MANcub

The rules of rock are simple: There are no new rules of rock.

You just do and you just are, and how you get to that point is whatever sweat-stained, cigarette-butt littered, Pabst-puddled path works for you.

A couple of fantastic, fuzzed-out final destinations, though, will be on display in Calgary this week, with a pair of release parties from two of the city’s finest purveyors of straight-up R&R: MANcub and HighKicks.

How each got here, the route they travelled and the rules that got them to rock are as unique as each act is righteous.

For example, local quartet MANcub, who will release a self-titled, three-song, one-sided, all-awesome vinyl EP with a show Thursday night at Broken City, came together with a little work but have become something of a swaggering behemoth on the scene over the past 18 months.

Longtime friends Trenton Bullard, Sean Doherty and Alan McTavish had been jamming around separately and with one another — not really fully committing to any or one thing — when a decision was made to bring bassist Alex Funke into the fold.

“Out first rehearsal was a little,” says Bullard over a pint at the Ship before pausing, “rough. And then we decided to, at our jam space in Springbank, put our phones away and play music for six hours straight, get a little drunk, and it worked out really well. We wound up crushing out a couple of songs that we still really enjoy and still play right now.

“It took some time, but it’s working out really well.”

That it is, with MANcub having come into a sound that’s a rifftastic mix of the heavier influences of guitarists Bullard and Doherty, such as Black Mountain and Red Fang, and the rhythm section of Funke and drummer McTavish who are somewhat more partial to the Pixies and the garage side of the rock street. As Doherty says, the two sides pull each other more toward the middle, with a song maybe starting out being more on one side before becoming something of “the band.”

“You never know until you jam it out,” he says, noting several more “lock in” sessions have produced similar great results.

A trio of which can be heard on the band’s debut which was recorded by local production master Lorrie Matheson last Halloween over the course of three days and which is huge and loud and loose in all of the right ways. A great part of that, they say, is because they were both on the same page and pointing at the same part of the atlas when it came down to those rules of rock.

“We sat down with Lorrie and he’s got this perfect, ‘F--k it, it’s rock ’n’ roll’ attitude,” Doherty says. “He captured the attitude of it so perfectly.”

Bullard agrees. “We just wanted somebody that had the same attitude we had about the whole thing. We didn’t want it to be super over-produced, we just wanted to sound like rock ’n’ roll again. That’s exactly what he said to us when we walked in. . . . He said exactly what we wanted without us asking the question.”

“And in the same breath,” Doherty interjects, “when we started recording, he had mentioned he had never done anything that loud before, that loud, rock ’n’ roll, garage rock. . . . But he did us and he did an amazing job.”

The band are now set to use less an atlas than a roadmap, as they head out on a cross-Canada tour that will take them to such hot spots as Moose Jaw, Winnipeg, Oshawa, Ottawa and Montreal before they turn the van back around and head home for a Sled Island appearance

“I’m having a hard time, like I kind of need to re-evaluate my goals because we’ve gotten everywhere that I wanted to be when we started,” says Bullard. “The idea of playing Sled Island was the pinnacle of what I wanted to do as a band when we started.”

Sharing a piece of Sled with the four-piece — and also celebrating a Broken City release this week — is the bass-drum duo the HighKicks, who drop their full-length self-titled LP with a “Friday night is all right” show.

The pairing of Danny Vacon and Matt Doherty (no relation) came about perhaps a little more easily than that of their ’cub buddies, with it being more a “Hey, wanna do something?” “Cool” conversation between the two, who, between them count approximately 11 1/2 bands they’re a part of in the scene, including notable acts Dojo Workhorse, Raleigh, The Dudes and Axis of Conversation.

“We had three songs we cracked off in one afternoon in Matty’s garage/bedroom,” says bassist/vocalist Vacon during a later Ship encounter, “and so I thought, ‘That’s close. These are almost songs. There’s 12 minutes right there, you got eight more minutes to a 20-minute set, that’s respectable opening band material.’ So we had to get cracking, for sure, to make our set length for our first show.”

Doherty agrees about the ease. “After the first jam it was really apparent that it was different from anything we were doing. It was its own thing. It just felt really natural and it was super easy and we started playing and writing and the rest is history.”

And whi - Calgary Herald

CALGARY — “There comes a time in a young man’s life where his body starts to change. He starts to have urges towards things that didn’t make sense before. His voice starts to change. It’s just awful. It usually leads him to listen to enough Graveyard to make a normal man sick. Leads him to buy 14 fuzz pedals until he finds the right one. Then he just kind of wakes up in the back seat of VANcub (the band van) halfway between Moose Jaw and Medicine Hat!”

Coming of age and learning to navigate the ways of this wicked world are all part of MANcub’s master plan, according to the Calgary-based rock outfit’s vocalist/guitarist Trenton Bullard and guitarist Sean Doherty. The duo’s first trial of bandhood entailed sweeping their now steadfast drummer Kevin Ross (Falcon) and bass player Dan Kneeshaw off of their proverbial feet. Since surviving those initial transmutations, the learning curve has continued to be a steep one for the heavy-treading foursome, who have chewed through the festivals from Vantopia to Rifflandia.

“Kev had his work cut out for him. I think he played his first show with us about 3 weeks after officially joining the band,” confirms Bullard. “But I guess that’s nothing compared to Dan who played a show with us 24 hours after our first jam!”

A proud moment in MANcub’s evolution from “alt-blues” gentlemen to “super-riffy” rockers, the group’s debut LP, Hangman, is due out in early June (listen above), with a Sled Island appearance and other summer engagements to follow. Woven around the tale of a executioner seeking revenge for his wife’s murder, Hangman is a game, but gritty, homage to‘70s rock. Part gunslinger, part guitar hero and 100 per cent Alberta prime beef.

“We were driving back from Revelstoke and spit-balling ideas and hit upon the notion that Calgary is the Texas of Canada. So, we thought, ‘Why can’t we be cowboy without being country?’” Bullard recalls. “The story itself is full of Western themes that are layered into the background, but I don’t think it necessarily translates into the sound of the album. Fortunately, most of the time, when we sit down and work through our songs in rehearsal, it comes together pretty easily. Of course, it’s always nice having a fridge full of beer to keep the creative juices flowing.”

Legal drinking age is no longer an issue for the burgeoning band, who has been paying their dues onstage and off opening for alpha-headliners such as Red Fang, Black Pussy and Shooting Guns, while matching wits with local rockers like Witchstone, Million Dollar Fix, Chron Goblin and Woodhawk. After getting off to a slow start, MANcub has emerged from their den and are prepared to stand shoulder to shoulder with the bands that they have admired over the years. The evidence is in, those cubs are all grow’d up.

“We just got back from our bass player Kevin’s stag party in Las Vegas,” says Bullard. “Twenty of us; members of Chron Goblin, the groom’s brother and a bunch of guys from around the local scene, all went down together and stayed at the Golden Nugget. The entire trip felt like something out of ‘Fear and Loathing.’ Everything in Vegas requires beer, so there was no sobriety left when it was time to come home. But seriously, we’re happy for him, because his lady’s great. If not, it’d be another story.”

MANcub releases Hangman on Friday, June 5th. The album will be available at Vantopia 3, which is held in Equity, Alberta. The festival also features Black Pussy, Chron Goblin, Solid Brown, the Get Down and more. MANcub will also perform at Sled Island on June 25th (Dickens) with Fu Manchu, Chron Goblin and Waingro, and also on June 26th (Palomino – Upstairs). - Beatroute

No, it’s not some ridiculously misguided misogynistic response to women having the unmitigated gall and sheer audacity to pick up instruments and rock the hell out of the city’s stages on a regular basis (I’m looking at you [deep breath] Miesha Louie, Eve Hell, Nicola Lefevre, Samantha Savage Smith, Elescia Wojak, Kenna Burima, Foonyap, Sykamore, Elise Roller, Brandi Sidoryk and Krista Wodelet, Ms. Cherry Kisses, all the members of Dream Whip … you get the picture).

It’s just two very excellent bands in the local indie scene that, true, are made up entirely of dudes, but also happen to have “Man” in their names.

MANcub and The Mandates.

Both have new albums, both rock carnivoriciously hard and both will be spreading their own particular takes on the Man message this week as part of Sled Island.

MANcub (Thursday at Dickens, Friday at The Palomino)

Along with being part of the local Man movement, the quartet is also part of the thriving Van scene. Yes, the legion of like-minded folk in these parts who love the rock music and the beer liquid, but also dig the tricked-out, four-wheeled, waterbed-equipped dream machines and rolling canvasses for awesome wizard and barbarian murals.

As such, it was at the recent Vantopia 3, held on the first weekend in June in Equity, Alberta, that MANcub chose to officially release their knuckle-draggingly righteous new record Hangman (that word again).

“It was crazy,” says guitarist-vocalist Trenton Bullard of the event while sitting on a sun-soaked Broken City patio supping a Guinness.

“Yeah, it was a lot of fun,” agrees similarly stouted guitarist Sean Doherty before delivering a laugh that says so much. “It just got away from everybody, I think.”

And while records from that time period are hazy, at best, it was, they say, the perfect spot to launch the album, which is, in itself, a relaunching of MANcub.

Not only is it their first release featuring new rhythm section of Dean Kneeshaw and drummer Kevin Ross flexing their muscles, the six-song, magnificent monstrosity moves them away from “the bluesy-poppy rock” of their first EP and is a full-on stoner-rock, riff deliverer in the bulging vein of acts such as Red Fang and Kyuss.

In fact, such a proclamation is it that they actually thought about changing the name of the band they’ve been at the core of for four years, but as Bullard says, “We built an identity around it, and it would have been really tough to start over.”

Still, Doherty is adamant that this MANcub ain’t the old MANcub.

“This isn’t like a butterfly coming out of a cocoon kind of a thing … We’re not that band any more.”

No better way to deliver the news than with Hangman, which was recorded with Calgary producer/wunderkind Kirill Telichev at his Sound Priory studio.

It is something of a concept record — not an anomaly in the hard-rock world of late, but this one is “a western, revenge story.”

“We’re trying to reclaim what ‘western’ means from spandex, Budweiser shirts, and Corona cowboy hats made of straw,” says Doherty.

The story, one that the band would prefer the listener discover for themselves or disregard entirely if that helps them get inside, was written, phenomenally hungover and coming back from a Revelstoke road-trip. It was, they say, something that guided things, took the record in its thundering direction and gave their music a little extra layer.

“We always have a problem writing lyrics because when you’re playing rock n roll, sometimes you get really drawn to that, ‘F — k, yeah, we’re drinking and girls are sweet,’ bulls — t cliché stuff,” says Doherty.

“We just found that as soon as we started writing this concept story that it just came so naturally, and it gave it another depth, and it started to impose itself on the music that we were writing a little bit too. So it got a momentum that we couldn’t stop.”

Now, with it finally out, the foursome is hoping to build off of its own momentum and spread the MANcub word further.

They’ll have an added push, with the release later this summer of a “dark and comical” video for one of the album’s cuts and they’re also on the bill of a couple of spectacular shows with their sonic heroes, including opening for Fu Manchu’s Thursday Sled appearance and with B.C. band Bison a little later on.

And if it doesn’t carry them beyond, if that momentum eventually stalls?

“At the end of the day, if MANcub doesn’t go any further than what we are now, and I can have an album that I’m super proud to be behind, and a really cool music video, and say I’ve opened up for some of my favourite bands,” says Bullard before pausing. “I will be a very happy man.”

The Mandates (Friday at the Royal Canadian Legion #1)

While the cover of their new release, In the Back of Your Heart, may actually feature a van parked on a hill overlooking the city skyline — as if to say “It’s rockin’, please come a-knockin’ ” — fellow Man band The Mandates didn’t head to rural Alberta to launch the 11-song effort.

Nah. Further. The quartet took their latest overseas first, to drop it on audiences during a two-week tour that took them to a whole lotta hard-to-pronounce, loads-of-umlauts cities in Germany, Austria and Croatia that, for some xenophobic reason, bring to mind the film Hostel.

Guitarist Matt Wickens laughs, while nursing a hangover with a pint inside and away from the beating sun in National on 17th. “It wasn’t like Hostel at all. The hospitality was amazing: we got treated really well there, fed every night, had a place to stay.

“And for the most part the shows were great.”

Hard to imagine they’d be otherwise, with The Mandates’ sound being a universal one — leather-clad, spittle-soaked, snotty and snarling power-pop that recalls everyone from Sweet and The Undertones to The Dead Boys and The Ramones.

And on In the Back of Your Heart they take it to another level, thanks in large part to the fact they took the songs down to Portland to work with producer Pat Kearns, who was behind the board for records by the Exploding Hearts and The Nice Boys — bands that were seminal in the formation of The Mandates.

“It was really great decision for us, it was such a cool experience to go down to Portland and record … and basically hang out in, what to us, is Disneyland,” says Wickens of the week-and-a-half he and bandmates Brady Kirchner, Warren Oostlander and Jimmy James spent there working with Kearns.

“Portland is such a cool rock ’n’ roll city.”

And, Wickens says, those eight days recording in the magical hipster and lumberjack kingdom, and away from all of the day-to-day distractions of life at home (jobs, girlfriends, family, etc.), helped focus them and sharpen up all of the performances on Heart.

He also says that despite fully embracing the man and studio that helped two of the albums that shaped The Mandates’ sound, ironically, it also helped them completely define their own.

“I feel like we’ve developed our own sound,” he says. “I think this record is truly us. There’s no trying on this record, you know? It was just pure inspiration, it wasn’t trying to forge the band into anything — it wasn’t. It was just the band.”

Not that things have changed drastically or that they feel a need for any kind of relaunch, for, as Wickens says, the content hasn’t changed too much — “It’s a hair smarter than the last one, but not much,” he says with a laugh — and they’ve certainly matured as musicians, despite, well, still feeling like boys, or Peter Pans, who’ve yet to become Mans.

“It’s really funny, it’s like this band is Neverland for me — I can’t seem to grow up while I’m in it,” Wickens says. “I think it’s a good thing. I’m having a lot of fun.”

mbell@calgaryherald.com

Twitter.com/mrbell_23 - Calgary Herald