AEM066 The D’Urbervilles

Their awk­ward to pro­nounce name — it’s “The Do-U — r — b — e — r — villes” — from Thomas Hardy’s novel Tess of the D’Urbervilles presents a beguil­ing front for this Cana­dian band. By nam­ing them­selves after the poor Eng­lish fam­ily fea­tured in the novel, are they assert­ing their own poverty? Or, hail­ing from Oshawa, Ontario, do they con­sider them­selves second-bests to their more sophis­ti­cated Québé­cois? Or is the band – which attained its com­plete form in col­lege –using such a lit­er­ate ref­er­ence iron­i­cally, a self-conscious acknowl­edg­ment of their mid­dle class priv­i­lege? The ques­tions swirl in the back­ground as The D’Urbervilles don’t so much lament their poverty –real or imag­ined – but rather use it a defi­ant ral­ly­ing cry on “We Are the Hunters.”

The first thing you think when lis­ten­ing to this A-side, though, isn’t whether these guys are poor or not: it’s whether – with the slap bass, manic energy and onslaught of gui­tar hits – it’s going to be “War Pigs” done for the paci­fist set. But then it melds into a punk sing along that sug­gests they aren’t some limp-dicked indie band: “We are the Hunters, it’s time for killing!” Exhausted? We haven’t yet arrived at the infec­tious, Depeche Mode-esque bridge, built on a bub­bling base line that makes it pretty much impos­si­ble not to do one of those bob­bing 80s shakes. “At night we own the city sky­line / By day we hide our selves from sight,” John O’Regan sings; “Mak­ing ends meet/Burned up like a fire in the street / you can strike our hearts any­where you like.” O’Regan, who moon­lights as Dia­mond Rings  — Side A on the PS I Love You split 7-inch that caught our atten­tion last fall – man­ages through his robust, beau­ti­ful voice to con­vey both the weari­ness and defi­ance of the lyrics. (His voice is even more incred­i­ble in per­son: I saw O’Regan per­form as Dia­mond Rings back in the fall in New York and was blown away.) The band only enters the 21^st cen­tury at the tri­umphant cho­rus, sound­ing like the Killers with­out the bour­geois melo­drama, syn­the­sizer and all.

So yeah, The D’Urbervilles are kalei­do­scopic. Their chutz­pah itself is wor­thy of praise: though plenty of bands exper­i­ment with dif­fer­ent sounds, it’s actu­ally some­what incred­i­ble how few rock songs these days change tempo or rhythm, let alone style. I’ve always been drawn to this kind of vir­tu­os­ity, built for the eas­ily bored (or less gen­er­ously, those with short atten­tion spans). Of course there are end­less great songs that build to a cli­max with shifting-tempos, and plenty of showy music-for-musicians (e.g. Zappa). But rarely do we see this collage-minded freely-borrowing approach, the best (and most famous) exam­ple of which has to be the cir­cus of freak-doo-wop “Hap­pi­ness is a Warm Gun.”

But The D’Urbervilles are no Bea­t­les, and upon first lis­ten this rapid jux­ta­po­si­tion, this drive-by of the last forty years of rock can be appear jar­ring if not down­right crude. They sound like a band that is either com­pletely aware of what they’re doing or totally clue­less. But upon repeat lis­tens it becomes clear though the D’Urbervilles try on many dif­fer­ent musi­cal out­fits, they are so tight that they pull it off.

But the other rea­son, the rea­son they have incred­i­ble poten­tial to be suc­cess­ful and great, is that they root them­selves in the trendy post-punk sound but use that as a point of depar­ture. Like the rest of their album of the same name, on “We Are the Hunters” The D’Urbervilles have all the ele­ments of that sound: pile-driving bass, gen­er­ally min­i­mal­ist arrange­ments, and quickly shift­ing forms. While Tim Bru­ton does a fine job on gui­tar and synth, it is the bass of Kyle Don­nelly that dom­i­nates here, giv­ing the band their appeal­ingly Pixies-like meaty sound. But instead of stick­ing to the for­mula, The D’Urbervilles add some hard rock gui­tar here, sprin­kle some syn­the­sizer there until it comes out just right. Bon appét-indié.

B-side “Worst Case Ontario” feat. New Slang sounds com­pletely dif­fer­ent than any­thing else The D’Urbervilles have recorded. It is, frankly, unrep­re­sen­ta­tive of their work – but it sure shows that these guys have a sense of humor. A self-mocking shout out to their home state, the track starts out with a clip from per­haps the fun­ni­est – and trashiest – piece of pop cul­ture to emerge from our neigh­bors up north: the Trailer Park Boys. Built around an old-school hip-hop (read: funk) beat with sim­i­larly loose, sim­ple vocals, the track con­tains such zingers as:  “I ain’t no moron/so I swim in Lake Huron,” such sophis­ti­cated smack-downs of other states like “What the heck, Que­bec?” and the clas­sic taunt: “Do you have the balls to swim Nia­gara falls!?” They are more “wiggidy-wiggidy-wiggidy-wacks” here than a Kriss-Kross sin­gle and they seem to be in that twelve year old state of mind as well. Which is to say: they don’t take them­selves too seri­ously. Thank god.

The D’Urbervilles are smart. They sing with sin­cer­ity, but always with a nod and a wink; they address real issues with verve but aren’t afraid to be com­pletely silly. They inhabit the hot sound of the moment but twist it in orig­i­nal and excit­ing ways. And they prove that even in an age when rock is becom­ing more and more orches­trated, a hard bass and beau­ti­ful vocals are all you really need to make a great song.

Nick Kelly

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