Everyone Wants A Piece Of Solids

It’s an early Thursday afternoon and the Montreal duo—not to be confused with the Connecticut power-pop band The Solids (best known for contributing the theme song to How I Met Your Mother)—are holed up in a west end Toronto bar doing interviews before their show later that night. They’re here to shoot a performance for a Canadian publication and while drummer and singer Louis Guillemette waits for his bandmate, guitarist Xavier Germain-Poitra to get off the phone with a Calgary weekly, he makes small talk with several employees from their Canadian label Dine Alone Records. Somebody brings up SXSW, which Guillemente mentions the duo played a handful of shows at the festival last year, though he expects more eyes to be on them this time around.

“I guess it’s going to be quite different this year because of the “hype machine”,” he says, only half-kidding.

He’s referring to the positive attention their debut album Blame Confusion (Fat Possum Records) has received. Ten tracks of blistering, fuzzed out, alt-rock, the record has drawn the pair comparisons to fellow Canadian guitar and drum twosomes like Death From Above 1979 and Japandroids, though Solids share more in common stylistically with ‘90s forefathers Dinosaur Jr. and Pavement. After cutting their teeth out playing in various hardcore outfits for the past few years, both men recently quit their day jobs, and were eager to talk about the album, band dynamic, and future.

Noisey: Walk me through the process of recording Blame Confusion. You’ve released a handful of EPs and music on your Bandcamp, but it feels like this album was a long time in the making.
Xavier: I think we started the writing the first riffs for the album two or three years ago. We have one song on there that we released on a seven-inch with a Toronto band called Animal Faces. The whole process of making the record was really fast, I’ve never been part of a project that the recording was so fast, but the writing took awhile. We actually put out the album last October and then we kind of unreleased it. At first we couldn’t tell people what it was all about, they were like “oh, we can’t listen to it any more?” and we’re like “no we have some things to announce”. We announced it when we were on the road on the east coast so early November. If they [Dine Alone/Fat Possum] would have told us to wait until next summer we would have been like we don’t know, some of these songs are old.

Was Solids the first band that you two played in?
Xavier: We played together in a band called Expectorated Sequence. Which was more…
Loius: Aggressive, screamo. Lot of time signatures. We wanted to do something that was more alternative, more poppy, but still aggressive and keeping the same energy because we’ve always been in hardcore bands. We started jamming in 2009 and released an EP in the spring.

Where do you guys feel you fit in the Montreal music landscape?
Xavier: There’s a lot of scenes in Montreal.
Louis: You go from scene to scene and people don’t seem to know what’s going on in the other scenes. We’re all from Montreal and it’s big, but it’s not that big. At first all our contacts were in the hardcore scene so we played a lot of loft shows with bands that were way more aggressive. Xavier: There’s a lot of Montreal bands that I like but don’t necessary look up to.
Louis: We played with bands like Duchess Says. It’s not the same kind of energy, but it’s still pretty aggressive.
Xavier: We played with Pissed Jeans, The Men, a lot of those shows in Montreal.

Have you been reading the reviews of the record? Specifically, I’m curious what you thought of the Pitchfork review. Considering that they premiered Blame Confusion, did the low score catch you off-guard?
Xavier: Not really. I wasn’t that surprised, the review in itself wasn’t that negative, but the number. The text was more of a 6.5, 7, but we really don’t mind that much.
Louis: It was a single person’s review. It was really focused on No Age.
Xavier : Somebody listening to the album at home might say “oh I get this, it’s kind of like Dinosaur Jr or No Age” but we know the live setting is what we excel at and that’s when people get really into us.

What do you make of the comparisions to other duos, do you think that’s lazy?
Xavier: I just find it weird because that’s not something you usually see with three or four-piece bands.. It's like it’s a genre.
Louis: Solids wasn’t meant to be a duo at first.
Xavier: We didn’t come to the jam space saying “oh we should do something that sounds like this” but we had an idea of what we wanted to sound like. We knew we had a kind of ‘90s vibe, but we weren’t trying to be Dinosaur Jr., Sonic Youth, Superchunk. I love all those bands, but I think it’s not just a melancholic thing, we don’t want to revive the ‘90s we still want to make music that works now. It’s funny because it’s true that it’s one of the eras of music that’s aged better and you can listen to it right now. It’s a timeless.

So you guys aren’t necessarily committed to the duo thing?
Xavier: If we ended up for logistical reasons, we won’t change our names. Some songs on the album we could definitely add more people.
Louis: Right now I’m drumming, I’m singing, he’s playing guitar and singing too.
Xavier: I have to keep on doing the bass notes so I can’t just zone out and solo for four minutes. We like the restriction that it implies. It has to be simple enough for just the two of us.

You’re about to embark on your first North American tour with Toronto’s PUP. There’s four of them, but being from Quebec, do you feel you have an advantage if you competed against them in a drinking competition?
Louis: We have more time to drink because the bars close later.
Xavier: I guess we can outdrink most of Canada.

With the added attention, are you guys feeling any pressure?
Xavier: Some, but we know the live setting is what we excel at and that’s when people get into us, we really enjoy doing shows and being on the road.
Louis: It’s all about the urgency of doing something. Full throttle.

You can see the rest of Solids’ North American tour dates here.

Max Mertens is a freelance writer living in Toronto. Follow him on Twitter - @Max_Mertens