The Matinee
It’s another endlessly dark and rainy night, and inside the Factory studio—tucked away in a light industrial area of Vancouver—The Matinée are recording a song.
A fleet alt-country-rocker sitting somewhere between Tom Petty and Joel Plaskett, “Young and Lazy” sounds as if it wrote itself, like its ready-made feel and perfect arrangement just crystallized out of the air surrounding the band. Vocalist Matt Layzell explains that it came out of a lightning songwriting effort (two hours) between the Vancouver-based five-piece and their producer for this session, Hot Hot Heat’s Steve Bays.
A few weeks earlier, the band was doing the same thing with Steve Berlin. It’s another striking fit. With REM, the Tragically Hip, and the Replacements in his past, Berlin is the kind of guy The Matinée should be hanging with. The two songs that came out of their little recording-tango, “The Road” and “Take Me As I Am”, both trace the mutated line from like-minded Californian bands Dawes and Delta Spirit back to the golden age of Laurel Canyon.
Meanwhile, there are other recordings.“Sweet Water” establishes the band’s solidarity with old souls of the Deep South like the Allman Brothers, while “Rockin’ and Rollin’” finds The Matinée sitting in the same hooky alt-country bracket as Ryan Adams. There’s a ton more, from the marathon writing sabbatical they laid down Basement Tapes-style in a log cabin on Galiano Island to all the material that’s likely to spill out in the next few weeks.This is where the band is at after a crazy successful 12 months—totally high on their own brimming creativity, and sitting in the catbird seat. “We really wanna get the new album done, but we don’t want to rush anything,” says guitarist Geoff Petrie. “We really want to put together the right collection of songs.”
Petrie and his four bandmates are ducking in and out of different studios, experimenting, and generally striving to be as great as possible right now for one very good reason—because they can. When the band came third in last year’s Peak Performance Project, they walked out with some financial security and right into a new recording and management deal.Meaning to treat such good fortune with due care and attention, Layzell points to the lessons they learned at Peak—lessons that actually built on everything The Matinée learned in the three years of intense road school that followed their first full-length in 2009. “A, it’s all about the song, and B, it’s all about the show,” he says. “Always play bigger than the room you’re in. We’re trying to write songs thinking about the live show.”
The Matinée on stage is a long established uproar of stomping, clapping, and blazing chops, and the songs were already formidable enough to lodge themselves in local radio playlists (and beyond: “$50”, “Mama”, “Let Her Go”). On top of that, the band had emerged as the kind of outfit that could swing between the Merritt Mountain Music Festival and the hipster ground zero of Vancouver’s Biltmore Cabaret without breaking a sweat. They were already astoundingly versatile and universally appreciated. Now they want to get better.
Which brings us back to the studio, where The Matinée’s chemistry experiment with Bays, based on “Young and Lazy”, has been a clear victory for both. “Good, honest songs, balanced with the simplicity and all-American rock of a Tom Petty record, that’s what we’re trying to do,” Layzell says of the album he and his friends are happy to take their sweet time over—for now.
As for us, the waiting is the hardest part.
