Back in the van
Blossoming stars still endure the trials of touring North America
John Kendle

Ah yes… there’s nothing like being the darlings of the Canadian new music scene.

In the space of a year you get to release your debut full-length, play an impressive set at the Pop Montreal festival, become a buzz band at South by Southwest, have one of your songs picked as single of the week by London’s New Musical Express, earn rave reviews at festival and club shows in the U.K. and Europe…

Then you come home and get to sleep in your van while driving the impossible distances between, say, Peterborough, Ont., and Chicago.

Such is life for You Say Party! We Say Die!, a combustible quintet from Abbotsford, B.C., whose energetic, sloganeering take on dance-punk has led its members in merry movements for past 12 months. Like many bands before them, the YSP!WSD! crew is discovering that the financial gap between being a ‘buzz band’ and being an ‘unknown band’ is pretty much negligible.

“It’s actually pretty warm when the five of us are all in the van,” bassist Stephen O’Shea says via cell phone from Toronto. “For us it’s still a real pleasure to do these tours like this. Everyone has to do it, and it still feels like a big adventure — you know, that gushy feeling that you get when you’re in your teens and dreaming of the future.

“At the very least it beats growing up and getting a real job.”

O’Shea and bandmates Derek Adam (guitar), Devon Clifford (drums), Krista Loewen (keys) and Becky Ninkovic (vocals) likely won’t need to work retail for a while — not if this gang of mid-20s British Columbians can keep up the momentum they’ve developed since springing the debut CD Hit the Floor! on the world last September.

The group has legitimately become something of a sensation in Europe on the basis of the singles The Gap (Between the Rich and the Poor) and You Did It. North American audiences have caught on, too, seeing something in the band’s earnest, keyboard-fuelled punk pop that’s been missing from the second and third albums of stylistic forerunners such as Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Hot Hot Heat and Interpol.

According to O’Shea, a lot of the group’s essence comes from growing up together as like-minded geeks in Abbotsford, a satellite town of Vancouver that lies smack in the heart of B.C.’s Bible Belt.

“For anyone who has been to Steinbach — that is Abbotsford,” O’Shea says. “Sixty per cent of a city of 120,000 is Mennonite, and it’s the first suburb heading out of Vancouver that doesn’t have transit into the the city. So we sort of grew up with our own scene,” he says.

Initially founded by Loewen and O’Shea to be a politically minded act, YSP!WSD! took on more of a personal tone when Ninkovic made the lyrics her own. The band also tempers potential spikes with a healthy dose of melody and breezy keyboard work.

“We didn’t really set out to create a certain sound,” O’Shea says. “I write my part and the others write their parts and then we say things like ‘Let’s get heavy here for no reason’ or ‘Wouldn’t it be hilarious if we did this?’”

“We’ve just done what we enjoy.”

So far, it’s working — as long as the van stays warm.