Since the pandemic all but shut down live music a year ago, Calgary punk band Julius Sumner Miller has only performed once.
It was during that period of time last year when a few venues enjoyed a brief reprieve from live-music restrictions by allowing performers behind plexiglass. The veteran act was grateful for the show, which took place at Dickens pub in October. Nevertheless, it proved to be a somewhat underwhelming experience compared to what they are used to. For those familiar with the band, the idea of the quintet performing behind plexiglass to an audience sitting quietly is hard to fathom.
“It was fun for the moment and Dickens was great and it felt really safe,” says Darren Ollinger, lead vocalist of Julius Sumner Miller. “But it was just not even close to the real thing. We got off stage and I was like ‘That was fun. I’ll never do it again.’ “
Not being able to tap into the energy provided by a bouncing horde of punk fans or have the crowd shout along to the band’s endless supply of impossibly catchy tunes seemed to flatten the more visceral and communal aspects of a traditional Julius Sumner Miller show.
“The weird thing was you can’t even see out there because of the plexiglass and the stage lights,” Ollinger says. “You are looking at your own reflection. It was so bizarre. I was like ‘Whatever. Let’s just pretend we’re jamming and have fun with this.’ “
It’s safe to say that the city is full of bands with a pent-up desire to hit the stage. But the members of Julius Sumner Miller, which also includes guitarists Monty Montebon and Sean Hamilton, bassist Glen Murdock and drummer Scott Burton, were hoping that 2020 would be a busy year for the band in terms of touring, particularly since they are now armed with a new album full of songs that are both well-crafted and ready-made for the stage. The first wave of the pandemic was already in full swing when JSM settled into a five-day stint last April at OCL studios outside of Calgary to record their fourth album, Try it Out. Ollinger says recording at OCL was next level compared to previous recording sessions, adding it felt like the eight-year-old band had put their “big-league pants on.” The 13-song album continues to showcase an evolution in songwriting for Julius Sumner Miller, he says. Granted, there are some returning hallmarks. After all, the band — which is named after the real-life physicist and children’s show personality who rose to fame on the Mickey Mouse Club in the 1950s — describes itself as “5 grownups playing kid music” on its Facebook page. The songs all clock in at less than three minutes and most feature the band’s trademark humour and penchant for catchy choruses. There was no desire to reinvent the wheel, but punk bands tend to evolve in a somewhat stealthy manner, Ollinger says.
“It’s the evolution of time,” Ollinger says. “You can only write the same standard punk-rock banger before it becomes stale. Our guitarist Monty (Montebon) is a really crafty player so that really helps. The band are all really great players so taking it to the next level is not even talked about, it just happens.”
While the band certainly allowed for some last-minute tweaks, the songs were generally fully formed when they entered the studio, allowing the five members and producer Josh Gwilliam to concentrate on the recording process.
“OCL was into working with us and we had been working on these songs for a while,” Ollinger says. “We had a budget, we had time. It felt really professional, for lack of a better term. We went from 10 in the morning until 6 at night for five days and said let’s see what we can pull off. And we pulled it off.”
You can certainly hear instrumental sophistication sneaking into the stately guitar riffing that opens This Town Sucks, the harmonious college-rock counter-melody on the chorus of All My Spots are Sweet, or the soaring post-punk vibes of Fall for This.
Ollinger, meanwhile, offers his best David Byrne-David Thomas sing-talk delivery on the slyly philosophical Frugal Man. As the band’s chief lyricist, he seems content to keep his tongue firmly planted in cheek for many of the songs, although he tries to mix it up.
“It’s funny how I write,” he says. “Half of it is hilarious to me or nonsensical and then I’m like, ‘I better write a serious song.’ I don’t want to be pigeonholed into one direction. We kind of write off the cuff: funny ideas when we’re driving to a show or jamming. Someone will say something and we say, ‘We should write a song about that.’ It’s very by the seat of our pants.”
Sometimes a song that seems nonsensical can have some serious undertones. The rousing punk-rock shout-along Cheap Parmesan, for instance, is probably the one song on the album that Ollinger would characterize as political. Still, it carries a fairly blunt message: He is not a fan of Alberta Premier Jason Kenney so the song imagines what it might be like to throw a can of stale parmesan cheese at him.
“If that’s a political statement, so be it,” says Ollinger with a laugh. “The morons that run our world these days don’t deserve to have 12 songs written about them. But they can have one song.”
Try It Out is available March 5 at jsm.band and other streaming services.
Copyright Postmedia Network Inc., 2021
