Pop Crimes

From the doom swells of Paul Lawton:

I caught this band at one of Sled Island 2013′s many lost soul refugee camps for Canada’s rock set. Pop Crimes were perfectly suited for that particular form of climate crisis: deep, heady and drowning in hopelessness. When you’re running from the floods, you have to pick your poison: do we bliss out and pretend that nothing is wrong? Do we try and connect with the internal doom swells and ride the lightning? Consider this post-Sled guilt that I was busy shotgunning warm Pilsner and asking “what band is this?” instead of getting dirty, filling sandbags or rescuing puppies. Winnipeg remains the soundtrack for my guilty conscience. - Weird Canada

This one is gonna be short and sweet, just like the chaotic, noisy post punk of Winnipeg, MB’s Pop Crimes. The riffs of their recent split 7″ with Willower are as catchy as velcro, and highlights their spontaneity-over-production aesthetic. It may share a name with an iconic U2 song, by Pop Crime’s “The Fly” blows its namesake away with sheer velocity, verocity, and verve.
They have one ass-kicking tour coming up, taking them from their hometown to a smattering of dates in the U.S., Ontario, Quebec, and the Maritimes. Dates are available on their perfectly titled Band Information Place tumblr. - Quick Before It Melts

Over the past two years, local experimental noise rock outfit Pop Crimes has been wowing Winnipeg crowds with their keen pop sensibility and Sonic Youth-informed guitar heroics — so it’s high time these guys put out a record.

Guitarist/vocalist Stefan Braun would agree.

"We had these songs we were working and reworking," he says. "It got to the point where we just needed to get something recorded. We didn’t really know what it would be."

Braun, along with bandmates Aaron Johnston (guitar, vocals), Jan Field (bass) and Kevin Strang (drums), headed into UMFM Studios with The Liptonians’ Mitch Braun and, after two days of recording live off the floor, emerged with City/Head, Pop Crimes’ stellar debut EP. A four-song slice of amplifier-blowing rock ’n’ roll goodness, the EP — which will be available on CD and cassette at the release/tour kickoff show — is a lesson in less is more.

"We didn’t want a lot of overdubs — we wanted it to be as clean as possible," Braun explains.

"It’s pretty bare bones. We didn’t want to get too convoluted. With this kind of music, you can layer and layer — but when you leave it, it’s a lot more pure. Obviously with any recording there’s things you wish you would have done over, but it’s those endearing qualities that make it real."

Pop Crimes enlisted Craig Boychuck, who’s worked with such local heavy-hitters as KEN mode, Kittens and Propagandhi, to handle mixing and mastering duties.

"After the record got made, it sounded good, but we wanted to clean it up a little and make it a bit thicker," Braun explains. "We were looking into who we could work with and Craig’s name came up. He’s heavy, he’s thick and he’s got a good reputation."

As for the finished EP, "I think it captures the sound well," Braun says. "It’s not perfect, it’s chaotic, and it shows a lot of personality."

So, in other words, it’s the perfect introduction to Pop Crimes.

Keep your ear out for more from the band; the foursome is planning on recording a seven inch this winter.


POP CRIMES EP RELEASE
Aug. 4, Lo Pub
w/ The Mystics, The Gunness - Uptown Magazine

THE ABSENT SOUND W/ POP CRIMES
@ Ragpickers’ Viva Libra Theatre
By Victoria King
Walking into Ragpickers sort of feels like walking into a real life version of Rocky Horror Picture Show. While the main floor holds a large assortment of vintage apparel, the rest of the building itself is an amusement park of eclectic art pieces, creaky staircases and an extensive used book collection. The place oozes of interest and unique authenticity. Moreover, seeing a show in the third floor Viva Libra Theatre is like sitting front row beside the speakers at a concert, no matter where you end up in the room. The space is so small, you are bound to leave with some kind of hearing impairment. Oh well. That’s what hearing aids are for.
After Saturday night, I am more than willing to go pick some aural assistance up after Absent Sound blew Ragpickers away for the release of their new EP Turn Them Off. The local experimental/psyche band definitely puts on more than your average show. If you haven’t checked them out before, I’m giving you fair warning that it’s more than just a concert, it’s an experience (fog machines, crazy lights, potentially moving image backgrounds). The show was one of the trippiest (and I use this word sparingly) experiences of my life. Holy mystic river, in three words: it was dope.
The night started off a little bit later than anticipated with Pop Crimes, a four-part experimental rock group and another local find, opening up for Absent Sound. Playing for an audience of no more than 40 people, they killed it. Relying mostly on heavy guitar riffs and some intense drumming, the band seemed to be totally channeling a Mission of Burma kind of vibe. Imagine all your favorite guitar openings, interludes and harmonies: that’s pretty much Pop Crimes.
With a room so small and intimate, it’s no wonder the band seemed to affect the audience so wholly. Absent Sound started up near midnight and the show opened with a steady progression into the opening song. Every note had its place. The fog machine started up, the lights were cued and with that it was more than a concert. The whole show was a full sensory experience. As mentioned before, the Viva Libra theatre is a tiny space. Seriously, it seems like no more than 60 people max at a time before the whole building would just crumble. With that being said, that music literally pulsed throughout the entire space. The whole show was a tight, focused, collective effort. It’s easy to get lost listening to Absent Sound. Also specializing in sound art, their music has a polished rawness to it. The whole show was nuts, right from beginning to end. Once the final song was finished, the lights fell and the audience, unsure whether to expect more, lay silent. Only until lead vocalist and guitarist David Fort clarified with, “That’s it.” Of course, clapping ensued as well as an encore. Not only did the show have the best closing I’d seen, the encore was incredible. Dedicating the song to a recent case of police brutality just outside the city, the tribute was wild. This was one of the coolest shows I’ve seen in a while.
While the EP doesn’t have the fog machine or the light show, Turn Them Off is a great stocking-stuff for any music fan on your Christmas list this year. It’s an epically haunting four-song trance/experimental/rock collection, available for purchase and download on the band’s website, www.theabsentsound.com. You can also check them out at Gio’s on December 21 at Element Sircus, also curated by Absent Sound themselves. - Stylus Magazine

From the cold, literal heart of North America known as Winnipeg, hundreds of miles in any direction from an urban centre with any more than one million people, a new crop of loud, abrasive weirdos are taking to the trails carved out of the tundra by the generations of “Mammoth metallic noise” rockers that came before them.

Today, bands like Dead Ranch, Pop Crimes, and Tunic are taking their dissonant feedback on the road. Their live shows and early demos, EPs, and LPs are reminding basement dwellers across the continent that ugly old Winnipeg has always punched above its weight when it comes to making outsider noise. And while these are but the first in a new wave to hit the road, a critical mass – including bands like the Party Dress, Lukewarm, Conduct, and more -- are sharpening their teeth at home, preparing to hit the road shortly with their own debut demos or 7” EPs.

Since the early 90s, Winnipeg has vomited out wave after wave of bands that do not fit into the molds of punk or metal, but who maintain a command over high intensity music played at deafening volume. Inspired initially by the noise scenes out of Chicago and Minneapolis that centered around the Touch & Go and Amphetamine Reptile labels, alongside unsung local heroes that went before them, bands like Kittens, Meatrack, and Stagmummer punched their way out of the “frozen shithole” (as Venetian Snares’ Aaron Funk so poetically put it) of their isolated hometown into international repute as some of the loudest, most brutally bizarre bands out there.
“Watching them play always remind[ed] me of the footage of that Asian monk who set himself on fire,” Ted Turner wrote of Kittens live performances in Winnipeg’s Stylus magazine back in 1996. “I was too young to check those bands out,” says Dave Schellenberg of Tunic, who has also had stints in many other local acts of renown. “But I have some tapes and old CDs, and it’s all so rad.” The fact that many of those tapes and CDs exist at all is thanks in large part to No List Records’ Lee Repko. Originally from the small town of Neepawa, Manitoba, Repko moved to Toronto in the late 80s, relocating to Winnipeg in 1992. He took an early interest in the local scene, and eventually formed No List in 1995.

“The summer I moved here I saw Drive Like Jehu. I saw Supersuckers, Jesus Lizard, Unsane, and the Dwarves,” Repko told Noisey over beer at the downtown Garrick Hotel. “These were all bands I’d never seen before in Toronto, and I had been going to a lot of shows in Toronto.”

Winnipeg’s location in the absolute middle of nowhere meant that while bands from the coasts might eschew the wasteland that is the American Midwest and the Canadian Prairie Provinces, the (relative) proximity to Chicago and Minneapolis had bands from those local scenes making the trek up the Interstate to Winnipeg regularly. From Hüsker Dü playing The Royal Albert in the 80s to the Jesus Lizard playing the city “two or three” times a year in the early 90s, Winnipeg punk and indie fans were served up a healthy dose of the noise pioneers from those Midwestern scenes. In between, the city saw regular appearances from Canadian punk stalwarts DOA and SNFU pass through town.

Winnipeg’s own Personality Crisis were the first such band to hit the road back in the mid-80s, paving the way with blown out tires and empty beer cans for countless others to follow. “When we’re on tour the older guys always bring up Personality Crisis,” Andre Cornejo of Dead Ranch told us. “I’m using this cab right now that used to belong to Personality Crisis, and the owner of this one bar was like, ‘You know Personality Crisis?’ Then he wrote this personal letter and wanted us to get it to them.”
While Personality Crisis were out on the road, a thriving local scene for punk and rock music developed over those years out of venues like Wellington’s, Verna’s, the Royal Albert, and countless community halls that would rent space to would-be promoters. By the mid-90s, the Royal Albert in particular became a rallying point for Winnipeg’s underground scene, a scene that spawned, among others, the early, floundering drunk (and often naked) incarnation of Propagandhi.

“Draft Nights became legendary,” Repko recalls. “You’d have bands like Bulletproof Nothing, Red Fisher, Meatrack all playing together. There was this undercurrent of incredibly creative people.”

Repko says that he “can’t underestimate the work of Sister Records early on, with Breath Grenades and Bulletproof Nothing,” for laying the groundwork for not only what No List Records would go on to do, but to fostering a challenging, creative scene in Winnipeg. And while Kittens might have made the biggest splash outside of the algae choked local pool, releasing a handful of albums on Sonic Unyon to close off the 1990s, their early label mates at No List Records, Meatrack and Stagmummer, were also stomping hard on muddy banks of the Red River.

By the late 90s, these initial bands had either broken up or had moved on to bigger things. At that time, Repko says he “got smart and went to university,” folding No List while he was out in Alberta. In the meantime, the noise scene in Winnipeg went through its inevitable evolution and various reincarnations.

When he returned, in the early 2000s, he found the scene had not only sustained itself, but had both grown in new, more exciting and extreme directions and that new bands were carrying the torch passed on by the previous generation.

“The scene takes care of itself,” Repko says. Venues opened and closed, as they always do, but the spirit lived on in DIY, underground venues. “Bands we’re putting on DIY shows in small spaces which were all ages welcome.”
Around this time, Mike Alexander threw the first Arsonfest, giving bands on the most extreme end of the loud spectrum, from Winnipeg and far beyond, an annual stage to come together and lose their collective shit.

“Winnipeg is a unique place for fast, noisy and uncomfortable music because the people who tend to it and who foster it have been doing so for a long time,” Alexander explains. “Other genres and musical trends come and go, but noise survives no matter what.”

Alexander should know. In 1994, he formed Swallowing Shit, one of the most extreme acts Winnipeg’s scene has produced, and has since gone on to perform brutal music in Head Hits Concrete and the ever-disgusting Putrescence. Arsonfest itself is going into its 14th incarnation this year on August 8 and 9th, featuring performances from Achagathus, Throatslitter, Enabler, and more. And year-to-year, Alexander regularly promotes extreme shows through his Mount Elgon Productions.

“Mount Elgon productions is great in that it gave a stage to bands like Under Pressure,” Repko says. “Under Pressure was the greatest live band of the early 2000s as far as I’m concerned.”

Other bands that emerged in those early years of the 21st century included the mind-bending guitar assault of Electro Quarterstaff, the explosive garage rock of Hot Live Guys, and the otherworldly HAM. Bands that released records via the resurrected No List at a time when Repko decided to focus the label purely on “noise rock, just heavy shit” included Big Trouble in Little China, Hide Your Daughters, and KENmode. All are firmly entrenched in the local noise tradition. And while no doubt the former acts left behind some heavy cloven foot prints on the local, and even national, scene, the band that has out-worked and out-shone them all, is KENmode.

Over 15 years after they formed in the St. Vital neighbourhood of Winnipeg, the Juno-Award winning trio, centered around Matthewson brothers, continue to tour the world today, releasing punishing, challenging record after brutal, ear-drum destroying record, with no signs of slowing down. “They’re doing it to challenge the listener,” says Repko, who released some of the band’s early records on LP, and worked with the Matthewsons in Hide Your Daughters. “That’s where KENmode really gets off. They want the listener to hate the new record for the first month or two.”

And so, just what is it that keeps the flame of noise rock burning so intensely in Winnipeg, an isolated shit-hole where the temperature drops so far in the long, dark winters so as to become colder than Mars?
“We’re subconscious Neanderthals,” believes Hart Koepke of the Party Dress and Lukewarm, constantly on the hunt for that “Mammoth metallic noise,” as Matthewson (with some jest) once described the sound.

“All these bands, they’re making music for themselves, first,” believes Kent Davies, host of CKUW 95.9FM’s Peg City Groove, a weekend round-up of live music events happening in and around Winnipeg. “They’re almost like jazz musicians in that way.”

“There really are no kneepads and chapstick with these bands,” says Repko, after pondering the question a while over his Fort Garry Pale Ale. “They’re not ready to serve and please. They are doing what they need to do.”

In a city like Winnipeg, with a population of less than 800,000, part of that is playing on bills with bands that might sound little – if at all – alike; which was part of the beauty of the Draft Night events. While events like Arsonfest may and the occasional spot with a touring act may offer noise bands a chance to play alongside similar acts, those events are few and far between.

“We play with everybody,” Stefan from Pop Crimes told Noisey last month. “We’ll play with pop bands, or metal bands, or noise bands, whatever.”

“The cross-contamination of these bills, I mean, these bands are all our friends,” Chad Alsop from Dead Ranch says. “If we’re playing with like, a power pop band, for a lot of their audience, that’ll be the first time they’re hearing something as loud and sludgy as [our band].” “I love music, generally,” says Andre Cornejo. “To be like, OK, I’m down for 4 hours of the same thing… I mean, come on! A glass of milk is good for you. Try drinking a gallon of it! That’s no good.”

As to what inspires these noise junkies to pack up the van and drive for hundreds of miles to the next pocket of civilization, to play to a room that may well be empty? That one’s a little easier to answer.

“I think it might have a part to do with tradition, whether the younger generations even understand that or not,” says Jesse Matthewson of KENmode. “If we could give the next generation of musicians that spark that bands like Kittens, Stagmummer, and Meatrack gave us,” Matthewson told Stylus magazine back in 2003, “that would be the biggest compliment we could ever hope to receive.” Over ten years later, there is no doubt that spark has been ignited, once again, like a North End back alley garage fire.
“You see a band like KENmode, they kind of gave me hope, you know?” said Ryley Devine, drummer in Dead Ranch. Dead Ranch’s 2013 LP Antler Royale had only one challenger for last year’s loudest, most intense record out of Winnipeg: KENmode’s Entrench. “They’re from Winnipeg, just like us. They played their music and went on the road. It makes you want to give it a shot.”

“When you’d see a band like that play at the Albert,” added Chad Alsop, also of Dead Ranch, “and the next thing you know you’re playing at the Albert, it makes you feel like you can do it. Like it’s not impossible.”

“Winnipeg is definitely a place where you can always try for more,” believes Andre Cornejo. “The bands that come out of here are great because of that drive for more.”

“Winnipeg’s a fucked up place,” adds Devine, “but I’m proud to be from here. I love it, and I just want to make good music and take it on the road.”
“I’d rather sit in the van all day than sit on my couch all day,” says Cornejo, with the final word. “Even if it sucks. If it’s Chad shitting on a sewer drain in a Wal-Mart parking lot at 4am in the morning, it’s still more fun than seeing Chad shitting on my own toilet.”

And as for the music itself -- the nebulous “loud, other” music -- Repko and the boys from Dead Ranch both had some eloquent words that summed up the Winnipeg music experience. “When I put out music,” Repko says with a smirk, “the tag line is ‘new Noise of the North.’ But when people ask me what it sounds like, I tell them ‘It’s ugly music for ugly people.’”

“There was one guy in Sudbury,” Ryley Devine recalls from a recent Dead Ranch tour, “who said that Winnipeg was like that not-so attractive girl at the party, but who knows like the best music and can play like King Crimson and is cool as fuck. But you’re kind of like, ‘can we just be friends?’ That’s Winnipeg.”

Sheldon Birnie is a writer living in Winnipeg. He is currently the editor of Stylus Magazine, which has been covering Winnipeg’s music scene for 25 years. - @badguybirnie - Noisey, Vice

Born in a hazy drone of feedback in a Winnipeg jam space before being marinated for thousands of hours in a van between crowded, sweaty basement shows, Pop Crimes are now making a name for themselves across North America among those who like their post-punk music to be raw and loud as fuck. “We just finished like six, six and a half weeks coast to coast,” says Stefan Wolf (guitar, vocals). “We played about ten US dates, then travelled from Halifax out to Vancouver.” After a couple sets at Sled Island, these four exhausted punks made their way back to Winnipeg, where Pop Crimes will celebrate the hometown release of their new 7” single “The Fly” with a basement show alongside Crosss and Vampires. To escape the mosquito onslaught that has descended on the prairies with the warm weather, the boys will be hunkering down and starting work directly on a debut LP.

“Everybody’s been asking us [about that] lately,” Wolf said with a laugh, as he paused to light a smoke while construction hammered on behind us. “Ideally it will be done by this winter.” In light of this activity, we caught up with Stefan over a late afternoon cocktail at Winnipeg’s West Broadway neighbourhood mainstay to talk about crazy drunk Americans, van tapes, and why Winnipeg is such a weird place to make music.



Noisey: On this last tour you played a ton of dates. Was there anywhere that really stuck out as, like, really fuckin’ weird? Somewhere you played that was just crazy?
Stefan Wolf: Yeah, actually we played this really weird town in Idaho, this inbred Mormon city. Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. I mean, it was really cool until everybody got drunk and it came out how gun crazy they really were. They started calling us “faggots” and shit and we realized very quickly that it wasn’t really the most comfortable place to be. The show was in this weird house that they had converted into a bar. It’s just like anybody’s basement. But they didn’t charge for booze, and they didn’t charge people to get in – which they didn’t tell us. There was like 100 people there, everyone was going crazy. But after, when everybody got drunk, it got weird. Like, so… there’s no cash? They were like, “Yeah. We’re still trying to figure out how to make this work.” Maybe charging for booze might be your first step? They were like, “Yeah, if people paid, like, a buck a beer it might work out.” I’m pretty sure it’s easy enough to charge a buck a beer. [laughs]

How did that show come about? Did you set it up?
We set that up with this really sweet band, Blackwater Prophet, from Spokane. Coeur d’Alene is only like 20 minutes from Spokane, so those guys put us in touch with them. It was should have worked out better, but the girl who set it up got pneumonia or something, so she wasn’t there. But, you know, it was fun.

What are some of the other bands you played with on the road that people should really check out?
From Vancouver, Woolworm. We played with them at Sled Island as well. They were just super awesome. Mormon Crosses, we played with them in Vancouver as well. The Ying Yangs in New York were really rad. And Safe Word in Oakland were definitely amazing. But really, there were so many. I’d have to flip through my tape collection in my van to really know.

Speaking of van tapes, was there anything that really got a lot of play when you were on the road? Any go-tos?
There was a lot of War on Drugs on the first tour. A lot of Kool Keith. The second leg… a lot of Lee Hazelwood. And then just whatever tapes we picked up.

Are you seeing more cassette releases these days? It seems like everyone’s putting out tapes.
Everybody’s doing tapes. It’s great, it’s the only thing I can listen to in the van when we’re touring. By the end of tour, the back pockets in our van are just jammed packed with records that we haven’t been able to listen to. We’ve thought about bringing a portable record player on the road. But it doesn’t really make sense.

You’ve put out an EP a couple years back, and you have a couple singles out now on 7”. Are you working towards a full length or what?
That’s the plan. Now that we’re back, we have a couple shows throughout the summer, but we’re really just gonna hunker down and start demoing, start recording. We’ve got a bunch of new songs. We basically don’t play anything off our first EP. Even the stuff we have recorded have been reworked so much that they’re basically different songs now. I like the idea of recording it ourselves, but if it came about I’d like to work with somebody. It depends, I guess, how our demos sound. If they sound good enough, we’ll just do it ourselves. Working in the studio is good if you know exactly what you’re doing. But we tend to rework things a lot. Once something’s recorded, it’s like “ahh, let’s change this, let’s change that,” and when it’s done it’s a completely different song. It’s nice to have that time, to have no constraints.

How has the band changed since you put out that first EP in 2012?
We’re getting a lot more comfortable being experimental live. In our jam space, we’ll feedback and play with noise and jam things out for 20 minutes, which on the recording might only be three minutes long. We’re slowly getting to a point where we’re comfortable doing that live. The songs themselves are more concise, I think. We’re giving space to add improvisation, while at the same time the song structures are pretty straight forward. The first couple songs we recorded were kind of all over the place.

Considering you’ve done so much touring lately, is there a perception of Winnipeg out there? What’s that like?
People are always really curious, actually. Depending where you are, everybody’s interested. They’re like, “What’s the deal?” I think people always hear about Winnipeg bands, but maybe Winnipeg bands don’t necessarily tour that much? We’ll get out there, and everybody always knows one or two bands. It could be as obvious as Propagandhi, or it could just be some super obscure band that I haven’t even heard of. The places we’ve been playing, people are always talking about, like, HAM or Kittens. Stuff like that. I guess they’re finding out about our stuff that way. Someone in Lethbridge was like, “I saw you were from Winnipeg and I didn’t even bother checking out your music. I just showed up. The last band I saw from Winnipeg was HAM.” I guess they played Lethbridge a lot? But he seemed to think we fell in the same vein. I guess there’s a sound that we’ve gotten into that is apparently “Winnipeg.” What that is, I don’t know.

How would you describe Winnipeg’s scene to people, then? Say, like to someone in Coeur d’Alene or Wisconsin or some place like that?It’s the most hodge-podge music scene ever. I love it. It’s super tight, but there’s no bands that sound like each other. There’s no definitive scene. You go to Vancouver or Halifax, most cities have a sound. But I don’t think Winnipeg has a sound at all. It’s all over the place, but everything kind of works. There’s like, maybe two bands in the city that we sound like. But we play with everybody. We’ll play with pop bands, or metal bands, or noise bands, whatever. I love the scene, it’s always interesting.

What would you say is a disadvantage of being a band from Winnipeg?
Disadvantages? Places to play. I’ve been putting on shows in my basement for the past month because there’s no venue that’ll book them. I mean, I like house shows. On the road they’re the most comfortable ones to play. There’s not the stress of getting people into a bar. It’s a lot easier to get people to come hang out at a house. It’s never really good sound, but it doesn’t really matter. People are more into it, it’s more intimate. And when people are actually there, they freak out a lot more. You can’t hide at the back of the bar.

Catch Pop Crimes in Winnipeg Thursday July 3 for their 7” release in the basement of the HMS Arlington.

Sheldon Birnie commits crimes against pop all the time - @badguybirnie - Noisey, Vice

This split is a slow, six-legged pull of your belly over the static and hum — before the RGB detonates and sends you into antennae-occupied space. Pop Crimes are brandishing buzzsaws while singer/guitarist Stefan Braun delivers a maniacal monologue of some sick Cronenberg persuasion; Long live the new flesh, and keep running around. Willower is on a modal meditation of what was once west, which winds can be commanded up, and whose waves will wind up on empty shores. The medieval script’s source has yet to be unearthed, but Crosss’ Andy March conjures the b-side all by his lonesome. - Wierd Canada