NO RULES The Luyas
Feb 24, 2011
The Montreal combo, with connections to Arcade Fire, Bell Orchestre, Final Fantasy and more, aims to follow its heart.
BY JENNIFER KELLY
"When we started the Luyas, the concept was that there were no rules about what it had to be or what it had to sound like," says Luyas singer Jessie Stein. "The band was conceived as a band for fun."
The Luyas have been keeping it fun for roughly half a decade now, playing secret shows in and around Montreal, relying on non-traditional rock instruments like French Horn, strings and a 12-string, three-bridged lute called a Moodswinger, and recording two albums. The first, Faker Death came out as a self-release in August 2007 and was reissued the following January on Pome Records. The second, Too Beautiful To Work, arrived this week on the much larger, much more visible Dead Oceans label.
Stein says that the record's title, which is also the name of its opening song, is partly a reference to a girl she knows who seems to get by solely on her looks. But it's also an observation about her band's languid, dreamily gorgeous sound, which proved to be a surprisingly hard sell when she went out to pitch it to labels. "People kept saying that they loved it, but they didn't know what to do with it," says Stein.
The Luyas began with Stein and her friends Pietro Amato and Stefan Schneider, all living in Toronto as part of the Blocks Recording experimental music scene. Stein was in an indie pop band called SS Cardiacs. Amato and Schneider had a three-piece instrumental outfit called Torngat. Their sounds could hardly have been more different, but they became fans of each other's work and embarked on a lasting friendship.
Later, when Stein turned up in Montreal, she began to think about collaborating. "I thought, it would be awesome to just take my songs and hand them over to somebody whose aesthetic sensibility was so different from mine," she says. "To let another set of ears and another style of musicians arrange it. I guess I got that inspiration from the record Destroyer did with Frog Eyes."
By then Amato and Schneider were both in Bell Orchestre and Amato had toured as a horn player with Arcade Fire. Stein began playing casually with Amato, in the process incorporating one of the Luyas more unusual elements, the French horn, into her songwriting. "It was more because of the fact that he's Pietro than because he plays French horn," she says. "He was my friend and he was a musician. There has never been any notion that, ‘Oh, we need a player who plays this.' So it's a really organic band. Everything happens for some natural reason."
Schneider joined next, and the band began playing live as the Luyas in December 2006. They released Faker Death on their own in 2007. In 2010, McSweeneys writer Sean Michaels documented a secret show in Montreal, where would-be concert goers were summoned to a meeting point, blindfolded and led by rope to the show venue. Michaels' called the Luyas music "an art-pop that's supple, gold and silver, with messy choruses wedged between swells of scattered sound." A week or so later, Stein was at SXSW, taking meetings and trying to find a label for her band.
For Too Beautiful To Work, the band added a new member Mattieu Charbonneau. This first album for Dead Oceans also has string arrangements by another old Blocks Recordings friend, the composer Owen Pallett, who was once Stein's roommate.
"Owen's a really good friend of mine. I met him when I was maybe 18 and living in Toronto," she says. "He was writing the first Final Fantasy record when I was living with him. We've gone through a lot together through the years, eight years."
The mutual confidence built up in that long-term relationship allowed Stein to simply hand over her tunes and allow Pallett to realize them more fully. "I really trust Owen. He's known every piece of music that I've made since I started recording music, basically. So I know that he has a very good sense of who I am."
For Too Beautiful to Work, Pallett arrived at the studio one day and took over. "He just walked in, and he said, these people are coming today. How much time do I have? He called a bunch of his friends, and just told them what to do. It was amazing."
"Owen's an incredible conductor," she adds. "He's very good at getting people to do a very specific thing that he wants them to do."
The full palette of instruments transforms the Luyas' dream-like songs into lusher, more complex compositions, as on the album highlight "Canary," where a wash of strings adds tension to Stein's languid vocals. The Moodswinger plays a role on that song as well, first in its traditional guise as a strummed, stringed instrument, and later in a giant crashing sound as Stein moves the third bridge mid-cut.
"The third bridge on a Moodswinger is a sliding bridge, kind of based on the concept of a screwdriver under the strings. It slides on two metal bars pushed up on the strings at different positions on the neck to create different overtone structures," says Stein. Normally, a musician would set the third bridge at the beginning of a song and leave it there, but it is possible to reposition it on the fly. "You can do that, yes, but it makes a big, loud scary noise," says Stein. "In ‘Canary,' that happens. When it goes to the instrumental section, there's a big crash." It was no accident, and Stein would do it again in a heartbeat. "It was a total move," she adds impishly.
That sense of play is maybe the central think about Luyas. This is a band that's always willing to try something new. For instance, the song "Too Beautiful to Work," was one of the last ones to be recorded for the second album, after new member Mattieu Charbonneau had joined Stein, Pietro Amato and Stefan Schneider. Along among the CD's tracks, it has an antic, manic, dance-friendly vibe, with careening piano lines and a percolating electro beat. "We never made a song that is remotely like that one before, but that's the spirit of our band," she says. "To do whatever... to follow our hearts."
The Luyas kick off a major American tour next week - check out their tour dates right here.
The Luyas Present "Everything Is Outta Sight" | a film by Derrick Belcham & Vincent Moon from A Story Told Well on Vimeo.
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