Features

VANESSA HEINS Enlarge Image

Elliot BROOD

For its third album, the recently released Days Into Years, Toronto alt-country outfit Elliott BROOD revisited an experience that left an indelible mark.
   
In 2007, vocalist/multi-instrumentalist Casey Laforet, vocalist/multi-instrumentalist  Mark Sasso and pianist/percussionist Stephen Pitkin embarked on their first European tour. "We had five days or something to get to Barcelona from Amsterdam and we were still a poor band at the time," recalls Laforet with a laugh, over the phone from Toronto.
   
Mostly looking to avoid toll highways, the BROOD took the backroads and drank in the bucolic Belgian and French countryside — but it was the historical First and Second World War battlefields and the military cemeteries that really left a lasting impression. "Those feelings stuck with us and we talked about eventually doing an album," Laforet says.
   
Released on Sept. 27 via Paper Bag Records, Days Into Years is that album. While it’s not meant to be a historical account of a particular war, the record’s cinematic narratives about innocence lost, homesickness, isolation and death-bed memories were inspired, in part, by reading lists of young Canadian soldiers’ names on those war memorials.
   
"Those were the feelings that stuck out," Laforet says. "Those feelings of being a young person dealing with all of that, and being confronted with death at such an early age."
   
The BROOD has always had a healthy preoccupation with history; the band’s 2008 album, the Polaris Music Prize-shortlisted Mountain Meadows, was loosely based on the Mountain Meadows Massacre of 1857, in which 120 to 140 unarmed emigrants making their way from Arkansas to California were attacked and killed in Mountain Meadows, Utah, by a collective of Mormons and Native Americans.
   
"Mark and myself are interested in history outside of music," Laforet says. "Most of the books on my shelf are historical accounts. There’s something about the past that’s fascinating. I love antiques, too. I love old things."
   
Recorded with co-producer John Critchley at Toronto’s Green Door Studios and Avening Town Hall (fittingly, a former army barracks) in rural Ontario, Days Into Years skews more alt than country; think Wilco at its noisiest.
   
"There’s a meatier sound on this record and I think these songs, with their subject matter, required that," Laforet says. "We had some money and a lot of time — we might as well have called it Days Into Years for how long it took us to do it."
   
Indeed, Days Into Years is a considered step in a new direction for Elliott BROOD. It’s easily the band’s most fully realized work to date.
   
"Mountain Meadows was a great record for us, but I think people love the step we’ve taken," Laforet says. "It’s a bit of a departure, but I think it was a necessary one. I love the minutiae of this album. We spent a lot of time laying it out."
   
With that attention to detail in mind, the new album is also a nod to how seriously Elliott BROOD takes its craft.
   
"I don’t think this band would exist if we were in our 20s," agrees Laforet, who’s 35. "We take it very seriously. We treat these songs as our children."
 

ELLIOTT BROOD
Oct. 29, 8 p.m., West End Cultural Centre
w/ One Hundred Dollars