Halifax's The Stanfields are touring this month. (Photo by CHR!S SM!TH)
Readers of Halifax’s The Coast voted them the “Best Band to Get Trashed to” two years in a row, and listening to The Stanfields’ high energy rock-infused Celtic sound, it’s easy to see why.
Lead singer, guitarist and accordion player Jon Landry admits that accolade is his favourite the band has received in the two years or so since it formed.
“That was the one that got us the most work, definitely,” he says with a laugh.
On the five-piece’s debut record, the recently released Vanguard of the Young & Reckless, the band almost seems to burst from your stereo speakers.
And while the lead single is the band’s trademark tune, The Dirtiest Drunk (In The History of Liquor) (video below), there’s more to the loud party rock sound on the tune and the rest of the album when you put the bottle down and really listen.
“(Audiences) find it really funny,” says Landry of their popular tune. “And that’s great. That’s one layer of the onion for the song itself, but, you know, peel back the layers a bit and really the song is a huge disclaimer.”
On another track, Antics, Landry sings, “Pills, liquor and smoke, it makes a fella stop and wonder, ‘how much did I lose?’”
“Our tunes about partying and stuff, I think, are largely a huge disclaimer,” Landry admits. “In a sense, it’s one thing or the other. It’s the dangers of excess or it’s whimsical, fantastical stuff that we just kind of cook up.”
Whether you party to the record or sit back and enjoy, Vanguard… has continued to raise the profile of the band since landing in record stores in June.
Landry says the band has played live relentlessly since forming in 2008, and the fruits of their labour are paying off as bars are filling up more and more each time they return to a city. The band is currently eyeing its third tour out to Ontario just this year.
“We’ve been working at it pretty relentlessly since day one,” he tells East Coast Noise. “We knew exactly what we were going to do starting out as far as how many shows we were going to play, how ruthless we were going to be with our touring schedule, and we’re starting to see the fruits of it now, I think, a bit.
“It’s pretty encouraging … there’s a long ways to go. But it’s all part of the game, I guess.”
The Stanfields are Landry, his cousin Jason Wright (bouzouki and vocals), Jason MacIsaac (guitar and vocals), Craig Eugene Harris (bass and vocals) and Mark Murphy (drums).
The band mates knew each other from the Halifax music scene and decided to join forces in 2008. Vanguard of the Young & Reckless is their first album.
“When we were recording it, it was the longest damn process ever – hair-pulling, pain-staking at times,” Landry admits.
Having said that, he says it was an “incredible” experience – the band’s first time in a professional recording studio. He credits producer Darren Van Kiekerk for bringing some great ideas to the table.
“He let us be ourselves, and that was really key,” Landry says.
The album was all recorded by multi-tracking, but it has a real live-off-the-floor feel, which Landry says was the goal.
“We’ve played so many shows together,” he explains. We just know each other’s nuances, we know our sound. We went into the studio with a ton of live experience under our belts. Darren was really good at capturing that. We wanted that really funky, warts-and-all kind of approach where … We’re not the band that plays perfectly all the time. We’re not the best at anything, we’re just good players together … our kind of five-fingers-of-a-fist mentality, I think that was captured on our record, and I think that comes across in our live shows. And that was kind of an important thing we wanted to capture.”
Landry wasn’t sure about long-term plans when he spoke with East Coast Noise. A second music video to follow up Dirtiest Drunk is in the works, and he suggests it may be for the tune Ship To Shore, but that may change.
He said the band is trying to keep its collective head on straight with all the activity surrounding it.
“It’s what got us to this point was us being careful about what we do and we don’t.”
A national Stanfields tour is in the works, but for now, here are officially announced dates:
Aug. 6 – Glasgow Square Theatre, New Glasgow, N.S.
Aug. 7 – Toronto Festival of Beer, Toronto, Ont.
Aug. 18 – Quispamsis Concert Series, Quispamsis, N.B.
Aug. 20 – The Capital Bar, Fredericton, N.B.
Aug. 21 – Larlee Creek Hullabaloo Festival, Perth-Andover, N.B.
Aug. 28 – The Paragon Theatre, Halifax, N.S.
Video for The Dirtiest Drunk (In The History Of Liquor):
