name, but their fans sung along to their pop-tinged hardcore all night. Songs like “House Plants” and “Busy Man” had people slipping across the Astoria’s checkerboard floor to shout along with the bloodied Dyck. Showing an uncomfortable level of affection for the musician, the minions up front groped and grabbed at his banged-up body and even tried to yank off the poor guy’s trousers.

“That crossed the line, folks,” Dyck cried out as he swatted hands off of his skivvies. “I don’t know if this is what punk is about.”

B-Lines ended the night with the unabashedly offensive “Social Retard” before Dyck threw his mike in the air and hurriedly walked away. Here’s hoping the singer, still gushing plasma, went to a hospital. - The Georgia Straight

Local punk fans looking for a followup to B-Lines’ short and scrappy six-song seven-inch from 2009 finally got what they were waiting for this spring in the form of the group’s new, self-titled 12-inch. However, if you were expecting a much more thorough affair than the band’s earlier single, you’re in for a rude awakening. While there’s a good five inches extra on each side, the whole thing clocks in at just over 11 minutes. Sitting beside guitarist Scotty Colin at an East Van JJ Bean, singer Ryan Dyck offers up a perfectly good reason why B-Lines didn’t fill up its latest platter with innumerable ragers: adding anything extra would be outright annoying.

“It would be hard to sit through a half an hour of B-Lines, I think,” Dyck says frankly between sips of java.

The vocalist explains that he’d rather trim the fat than bloat up the band’s product, likening the record to classic punk EPs of the ’80s rather than the overstuffed CD compilations he grew up with in the ’90s.

“You could fit 70 minutes of music on there,” he moans of grunge era’s glut. “Everyone thought they had to put more and more stuff on there. You don’t need 33 songs on there.”

The nine brief bursts that B-Lines—which also features drummer Bruce Dyck and bassist Adam Fothergill—unleashes on the record feature spiky guitar licks, lightning-quick beats, and Dyck’s wrenched-up, nervous wail. Unsettling moments like the hyper-speed “Wealthy Barber”, a hopped-up ode to junk-collecting, bring to mind American hardcore icons like the Circle Jerks and Government Issue through their strangled power chords and brutally bashed-out beats, but B-Lines members are quick to point out they’re no retro act.

“There are lots of revival punk bands these days that try to write songs that sound like they’re from London in ’77 or from California in ’81, whatever period in time they feel punk was at its best, and it just sounds kind of cheesy,” Dyck says with a sneer. “If you’re a band from Edmonton, why would you be singing songs about going to the beach?”

Rather than scream about catching a wave on his surfboard or affect a Brit accent while dumping on the royals, Dyck uses the lyrics on the new record to reflect life in Vancouver. The jarring, skank-inducing “It Rains”, for instance, plays up Lotusland’s frequent torrential downpours, with the singer decrying our overflowing gutters, eternally soggy footwear, and the fact that “you can’t tell where the concrete ends and where the sky begins.”

The punchy punk opener, “Hastings Strut”, meanwhile, finds the frontman fascinated with the dangers of jaywalking in the Downtown Eastside, remarking on how many people narrowly avoid getting hit by traffic as they lurch aimlessly into the street. Working at Scratch Records, situated at 1 East Hastings, Dyck is quite familiar with the scenario.

“You don’t look. You just cross the street, step out in front of a bus. I see the Hastings strut every day.”

“Ever since the beginning of B-Lines, we’ve always tried to have this element of being a Vancouver band,” guitarist Colin offers, pointing to the group's being named after the popular city bus line. “This is where we live, this is our city. We’re proud of our scene. We want to sing about it.”

A noticeable difference between the new album and B-Lines’ previous work is how much gnarlier Dyck’s vocals sound. Earlier recordings had him yelping like a giddy teenage Muppet, whereas he comes across as both more aggressive and more reckless on snotty missives like “World War Four”. It’s a little disconcerting to hear the singer doing his best to ravage his vocal cords. While some would be concerned about the irreparable damage being done to their throat, Dyck maintains it’s just part of the game.

“My voice has just changed from playing so many shows and yelling over cheap PAs,” he admits. “I don’t plan on being a jazz vocalist when I’m 40 or anything. If I have a rough voice from a couple years of being in a punk band, then that’s a risk I’m willing to take.” - The Georgia Straight