The Coast

The Coast call Toronto home but sound more like they hail from London circa 1993, combining American collegiate jangle-pop with the beauteous distortion of the U.K.’s shoegazing past. They recently released a flat out stunning debut, Expatriate, rightfully already turning plenty of heads in Canada but still floating under the radar stateside, finally seeing release next Tuesday. In between another serious stretch of touring front man Benjamin Spurr was kind enough to take time out to talk with Reveille about the Coast’s evolution, gossamer guitar interplay and close personal ties amongst other topics.

Watch The Coast perform a live version of "Killing Off our Friends" on MTV Canada

 

Reveille: The band’s sound took a pretty big leap between your debut EP and the new full-length. Any particular factors you’d attribute that to?

Benjamin Spurr: We all feel that our full-length was definitely leaps and bounds ahead of the EP. In between making the EP and the full length we toured a lot and started seeing the songs in different contexts. Just way different crowds and towns reacted to certain songs taught us a lot. It made us want to write songs that were more high energy and direct. Pretty much every night on tour we have to go up in front of people who don’t really know our music and win them over by throwing all of our energy into it. We wanted to write songs we could really get behind every night on stage.

Reveille: The guitar on Expatriate has a lot of different textures and parts, it’s not your typical rhythm guitarist who strums away during the verses and steps back for the lead to solo kind of situation.

Spurr: In other bands Ian [Fosbery] would really be what’s considered the lead guitarist. He’s a wizard with various sounds and effects. You should see his pedal board, we call it ‘the Death Star’ because it was under construction for so long and it’s so huge. We have such completely different style. I’m a big fan of bands like New Order and have a pretty simple noodly guitar style. Because we’re really different players there’s a lot of room for us to both do out thing, we’re rarely fighting each other for space and most of the songwriting is a collaborative process.

Listen to "Tightrope" by The Coast

Reveille: The lyrical world of Expatriate reads like short stories with all the identifying details of names and places purposely left out. How would you describe your approach to lyric writing?

Spurr: I think there was a time when I was more interested in writing direct narratives, but I’ve realized unless you have a really good story to tell it can get a bit bloated. Half the time people aren’t really listening to the lyrics anyway. I find it liberating to write in a more vague style. Every song on the record is pretty specific in my mind but I don’t expect everybody else in the world to care about the intimate details of my life. It’s probably easier to connect with the universal emotions driving those situations so that’s what usually ends up making it into the lyrics.

Expatriate

Spurr: I think that closeness makes it easier to think of your self as a part of one unit. I’ve known [bassist] Luke [Melchiorre] for over 20 years. There can be some baggage in there as well that you wouldn’t have if it was four random guys. There are trade offs, I know lots of bands that are professional about everything and personal issues don’t come up, we could never be that way even if we wanted to.

Reveille: Even though a number of Canadian bands have exploded to global prominence in recent years it still seems from an outside perspective like a pretty close knit musical community with bands lending each other helping hands regularly. Is it as supportive and communal a music scene as it appears?

Spurr: Even though we’re in Toronto, it still feels like a pretty small community, all the bands know each other somehow. Even now Canadian artists still have this relationship with the States, I don’t know if it’s an inferiority complex or what, but you’re always aware of entering a large domain when you go and tour there. The reaction to band together with the other people doing that is natural. We’ve been helped immensely by other Canadian bands, Tokyo Police Club are probably sick of us riding their coattails by now. [Laughs] [Ed. Note: A Tokyo Police Club remix of the song “Tightrope” is currently on the Coast’s MySpace page]

Reveille: You’ve been pretty serious road warriors for the entirety of 2008 having toured the U.S. multiple times even though the record wasn’t officially dropping here until this month [August 19^th to be exact]. Does it feel like all the touring has started to pay off yet?

Spurr: It’s sometimes hard to tell in this business what the benefits are of the stuff that you’re doing. [Laughs] When you drive across the entire continent and spend six weeks straight touring you spend a lot of money and sometimes play for a lot of people and sometimes very few. It’s easy to ask, ‘What’s the benefit of this?’ It’s hard to tell if it’s an immediate success, but it’s still something we feel like we have to do, at the very least it makes us all better players. Touring can be such an undertaking sometimes you feel successful just by getting through it. I don’t want to sound defeatist though, we’re hoping that a lot of people hear our music and enjoy it as the record finally comes out and we keep touring.