Too Pure

Some bands appear thrown together by marketing consultants. Others look, sound and feel like the real thing – the band-as-gang ethos equipped with an internal bond and external cool. In 2006, few bands have as much qualities in spades as Vancouver’s The Organ. But don’t just take our goggle-eyed word for it.

The UK’s success story of 2005 and ex tour mates of The Organ, the Kaiser Chiefs, loudly proclaim The Organ's greatness to any passing journalist (hence The Organ’s name appearing in The Guardian’s ‘Going Up’ feature and the NME’s ‘Recommended’ pages in December last year), while The Mirror have singled them out as a band to note and trust in 2006.  While across the pond the whole band Katie Sketch (vocalist/songwriter), Debora Cohen (guitar), Shmoo (bass), Jenny Smith (Hammond) and Shelby Stocks (drums) had a cameo role playing on America’s sainted urban drama, The L Word. With a planned appearance at this year’s SXSW, how long before such garlands become common place?

Once The Organ’s debut album, Grab That Gun, becomes freely available in the UK, then that seems a nigh-on probability. What’s striking about the quintet is how they’re both a part and ‘apart’ from the current glum rock zeitgeist – instantly recognisable yet strikingly different too. On the surface, Debora Cohen peels off the kind of glassy, spirograph riffs found on early Cure albums. Shmoo’s roaming and climbing bass lines, meanwhile, loads up on nocturnal, foreboding tension with booming authority.

Dig deeper, though, and there’s far more going on here than standard early 1980s rock signatures. Tracks such as “Steven Smith” and “A Sudden Death”, for instance, writhe with the same sexual longing and tormented soul as very early Smiths. Indeed Katie Sketch’s questing voice wonderfully recalls Morrissey’s ghostly groan yet coupled with a self-assured, cut-glass purity. How many Joy Division copyists have that going for them? And in a climate where lyrics are considered a rash afterthought, Sketch’s flowing words on the triumphs and absurdities, the elations and despair of love and longing are pitch perfect.

Another glaring clue of this band’s intent is in their moniker. For amidst the plangent guitar chimes a lone church organ can hauntingly be made out. Throughout Grab That Gun it acts as a warm and woozy balance to their brittle edges and efficient metronomic thrusts. In a genre renown for cold-eyed but theatrical aloofness, The Organ sound welcomingly human. This perhaps explains why Grab That Gun is mercifully devoid of histrionic over-emoting and over-wrought angst. Instead, songs such as “There Is Nothing More I Can Do” and “No One Has Ever Looked So Dead” capture the fluttering ennui that most of us feel some of the time. These are songs custom built for overcast afternoons where a ‘will they/won’t they’ despair hangs heavy on the heart.

Indeed The Organ are masters of every day/rainy day atmospherics. “Memorize The City”, for instance, captures the wonderment of city street strolls with only probing thoughts for company. Furnished with a gloriously clipped and strident guitar surge, here The Organ displays an emotive quality brimming with real lasting force.

This all translates widescreen on stage, wherein their tumbling intricacies are given room to roam. Katie Sketch’s fidgety stage presence and soaring larynx seems to push The Organ’s yearning sound to ever greater dimensions. The band, meanwhile, stands and stares motionless on stage. As hypnotic and haunting experience live as on record. 

So how did The Organ arrive upon us so seemingly fully formed? The band’s pre-history resides in the ashes of Katie and organist’s Jenny Smyth’s previous outfit, Full Sketch. Determined to go beyond the constraints of band-as-hobby, they started scouting for new group members in summer 2001. They wanted simplistic playing. They wanted people enjoy making music as much as they did. And they wanted the band to be top priority. After auditions and more auditions, Sketch and Smyth eventually got what they asked for.

It quickly became apparent the fledgling five-some had stumbled upon that rare alchemical spark. “The way we play is so simple,” says drummer Shelby Stocks, “it just seemed to work and everything fell into place. There’s something in the way we write songs that it just comes together”. Contrary to appearances, the band-as-girl-gang aesthetic was surprisingly accidental. “It wasn’t important at first because I originally did have boys try out,” says Katie, “but it just didn’t’ work out for whatever reason. Once I had four girls, I was like, ‘I might as well find another girl’”.

Having established a stable and reliable line up, and having wrote and rehearsed for months, they scraped together $100 dollars to record the Sinking HeartsEP in 2002. Released in the UK in March 2005 on Bristol’s enterprising Sink and Stove label, it achieved in Britain what it originally did in Canada – acres of admiring praise. “A potentially wonderful band,” noted The Sunday Times. A “hauntingly beautiful work” nodded the NME, while The Independent on Sunday couldn’t help but admire the “simple and direct” quality on display here.

In Canada, the EP was deemed strong enough for Mint records to sign them up. Work was pencilled in for their debut album, but like so many perfectionist bands before them, it didn’t quite go to plan. In Fact, the entire album was re-recorded and the over-polished production eradicated. Debut albums are meant to be statements of intent, not mistakes-in-progress.

“I doubt it would be possible for me to ever be 100% satisfied with my own album,” says Katie. “In retrospect there are always parts of a record that an artist wished that she or he had differently. This being said, I would not have been proud to release our first take of the album on any level. Not only did it sound too clean, it also sounded totally void of emotion”.

Getting it right second time paid off. Upon its release, Grab That Gun received hefty acclaim in Canada and America and The Organ a rapidly growing live following, aided by and resulting in The Organ playing prominent European festivals in 2005, alongside The Cure, “!!!” and The Ravonettes (Route Du Rock’s main stage in August) and Cat Power (Le Inrocks Festival, Paris, in October). The New Pornographers invited them to tour throughout North America twice back in 2003, followed by an appearance with fellow Canadians Arcade Fire at Halifax Pop Explosion in November 2004.

In 2005, The Organ set their sights on the UK, braving dingy Brit venues to win further fans to the cause. Now signed up with redoubtable London independent label Too Pure, April 2006 will see The Organ’s Grab That Gun reaching out to the dispossessed and disenfranchised everywhere.

The band-as-gang ethos has never looked or sounded as cool or as good as this.