Introducing :: The Rest

Hailing from Ontario, Canada come The Rest. A gaggle of youngsters striving to make the ever elusive and hard to achieve “Big Music”. Music that aims unashamedly high for the heavens with a soaring self belief, y’know – kinda like fellow country-men the Arcade Fire. But don’t take that as some sort of reference point – The Rest’s music is a whole lot more intimate than Arcade Fire’s sheer bombast. We’re talking about something very special here. UK indie Something In Construction have just picked up on these guys and are releasing their wonderful debut LP Everyone All At Once on October 5th. If you purchase said LP from Rough Trade you’ll be able to take part in what can only be called a “revolutionary” pricing structure (or something). Basically, the first 50 copies of the album sold will be priced at 99p. The next 50 at £1.99 then £2.99 etc, until the ‘normal’ retail of £9.99 is reached. Basically, get in there quick and grab yourselves a bargain. Pre-order link here.

As an extra special treat, we’re giving away a free digital EP from the band called the WOW EP (short for ‘Walk On Water’ the EP’s lead track). The four track download also contains a superb cover of Swedish pop-starlet Robyn’s crossover hit ‘With Every Heartbeat’. Download at the bottom of the post.

The Rest will be over in London next month for a string of showcase shows – most are still being booked at the moment but one that IS confirmed is the TLOBF vs SiC Records Club Night: ‘ILL FiT’ which takes place at Old Blue Last, Shoreditch on 12th October. As with all ILL FiT’s nights, entry is completely free – so there is no excuse not to come along, right? Awesome French piano based singer-songwriter Sebastian Schuller will also be playing as well as a third act, yet to be confirmed.

Here, we meet the band for the first time and find out a little more about what makes them tick.

For people out there that have never heard of you. Give us three reasons why they should?
First, I would tell them that we’re a group that is interested in making great music, and we’re driven to keep eclipsing the last piece of music we’ve been working on. We have no interest in tossing out something that is sub par into the world. There’s already too much bad music filling up every corner of the information age. I want people to feel something. You may hate us, but you may love us. We’re not interested in the middle ground. The Internet may have a bottomless pit, but our minds don’t, so why fill it up with something that doesn’t elicit a strong response?

Secondly, we’re honest to goodness music fans, and we’re not making music to fit into some weekly sub genre. We all love the possibilities of music. It has the ability to directly speak to an individual, giving that person the chance to shape the music around their life in the way that they feel fits. Music also seems to have the power over other forms of art, especially now when it can be taken to so many different places. We’re hoping to make soundtracks to every facet of life.

And lastly, I only feel moderately uncomfortable talking about how much of an amazing band we are, so there has to be truth there, doesn’t there?

Can you recall the moment when you first decided you wanted to become a musician?
I can! When I was about 13 years old I was asked to be in a band. We were named after the new music television show “The Wedge”. We christened ourselves “The Wedges”, which led to a bombardment of wedgie jokes, but thankfully not any physical wedgies. Now, before you come to any conclusions, being ridiculed was not the moment I decided to become a musician, even though you learn it comes with the territory. The light bulb came on a few months later while playing “Run away from insert name” (I know, kids are cruel). We were hiding in some trees, and quickly forgot about the game and began talking about the band. We discussed songs, direction, etc all with the utmost urgency. I couldn’t wait to get to practice. I couldn’t wait to make music. I couldn’t wait to listen to music. Since that point I’ve rarely thought about doing anything else.

Where do your songs come from? What’s your inspiration?
On Everyone All At Once I took a great deal of time preparing various subjects that I thought would be a good foundation for lyrics, filling half of my journal, but when we started actually writing the record I became extremely moved by a story my great uncle told me about going to see his mother in a sanatorium, and I abandoned almost all of my previous work. In the 1930’s his mother was dying of Tuberculoses and to see her he had to make a long, emotionally taxing trip with his father. However, he didn’t tell this story with sadness, instead it was filled with a powerful importance. This particular story directly inspired the first track on the album “Coughing Blood/Fresh Mountain Air”, but also made me explore general subjects like time and place in a new light. We’re stuck in the world that keeps getting faster, and the way we perceive time is now bound to the culture moving around us, but what if we could escape that world? What if we were able to create our own microcosm and set our own individual pace and way of preserving time? It may sound like an escapist idea, but I wasn’t interested in escaping, but in possible worlds.

Name your Top 5 records.
I actually had to make a top ten list a few months ago and it took me about a week, so when it came down to making this list I stupidly thought about reconsidering the order, or possibly even changing one of my picks. I quickly just copied and pasted the albums because being overly critical of these albums is just foolish, and more importantly I cannot waste all of my free time thinking of lists, even If I really want to.

Talk Talk – Laughing Stock
The Beach Boys – Pet Sounds
Neutral Milk Hotel – In The Aereoplane Over The Sea
Wilco – Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
The Replacements – Let It Be

What was the first gig you ever played and was it a success?
The first gig I ever played was my grade 8 graduation dance, and it was something that haunted me for years. Not a success any way you looked at it, but it was a good experience for the future. We thought we were a band that was inches away from stardom, and in reality we were lucky to get out alive. We had a song called “Wannabe Man”…enough said.

What one piece of criticism has stuck in your mind and was it justified?
“You don’t need to have so many people in your band”. It’s something that I’ve heard ever since we began playing together and I’ve never found it to be justified. There are limitless possibilities when you’re making music, and we’re all interested in finding new colours and textures to surround our songs. Why should we narrow our scope? I love having the feeling of boundlessness, whether or not it’s truly attainable, but having the ideology that we can bend our musical personalities in any way we see fit keeps me consistently excited for the future. Also, these 6 people are also some of my best friends in the whole world and we’ve now grown into this terribly dysfunctional siamese twin, and even though we’d sometimes like to have a surgery to free ourselves of one another, it’s just too dangerous of an operation.

What one thing has caused you to waste your free time in the past 6 months?
Other than obsessing over lists? Well, I spend a great deal of time watching movies. Not that I really think that’s a waste of time. I found this great site (They Shoot Pictures Don’t They) that has compiled a list of the 1000 greatest films of all time. It’s a great resource for cinephiles. I’ve also played a great deal of tennis over the summer months, but I’m trying to make it onto the professional circuit, so not a total waste. Federer got no chance against my Kamikaze Slice! I just noticed this was suppose to be one thing…so I’ll pretend it was three because I’ve found the activity that has actually sucked an outrageous amount of from me: reading about the Toronto Raptors basketball team. I know everything about this team. It’s a truly terrible, self-esteem sucking addiction! If they’re awful again this year it will actually depress me. A sports team causing depression, how have sunk this low!

If you weren’t making music, what do you think you’d be doing?
I’d be the first man on mars. No doubt in my mind. I loved a movie called “The Explorers” when I was really young. It was about these teenagers who built a spaceship and flew into outer space. It starred a young Ethan Hawke. I don’t know about your thoughts on this, but Ethan Hawke seems like an idiot, so if he can get a homemade spaceship built from junkyard into space then I can get to mars. If the movie taught me anything is that you can do these things as long as you don’t tell people about it. That’s when the government gets mad.

What’s the worst job you’ve ever had?
I worked for a local radio station as part of their “Rock Patrol”. This was an awful decision. You don’t get paid, or at least I never did, and you’re surrounded by people who believe that Nickelback are viable artists. Before this job I couldn’t figure out who was actually listening to these terrible “modern rock” groups, but one month of doing this introduced me to the whole cult. Nasty, inconsiderate people for the most part. It’s strange to label people like that, but I had never run into so many people that would go out of their way to be rude to you. The one supposed perk was to include free tickets to local concerts, but for the most part nothing interested me. I then saw that Merle Haggard was coming to perform, so I asked for tickets, and then got laughed at. They were skipping that concert. However, I did get a poster for Mongoose Beer, which has the amazing image of a mongoose biting the head of a snake. It’s horrible, horrible beer, but the poster is so awesome that you still want to drink it.

We’d like you to make us a mix-tape. Pick five tracks with a theme of your choice. Go!
Songs I’d like to listen to while looking at my Mongoose Beer poster:
Jim O’Rourke – The Visitor
Gal Costa – Baby
St Vincent – The Party
Jorge Ben – Oba, La Vem Ela
Delorean – Seasun

DOWNLOAD
The Rest: ‘WOW EP’
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