They will be opening for Hollerado @ Habitat
Tickets also available at Leo’s Video (2680 Pandosy St) & Mosaic Books (411 Bernard Avenue).
Hollerado is an indie rock band which formed in Manotick, Ontario. The band consists of Menno Versteeg (vocals, guitar), Nixon Boyd (guitar), Dean Baxter (bass) and Jake Boyd (drums). They self-released their debut album “Record in a Bag” in 2009 as a free download on their website.
Hollerado’s members grew up on the same street in a small town in Ontario. There is one bar in the town and on Friday nights the jukebox plays Roy Orbison, and John Prine. One day, while riding the bus, a man in an exquisitely tailored suit said to them “it is not nearly as fun to reminisce about the times you didn’t spend your life savings on four one-way tickets to Japan.” With that in mind they got jobs doing construction. When they were tearing down the old walls they listened to The Who. When they built new walls they talked about time travel. Soon they bought an old van and started a moving company (Haulerado). The van had a tape player and they listened exclusively to the Traveling Wilburys.
The Zolas DATES:
After debuting with Tic Toc Tic in 2009, The Zolas scaled the precipice of cult status across Canada, thanks to a loyal fanbase carried over from Zach Gray (vocals, guitar) and Tom Dobrzanski’s (piano) earlier years as Lotus Child.
With Ancient Mars, their second album, The Zolas are set to continue their legacy of postmodern pop. Armed with poetic lyrics, Ancient Mars trades in the cabaret glitz of Tic Toc Tic for reverbed pianos and hard, minimalist beats.
In “Strange Girl” a sunny guitar riff blasts into the perfect mid-‘90s summer jam, while title track “Ancient Mars” is bouncy and nostalgic, with heaping spoonfuls of Montreal and Brooklyn avant-pop. If John Lennon and Kanye West met later tonight at a hotel bar, “Escape Artist” is the song they would write. It’s these kinds of pairings that Ancient Mars is full of: The Zolas write classic pop songs and then fuck them up until the hooks have to fight to get out.
As if to offset Ancient Mars’ aesthetic diversity, the lyrics are raw and focused. The Zolas’ tumultuous songwriting captures the zeitgeist of being in your 20s, on the cusp of youth and real adulthood. In each song Gray builds a skeleton of a setting – from outer space to a college library to a Victorian jail cell – and tells stories fleshed out with the listener’s own history. In October 2012, The Zolas teamed up with Winnipeg’s The Liptonians to release a 7” split single “Cultured Man”, a quixotic snack in between the two full-length albums.
Dobrzanski is the band’s on-board producer, having worked with names in indie-rock royalty like Said the Whale and We Are The City, but for Ancient Mars production duties were handed over to Chuck Brody (Phantogram, Wu-Tang), much like how 2009’s Tic Toc Tic was produced by Howard Redekopp (Mother Mother, The New Pornographers).