Timber Timbre conjures up an electronic dystopia on latest album

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There is a lot of talk that Sincerely, Future Pollution — the latest album from Montreal band Timber Timbre — presents a dark, disturbing portrait of a dystopia. And it does.

But in a recent chat at the jam-packed Caffè Italia, Timber Timbre singer-songwriter Taylor Kirk and his bandmate Mathieu Charbonneau were talking about the wonderfully relaxed time they had recording the album, which is being released April 7.

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Kirk, Charbonneau and fellow multi-instrumentalist Simon Trottier, along with drummer Olivier Fairfield (who no longer tours with the band), were living and recording at La Frette studio in the small town of La Frette-sur-Seine, 20 minutes outside of Paris.

The studio — which has hosted musicians from all over the globe, including Patrick Watson, Salif Keita and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds — is in a 19th-century manor house, and it made for a unique experience for the guys in Timber Timbre. They stayed in the manor for a couple of weeks, like old-school rock stars, with the studio even providing an in-house cook.

“It was magical,” Kirk said. “If (The Grand Budapest Hotel director) Wes Anderson was going to make a movie about a recording studio, it would be that place. There were all these really eccentric people, an illustrious cast of players. Everyone was really quirky, very hospitable. We’d go in every day and the engineers would be just beaming. It’s funny, because the mood of that place was very light and very idyllic. It was like paradise for those two weeks. And the record, I’m told, is kind of the opposite. It’s pretty dark, bleak and pessimistic. I don’t hear it that way. When I hear it now, it triggers memories of that place.”

Those may be Kirk’s memories, but there’s no denying that there’s a gloomy noir feel to much of the material on Sincerely, Future Pollution, perfectly encapsulated in the first single, Sewer Blues, a clanging, ominous dirge of a song that’s a nightmarish vision of a rotting society: “The voice is barking of nausea and fear / An unholy jargon in the judgment seat.”

“It’s kind of science-fiction, non-fiction dystopic imagery,” Kirk said, by way of describing the band’s sixth album. “It seemed unavoidable with the kind of general malaise and anxiety that was floating around.”

That bleak vision is adorned with way more electronic sounds than Timber Timbre ever showcased before. The entire album is coloured by swaths of old-school synthesizers, with almost all of the keyboard work provided by Charbonneau.

That’s partly because La Frette studio has an impressive collection of synths from the late ’70s and early ’80s, and studio owner Olivier Bloch-Lainé would always run out and somehow find them whatever rare electronic keyboard they were looking for.

Kirk had gone into the studio thinking these songs would be really suited to electronics, producing something that’s light years removed from the sparse, folky sound of Timber Timbre’s early days. Kirk was ready to mix it up musically, even if it might surprise some longtime fans.

“I was listening to a lot of younger artists, and with music made by younger people I find that they don’t have the same prejudice with their music, because they grew up with the Internet,” Kirk said. “So they have a much wider scope of what their music could be. There is no taboo for the new generation. Everything is fair game.”

Sincerely, Future Pollution is in a whole other musical universe from Timber Timbre’s breakthrough self-titled 2009 album, but in many ways it feels like a natural progression from their previous album, 2014’s Hot Dreams, which featured a bigger, dreamier sound.

“To me it doesn’t seem like a radical departure,” Kirk said. “In a way, there’s an accidental linear chronology to the flow of records. But it wasn’t deliberate.”

But initial reaction to Sincerely, Future Pollution was not so positive.

“When we played it to friends, it was weird,” Kirk said. “It was alienating to them. So I was really concerned. I had a lot of doubt when we were finishing up and sharing it a little bit. We were also putting back together our management team and sending it to labels, who found it very weird. It seemed too incongruent to what we had been up to previously. But once the songs went out (to the public), I sort of remembered that I liked it. I’m really quite proud of it. I think it’s the best thing that we’ve done.”

“What I’ve heard, from the people I’ve played it to, is that obviously they hear the new equipment, the new sound, but they feel it’s still the same band,” Charbonneau said. “The songs have been generated from the same place.”

It was also created in a different way. In the past, Kirk, the driving creative force behind the band, would come into the studio with a firmly set collection of ideas, but this time he worked much more closely on the music with Charbonneau and Trottier, who both also play with the Québécois band Avec pas d’casque. 

Kirk hails from the small town of Brooklin, Ont., near Oshawa, but has split his time between Toronto and Montreal since forming Timber Timbre in 2005, moving back here two years ago.

“There are so many opportunities here for me, and the infrastructure for working here is amazing,” Kirk said. “There are so many recording studios. There’s a strong community and everyone likes to help each other out.”

The band is in Europe touring right now, and then they’ll be back for a series of dates in North America, including a Montreal show at the Olympia on June 2.

AT A GLANCE

Sincerely, Future Pollution is released on Friday, April 7. Timber Timbre performs Friday, June 2 at 8 p.m. at the Olympia, 1004 Ste-Catherine St. E., with Sin and Swoon. Tickets cost $40.85 via admission.com.

bkelly@postmedia.com

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