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Local Guides
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Culture Reject
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by Bill Adams
April 17 – 23, 2007 |
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As in any other line of work, when a musician wants something
done right, he or she has to do it themselves and that’s exactly
what singer–songwriter Michael O’Connell did after taking a break
from the Guelph–based musical collective Black Cabbage. The
singer knew he still wanted to make music, but he wanted a
different, more personal form of expression that he just wasn’t
getting. “I did Black Cabbage for a number of years,” explains
O’Connell of his creative conundrum. “We were an eight–piece
band and then playing solo and touring all over the country, I
eventually got tired of it all; just a bit burnt out. Being both a
writer and performer and being a writer trying to do engaging
songs while constantly being on the road stopped making sense
to me.
“I decided at that point that I wanted to record an album at
my own pace so I bought a bunch of recording gear and started
doing it myself,” continues the singer. “I’ve been at that for the
last five years and came up with this collection of songs that I
thought were a reasonable departure from what I’d been doing
before.
“Culture Reject, as a name, is only about a year old, but some
of the songs are a few years old.”
For such modest intentions, Culture Reject’s self–titled debut
is a pretty fantastic exposition of songwriting. With tender, warm
melodies, spidery guitars and song arrangements that blossom as
they progress, the album bears a lot of the earmarks of a vintage
college rock record and songs including “Inside The Cinema”,
“Blueprint” and “Fireflies Are Fading” hint at possible greatness in
the veins of Sebadoh in their earliest days, indie guru Karl Blau
and even Plastic Ono Band–era John Lennon. There’s a certain
sweetness and romance in this startlingly pretty, tiny music; the
songs are not spare in their arrangement – they have the capacity
to be quite sprawling in the right light – it is simply the way which
they’re presented that makes them relentlessly intimate and that
feel makes them simultaneously very endearing. It makes you
want to take this record home and watch it grow; the flowers of
each song promise to be incredibly lovely.
However, the noticeable and resounding word that recurs
throughout a conversation with the singer is “I”.
Culture Reject is a one–man band so how to present these
lush little songs live with no assistance from other musicians on
stage? It’s a difficult feat, but when the going gets tough, the
tough get innovative; rather than scale back these songs to just
voice and guitar, O’Connell has turned to technology to help
present his music for an audience. “While I was making this
record, I spent a lot of time overdubbing on it like a little mad
person,” explains the singer of the process that ultimately ended
in Culture Reject’s eleven songs. “I played just about everything
you hear on it other than the horns and Jim Guthrie plays drums
on one track. Otherwise, it was all me.
“For me, these songs don’t totally exist without the melodies
and countermelodies and horns and everything,” continues
O’Connell. “I wrote them, but had horn players come in and play.
So for me to play them live and not have those elements included
would kill me. To compensate I do a lot of live looping.
“There’s a certain subtle athleticism reproducing all of those
loops on stage [chuckling]. It’s kind of fun that it’s all live and I
don’t pre–program anything but I still get as much of it as I can in
there. No one calls me a cheater, and no one has confronted me
for having music onstage that’s not done by someone else. Every
performance that I’ve done in the last while has been pretty good;
I played CMJ and Pop Montreal in October and those were really
well-received shows – especially New York; that was awesome.”
While O’Connell does concede that perhaps one day a full–
size touring band might be a consideration, for the moment, he’s
having entirely too much fun doing the shows on his own to bring
in the standard rock n’ roll combo – though he does say that for
his upcoming shows in Toronto and Guelph, he’ll be enlisting the
aid of a horn section. “I think eventually getting a bigger band
together will be a more serious consideration, but not yet,” says
the singer jovially. “I’m playing Hillside Festival this summer and
it might come up then. The tour that I’m going on now, I’ll be
going to New York, Boston and Vermont as part of this tour and
it’s pretty tough sometimes to organize a bunch of people to go
and do these sorts of tours but I think that if I can represent my
music well enough now, I’d like to break into these places as
modestly as I can; in Europe as well. I think once I have
established something in those places, I’d certainly love to tour
with a band.
“By the same token though, it’s pretty fun to do on the fly; it
makes performing stressful because you have to make sure that
everything is in time and so on, but it’s fun for me. It can be a
little nerve–wracking, which puts me on edge, which I like.”
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