It’s a question I am sure has been asked innumerable times over the past seven or eight years by music journalists and music fans alike: how can so much music, so much dynamic sound and musical artistry come from just a solitary electric guitar, a drum kit and one voice?
It’s a mystery, but it’s also a reality as the remarkably potent and powerful Oshawa rock duo The Standstills proves song after song, show after show.
And this ferocity and heaviness as a band has never been more emblematic than on the new album, From the Devil’s Porch, released a few weeks ago in stores and on various digital platforms. The breathtaking power and intensity of this album might have the more conspiratorially-minded wondering if vocalist/guitarist Jonny Fox and drummer/percussionist Renee Couture had indeed paid a visit to that porch and concluded a Robert Johnson-like bargain with Mephistopheles himself.
There actually is a brooding, almost menacing, enveloping intensity to the album and a heaviness hitherto unheard of from The Standstills earlier repertoire.
“It was the intention this time around to go a little darker and heavier. I think it speaks to the idea of who we are as a band, especially when we play live. It’s a mix of this bluesy but really driving, heavy sound. It’s something we haven’t done as much as before but it lends itself better to our live show,” said Fox.
“We do like to mix it up with a lot of different material when we write and record but the heavier tunes seem to come off better live so we wanted more of that this time around. We hadn’t really done a ‘heavy’ record before, but I know a lot of fans would comment to us after shows saying that we always sounded heavier onstage than we did on record and that it was something they liked. So we listened to that feedback, as well as from other people, and we tried to incorporate that a little more into the new album to create more material that we could play live.”
With their growing acclaim and popularity, Fox and Couture are also very cognizant of the fact that for the uninitiated, seeing a band with a male guitarist/singer and a female drummer conjures up one glaring and unavoidable comparison – Meg and Jack White of the White Stripes. But Fox is quick to point out that aside from the numerical and gender similarities, The Standstills don’t consider any other band when they are writing material or playing on stage. The neither consciously ‘try’ to sound like someone else, nor do they consciously try NOT to sound like someone else. They just do what they do, organically and unfiltered.
“You have to be aware, to some degree, of what’s happening in the industry. We have always been in a really challenging position because we’re in a duo and we get the comparisons all the time. So we are always fighting an uphill battle. It’s just inevitable. We try to stick to our guns and our passions as much as possible. With our sound, it wasn’t necessarily an approach where we said we’re going to deliberately go against the grain. It was about getting in the studio and starting to create sounds that we were really excited about. And things just started coming together to where it, honestly, just started sounding great,” Fox explained.
“And we never said we should add a little more of this or we should take away a little of that so we’re less ‘alternative’ or whatever. It was never a conscious decision to go in any one way. It was more, ‘let’s just be creative and go in there and try to make something really great that sounds great to us.’ The whole ‘new alternative’ thing has some great stuff, but there also seems to be a pattern of regurgitating a lot of the same songs. To my ear, it sounds little stale because everyone is listening to almost the exact same song, but done by different bands. We never want to be lumped into that movement.”
It so happens that the band itself came about through an unplanned and organic moment. Fox was getting serious about his music career with the desire of traversing down the path of a solo troubadour, acoustic guitar tucked tightly under his arm when fate intervened back in 2008.
“We met at Fanshawe College in London. At the time I was doing a blues-based solo acoustic thing but I wanted to start jamming with other people. I had played in countless band before as a guitarist and songwriter and Renee had been in a couple of groups as a drummer. But it’s funny; we were friends for a while before I even knew she was a drummer. I wanted to maybe try the band thing again, but I was frustrated with the audition process. I was serious but they weren’t, so I was going to give up and just continue to do solo stuff,” Fox said.
“Renee said she played drums and when we first jammed I was blown away. I had never seen anyone, male or female, play the drums like she played. And the most important thing was it just felt right and we were both very excited about what we were creating in that jam space. We actually recorded a song that very first night and soon we started playing gigs. We kept getting great feedback from people so we just kept going and going.”
It actually took a little while to shed the acoustic guitar, even though The Standstills were definitely not going to be a folk-based hipster band by any stretch of the imagination.
“When we first started, I was still on acoustic but playing through a Marshall stack. It was a really heavy, grungy kind of blues. But over time we progressed and I started to get different gear to fill out the bottom end a little more. Then the songwriting started to change and it slowly started to be what you see now,” he said.
“And for the songwriting, it makes it a little more interesting because as a duo there is so much time and space you need to fill, which demands a lot more on two than it does on a trio or four-piece.”
The Standstills have a wonderfully diverse appeal that defies genre and demographics. This is because there sound is timeless – both modern and old school all at once – and very reminiscent of the band to whom both Fox and Couture refer to as personal musical heroes – The Tea Party.
“I guess people who are into that band have a different vibe. It’s like you either love them or hate them and we both definitely love them. I think as far as Canadian bands go they are just amazing. And considering what they have achieved they still seem like kind of a dark horse in the Canadian music industry. There really isn’t another band like them. And I kind of feel we’re sort of like dark horses too. It was so influential to see a band just doing what they loved to do. It was great and exciting for a young musician and then when I found out they were Canadian, it made them a bigger deal for me,” he said.
“They combined a lot of that classic rock and other stuff that just caught their fancy and that’s kind of the way I am. I loved my dad’s records and was listening to CCR and The Guess Who a lot. When I listened to those records I thought, ‘this is what I want to do.’ And with Renee, her mom was taking her to rock shows when she was eight. She was big into the Tea Party and classic Canadian rock like April Wine. So we sort of always had that in common.”
And the Tea Party have become more than heroes. After seeing an early Standstills performance, members of the legendary Windsor, Ontario band had Fox and Couture booked to open their big reunion tour a few years back. The have subsequently opened for the band many more times and now look upon Jeff Martin, Stuart Chatwood and Jeff Burrows as mentors and even friends.
“Their professionalism just rubs off on you, 100 per cent. It’s like going to school for us when we get to play with them. When you see the pros who have been doing it for so long, you start to pick up the stuff that they do to prepare and just how they conduct themselves. While we’re watching them play we’re just like all the other fans, but afterwards we would take about how they did certain things, how they composed and comported themselves onstage and the different vibe that you have offstage. And that composure is something we’ve had to learn a lot over our career so far,” said Fox.
“The presence they have takes time to develop and it’s a game changer when you’re onstage and you’re actually putting on a
show. It’s everything. It bridges the gap from just seeing a band and actually having a memorable experience. We’re going to keep working until we can get to that point. But the guys in the Tea Party have been inspirational just by being around them, but they have also been really supportive of us on a personal level.”
And here’s another pretty significant feather in their career caps; The Standstills can say they shared the stage with The Doors (well, half of them anyway) opening for the version of the band featuring originals Robbie Krieger and Ray Manzarek that headlined the Rockstock Festival in Chatham, Ontario back in 2010.
“We just happened to do a show earlier in London and the promoter of the festival saw us and asked us if we wanted to open the show which The Doors were headlining. It was a highlight for us for sure,” Fox said.
From the Devil’s Porch was recorded at Heritage Recording Studio in Streetsville, with James Robertson producing these sessions and Eric Ratz working his mixing board wizardry.
“It was the perfect fit. I think James is a musical genius and he has been a fan of our stuff for a long time, but this was the first time we’ve been able to connect as collaborators. We wanted to get into an atmosphere that really spawned creativity and this was the perfect place to do it. It was a really cool experience because we knew and trusted James, and the environment of the studio in this wonderful old, and possibly haunted, heritage home was just what we needed,” Fox said of the process to record From the Devil’s Porch.
“It started early with us doing demos for James in our jam space. Then we decided to go and do one song in his studio to get a feel for it and see if we wanted to continue recording there. We did that one track and it went great so we decided to do the whole album there. Then we reached out to Eric Ratz to mix it for us. James is like the crazy musical genius who oversaw everything and Ratz has always been such an amazing, efficient mixer. So it was like having the best of both worlds coming together. We put our faith in Eric and James and it paid off.”
With a brilliantly ferocious album now out, The Standstills are set to hit the road for series of shows in Ontario throughout the month of October. Check out all the dates here: http://www.thestandstills.com/tour/
- Jim Barber is a veteran award-winning journalist and author based in Napanee, ON, who has been writing about music and musicians for a quarter of a century. Besides his journalistic endeavours, he now works as a communications and marketing specialist. Contact him at jimbarberwritingservices@gmail.com.
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