Silver Dapple

Genre(s):
Rock
Étiquette:
Forchristsake

Sortie en magasin : 25 novembre 2011

C’est quoi?
Silver Dapple, c’est un groupe incluant Martin Blackburn, chanteur et guitariste de Jesuslesfilles, dans lequel il laisse toute la place à sa douce moitié, Emily Deimert, qui chante et joue de la guitare. Côté sonorité, on est en deux-mille-dix-neuf-centre-quatre-vingt-douze, sur un terrain garage-grunge-fuzzé, mais quand même pop.

Une blonde anglaise?
C’est le titre de l’album : English girlfriend. Et c’est un peu l’équivalent plus raffiné et anglophone de ce que fait Jesuslesfilles. Je dis « plus raffiné » parce que c’est (un peu) plus délicat, mieux réalisé, moins désaccordé. Silver Dapple se rapproche aussi beaucoup du son shoegaze noyé dans le reverb des regrettés Vicious/Delicious ou encore du rock psychédélique éthéré de Spacemen 3. On pense aussi à Sonic Youth et à Hole.

Un chum français?
J’aime ça, c’est charmant et c’est le genre de truc qui gagne en profondeur et en dimension(s) à chaque écoute. Je pense sincèrement que j’aimerais encore mieux l’album s’il comportait plus de chansons en français, à l’instar de M’sorry (dont seul le titre n’est pas en français…), simplement parce que ça apporterait quelque chose d’encore plus rafraîchissant à ce son-là. - Band à part

Kinda wonder what the citizens of Toronto are up to nowadays. Not making music, apparently. While here at NFOP we continue to celebrate the thriving scene over in Montréal (see here, here, here or here, or here indeed) and are quite regularly blessed with splendid submissions from the western parts of Canada, Vancouver in particular, from the country’s first city we hear exactly this (prove us wrong, Toronto).

Anyway. Honestly, we don’t care too much as long as there’s that wonderful city on the banks of the Saint-Laurent. This time, it’s the four-piece Silver Dapple that has grabbed our attention lately with their purest 90s throwback piece Slip Stitch, featuring pretty pop harmonies and sugary female vocals all gently drenched in reverb and a fog of fuzzed-out guitars, and everything else that makes us happy. Silver Dapple is the first tune from the band’s forthcoming LP English Girlfriend, due in September.

- No Fear of Pop

By Philip de VriesMontreal-based fuzzy four-piece Silver Dapple have released a video for their track "(Pauses)" from their upcoming LP, English Girlfriend, to be released via Forchristsake.

The video is a collage of lo-fi VHS-esque cuts of peculiar characters dancing in a sufficiently uncomfortable manner, accompanied by amounts of video fuzz parallel to the band's guitar sounds.

Seemingly aimed at more of a visual experiment, as opposed to a linear video with any sort of plot, the clip finds Silver Dapple delivering images that are as shoegazing as their washed-out sound.

Check out the video for yourself below. - Exclaim!

Silver Dapple
Hometown: Montreal, Quebec
Buzz: A group of Alberta ex-pats (Jesse Locke, Marcus Lake, Martin Blackburn and vocalist Emily Deimart) engage in the static-clinged art rock made popular by My Bloody Valentine and Sonic Youth. But their swooning shoegaze is centered by Deimart’s gorgeous, sugary vocals that add feminine mystique to the droning, pulsating fuzz. This fall, they released their debut LP, English Girlfriend, via their own label, FORCHRISTSAKE.
Sounds like: Surprisingly tender and romantic for a band caked in 10 tons of reverb. Standout track “Slip Stitch” recalls the early days of SS Cardiacs and less aggro Sleater-Kinney.
Future prospects: Hopefully with a record to promote, Silver Dapple will hit the festival circuit. The band’s one SXSW away from turning into the new Pains of Being Pure At Heart. - A.V. Club Toronto

Silver Dapple - "M'Sorry" [buy]
Barrels of noise, in a warehouse like stacked barns. Feedback in banded oak casks. Two ghosts, one good and one also good, but resentful. You cannot make out their voices. This is what we hear, when the needle drops. It will let us live forever. - Said the Gramaphone

Silver Dapple
English Girlfriend
If Stephen Malkmus from Pavement and Bilinda Butcher from My Bloody Valentine had hooked up back in the early ’90s, their noise-loving spawn would probably have written an album that sounds exactly like English Girlfriend. - Straight.com

The main thesis of Harold Bloom’s 1973 book The Anxiety of Influence is essentially that a poet will be hindered by the relationship they have with their creative precursors — that artistic influence can become a creative hindrance, resulting in work that can be dismissed as derivative or unnecessary. If one is to forge a unique artistic vision for whatever reason (artistic posterity, “success,” any number of subjectivities), the influence of previous artists will cause creative anxiety (hence the book’s title).

I mention this because the “anxiety of influence” is not just a strictly literary occurrence. Recently in music, ’90s revivalism has been heavily in vogue, and Montreal’s Silver Dapple will, inevitably, be compared to the gamut of that decade’s guitar-based noise-pop and indie rock acts. I hear echoes of the late ’80s as well — notably EVOL/Sister-era Sonic Youth and some lesser-known British shoegaze/noise-pop acts, such as The Charlottes — but playing games of “spot the influence” seems more of a critical pissing contest than actually doing English Girlfriend justice.

Silver Dapple’s debut LP is a solid record, packed with immediate and memorable vocal and guitar hooks (“Slipstitch,” “Pauses”), well-established pop/noise tension dynamics (“Swannsong”), and a healthy dollop of guitar fuzz. The question is more or less left to how one feels about music so firmly indebted to its influences: do I like Silver Dapple on their own, or is it because they recall so many of my favourite bands and sounds?

I’d suggest a middle ground, because I believe both of these statements are true. No matter how many references to Sonic Youth, Swirlies and Black Tambourine I can type out, Silver Dapple manages to combine these influences into a wholly appealing statement that makes up for any perceived lack of “uniqueness” by being remarkably cohesive and confident: “Swannsong” rolls by with menacing guitar swagger, “Slipstitch” merges icy, reverb-laced instrumentation with a soaring vocal hook. Maybe I’m just happy to hear a noise-pop band that sounds more entrenched in winter temperatures and Sonic Youth-influenced technique than sun-drenched beaches and red-lining tape static. Regardless, English Girlfriend is an excellent record of ’90s-derived indie rock.

DEVIN FRIESEN

Fast Forward Weekly: First, how long had you been working on the album? I know some of the songs have been kicking around for a while...

Vocalist-guitarist Emily Diemert: Some of the songs have been around since when the band first started, almost three years ago. But the album itself, we started recording in January, and then recorded and mixed all summer. Now it’s done.

A bunch of reviews have been doing lots of “spot the influence,” and while I think that’s fair to an extent, I think there’s more to the record than Sister-era Sonic Youth worship or whatever. How do you feel about being critically compared to other bands? Do you like when people try to pick out influences, or do you feel that misses the point?

It depends. I guess I don’t mind. I think that when you’re writing a review or when you’re a person that’s reading a review, you may not know who this band is that’s being written about. One way to connect is to broadly say, “they sound like Sonic Youth.” Then everyone can go, “okay, that genre.” So in that sense, it gives people a touchpoint on what we might sound like. But also, I find it funny too — even the guys in the band sometimes say, “oh, this song is influenced by this band,” and I’m like, “oh, I didn’t even see that. No it’s not, it’s actually influenced by this other band.” It’s kind of funny. I think, rarely, song-specific influences are never really on the nose, because when you take an influence and write with it, it always comes out however you’re doing it. It’s never going to sound exactly like another band. It’s not a conscious thing, like “I want to write songs that sound like the ’90s.” It’s just that I like that idea of pop music that sounds kind of dirty, which was a big sound in the ’90s.

One thing I really like on the record is the subtle but effective guitar interplay and feedback touches, which is really audible on “Swannsong,” some parts of “Give Me Grace,” and “Slipstitch.” Have you ever experimented with alternate guitar tunings?

Not really. The most the record goes with alternate tunings is going to drop-D on a couple songs, and that’s about it. Everything else was just a lot of fooling around in the studio, having fun, trying to make different sounds with the guitar, different pedals, things like that. For the record, when we were in the studio, we tried a whole bunch of different stuff. We were joking with the idea of having a B-side of feedback, but when we practise, we play around. I’ll bring a song to the group and we’ll play around with it, but we don’t do a lot of free jamming.

I find a lot of contemporary noise-pop bands have been very beach and summer oriented, but I find Silver Dapple to be colder sounding, if that makes sense — less summer and beach, more winter snowfalls. Do you have any thoughts on this? Is it a conscious or unconscious thing, like a byproduct of influence or anything?

That’s kind of funny, I’ve never heard that, but I see where you’re coming from. I don’t know. That’s totally not a conscious thing, but thinking back, I don’t do a lot of songwriting in the summer. It’s something that happens more in the winter. But I don’t know if that’s a conscious thing. Maybe it comes out without thinking about it, but I don’t know.

What are your plans for the future of Silver Dapple?

Right now we still have to practise a lot more. It’s been going well, but we need to practise with our new drummer. I’d love to go on tour or something in the summer, but even now it’s getting late in terms of booking. I think what we’re going to aim more for is to start playing new songs. We’ve been without a drummer since basically July, like without a drummer in the same city, so we haven’t been able to really work on a lot of new material. You can write, but as far as a band playing together, we haven’t been able to do that. So I think instead of touring, we’ll be writing new songs, and it’d be nice, hopefully, to have an EP come out in early summer or late spring. We’ll see. - FFWD

By Alex HudsonToday (November 29), Montreal up-and-comers Silver Dapple released their debut LP English Girlfriend via their own FORCHRISTSAKE imprint, blending thundering rhythms with an assault of jagged guitar lines and shoegazing feedback. Despite the raucous arrangements, however, singer and principal songwriter Emily Deimert explains that her love of noise never gets in the way of her melodic sensibilities.

"I like pop music," she tells Exclaim! "I love a song that is, in its core, just a good pop song. I like being able to play with that; just making sugary pop music, but being able to do something interesting with it. Create a pop melody but using feedback or adding a weird big drum beat to it, or just making it super fuzzed out."

The frontwoman's love of pop comes across in her sweetly tuneful vocals, which imbue the muscular rock arrangements with a sense of indie pop fragility. Deimert crafts these honeyed melodies during solo writing sessions before bringing each song to drummer Jesse Locke, guitarist Martin Blackburn and bassist Markus Lake to get an aggressive makeover.

"I write them knowing that they're going to get dirtied up," she acknowledges. "Knowing the band, I know it's eventually going to become a noisy rock song."

On English Girlfriend, these speaker-melting tracks are given appropriately raw arrangements with straightforward structures and a restrained use of reverb. Don't be fooled by the no-bullshit sound, however; these 11 tracks were agonized over during once-a-week studio sessions that took place across several months.

Deimert explains, "We put a lot of work into it, a lot of overdubbing. We played a lot with the guitar sounds to get different feedback and texture and things like that for all of the songs."

English Girlfriend is named after Deimert herself, who earned the nickname while dating a francophone but not speaking French herself. "I was just introduced as 'this is my English girlfriend,'" recalls the Lethbridge, AB-raised singer with a laugh.

The album is available now, but, unfortunately for Canadian audiences, the band members' busy work and school schedules mean that they aren't planning to tour anytime soon. They're also in the midst of a lineup changeover, as founding drummer Jesse Locke will be replaced by Julien Bakvis following the group's show at the Port in Toronto on December 2.

With their live schedule relatively modest, Deimert is helping Blackburn with his new label FORCHRISTSAKE. In addition to releasing English Girlfriend, the record company will soon be launching a series of split cassettes from a handful of local Montreal acts. The bands involved recorded their songs during a whirlwind session at Studio Napolitain de Montreal with just one day for recording and another for mixing.

The bands signed on for the project include We Are Wolves spinoff LEAP, Demon's Claws side-project Primitive Hands, Phil Console (who recorded a live set) and Velvet Chrome. There will also be a release from Deimert and Blackburn's two-piece side-project Keyboardforyou.

"There's no keyboards, actually," Deimert notes, going on to add that the band's style is "super pepped-up. Kind of silly, but not a humour band. Fun songs with just drums and messy guitars."

Look for the split series to launch soon. Until then, soak in FORCHRISTSAKE's debut release, English Girlfriend, which is streaming below. The video for the single "(Pauses)" can also be found at the bottom of the page. - Exclaim!

From the psychocandy of Gabriel Jasmin:
Caked from top to bottom in a thick simmer of fuzz, Silver Dapple choose to fight amplifier feedback with massive walls of unclean guitar overdrive. English Girlfriend’s honey dripping sounds echo back two decades at Black Tambourine’s feminine noise-pop, its finely wound songwriting tangible through humble hooks and fairly removed expressionism. À dévorer à pleines dents. - Weird Canada

Something real wicked this way comes in the form of this yo cool quartet from Montreal. Silver Dapple dabble in a pop music that bulldozes to a beat of its own – sinewy, jagged and rough-edged – that will shake your bowels all the while whispering sweet meanings in your ear. Emily Deimert (vox and guitar), Markus Lake (bass), Martin Blackburn (guitar) and Jesse Locke (drums) play their shit loud, proud and confident, building a swirling, fuzzy and buzzy alternative bridge to the rock the others call rock today.

By Steve Guimond - Hour Community

Son patronyme est un clin d’oeil aux vétérans expérimentaux Silver Apples, mais musicalement, le quatuor montréalais (dont fait partie Martin Blackburn de Jesuslesfilles) hante plutôt les années 90 de Sonic Youth, My Bloody Valentine et même Hole (cité dans Want to). Guitares saturées, rythmes fourmillants et mélodies légères sont à l’ordre du jour sur ce premier album, qui se démarque néanmoins de la récente résurgence shoegaze par ses chansons chaleureuses et sensibles, portées par la voix fragile d’Emily Deimert. La tempérance ne fait pas nécessairement partie du vocabulaire du groupe, mais English Girlfriend renferme ses justes parts de moments tranchants (Give Me Grace) et plus émotifs (Swannsong, Slipstitch).

Par Olivier Lalande - Voir

On dit que Silver Dapple est « un enfant des années 90 aux cheveux luisants, élevé au shoegaze, au brit pop et au rock slacker, avec une bonne dose de The Wedge ». Formé en septembre 2009, le groupe montréalais lancera son premier album; English Girlfriend, le 25 novembre prochain au Jackie et Judy Rococo Bar Spectacle, à Montréal.

Entretien avec Emily Deimert, du groupe Silver Dapple.

La chanteuse et guitariste Emily Deimert; le bassiste Markus Lake (Sheer Agony); le guitariste Martin Blackburn (Jesuslesfilles) et le batteur Jesse Locke (Dirty Beaches) sont satisfaits de cette première expérience. « C’est formidable de pouvoir enregistrer des tounes que l’on joue depuis près de cinq ans », explique Emily. En effet, avant de passer en studio, la formation a pris part à plusieurs festivals tels que Pop Montréal, Wyrd Fest III et Halifax Pop Explosion.

Si Emily trouve que le processus d’enregistrement a été long, elle considère que le produit fini ressemble trait pour trait à ce que le groupe espérait. « Je trouve que l’album nous ressemble. Il offre un regard différent sur la musique des années 90, avec des influences grunge. C’est exactement ce qu’on espérait. Mais il faut dire que c’est dû en partie à Jesse, notre batteur, qui apporte des sons originaux ». Il faut dire que comme groupe, Silver Dapple a trouvé un équilibre grâce à ses différents membres. « Par contre, nous allons devoir apprendre à travailler avec un nouveau drummer parce que Jesse va continuer son chemin ».

Qu’importe! En ce moment l’heure est à la fête et au bonheur! « On a très hâte au lancement », indique Emily. « Je pense que c’est le bon moment pour sortir le disque. On a réussi à trouver notre place et il y a un public pour notre style de musique ». Ce que Silver Dapple espère, c’est également pouvoir lancer l’album au Québec, probablement en 2012. « Le 2 décembre, on va aussi le lancer à Toronto », précise la chanteuse.

Le 25 novembre prochain, à Montréal, le public aura non seulement l’occasion d’entendre Silver Dapple, mais également Cocobeurre et DJ Annie Q. « On est très heureux de proposer au public des invités », souligne Emily. « Cocobeurre, on les aime vraiment beaucoup et on était très content qu’ils acceptent d’être des nôtres. Et puis Annie, c’est une amie. C’est donc un plaisir de lui laisser une place ». En assistant au lancement d’English Girlfriend, le public profitera donc d’autres artistes. « Et pour nous aussi ce sera le fun », ajoute Emily en riant.

Comme tout bon groupe qui se respecte, Silver Dapple pense déjà à la suite des choses. « On a déjà de nouvelles tounes qui sont créées. Ce qu’on espère, c’est pouvoir sortir un petit quelque chose pour le printemps, peut-être cinq nouvelles chansons. Mais ce ne sera pas tout de suite transposé sur un nouveau disque, parce que cela demande vraiment beaucoup d’énergie ». Qui sait, peut-être que la formation proposera une tournée avec d’autres groupes? En tout cas, il semblerait bien que l’on n’ait pas fini d’entendre parler de Silver Dapple.

www.silverdapple.bandcamp.com
www.myspace.com/silverdapplemusic

Entrevue réalisée par : Christelle Lison - QuébecSpot Média

This morning, I woke up in a foggy daze to the horrid tones of the KUOW pledge drive (reminder: Rainydawg will never do this to you), which I should have seen coming because I did the same thing yesterday. It forced me to listen to music on my computer while eating breakfast, which is where I found this:

English Girlfriend by SILVER DAPPLE

It’s from Montreal garage rock group Silver Dapple. What I love about this song is that it is constantly shifting. Garage rock revival bands tend to play the same chords over and over again and can become increasingly boring, especially in album format (see the Dum Dum Girls latest album). This track, however, is a constantly morphing pop gem and doesn’t allow the listener to get too comfortable with any section of the song. It’s Neapolitan ice cream and self control put together. Look for their album to come out in late November. - Rainy Dawg Radio