Vancouver based blues/punk duo, the Pack A.D., who play the Slice, Sept. 10 with the Turncoats,  are a bare bones, raw and dirty rocking duo who know how to do it themselves — old school — thanks to a variety of innovative online contests.

“We wanted to record our first CD , but we had no money, so recorded cassettes live in our basement and dubbed them and sold them to fund it. We think it’s fun to do things that actually show you put some effort into it,”  said drummer/ vocalist Maya Miller adding the Pack A.D. enjoy involving their fans in the process of making their music, so they have been holding several unique contests through their website.

“ We held a mix tape contest because we have an old school bus which doesn’t have a CD player, so we asked the fans for their mix tapes. It went over really well. We got 45 tapes. And lots of really good tapes too,” she continued adding their latest contest is to ask fans for drawings and and artistic renderings of the band. The best ones will be included in their next CD’s liner notes.

“Even if your picture doesn’t get picked, we will still send you a postcard. Actually, if you want one, we’ll send you a postcard anyway, because people like to receive things other than junk mail and bills in their mail,” she continued.

They have also released all of their records on vinyl.

The Pack A.D. aka Maya Miller and Becky Black, touring on their third full length CD “We Kill Computers,” are looking forward to returning to Lethbridge.

“We missed it on the last tour. But there’s people that we know there and anytime we’ve played there it’s been a real good party during the show. We don’t party much after the show because we always have another show to go to, ” said Miller taking a quick breather from her Vancouver home.

 She said they will begin work on their next CD in January and February, which will continue in on the more garage punk sound, the band has been building on, evolving from the more laid back blues sound they began with.

“When we recorded this CD, we wanted to play a set and capture it as close to how we perform it live. So far it’s going over well,” she said.
“Before, we wrote some songs which are just not meant to be played live, usually slower songs, because by the time we got on stage, people are usually drunk and ready to party,” she said adding the Lethbridge show will include most of the CD, maybe some new songs and songs they play live, but have never been recorded.

The band begins an intense cross -Canada tour in support of their latest CD, “We Kill Computers.” Sept. 8 in Edmonton. .  In addition to touring with the Sadies this year, they also went to Europe with west coast punk stalwarts, Nomeansno. For now the Pack A.D. will be touring Canada in September, then dip down into the United States for a month before returning to Europe with Nomeansno in November.

“Their audiences are crazy, in a  good way. They are  excellent musicians and really great guys. It is great to tour with someone you actually like on all levels,” Miller enthused.
“They’ll play a two hour show and we’ll play our 40 minute set and go “whew, that’s tiring,” then they’ll go an play a two hour set and make us feel stupid,” she continued.

“European audiences are great. They are there to see all of the bands while in North America, they’ll show up late just to see the headliners. They’re just excited to see live music.  And we always get treated really nice, they’ll always feed us. One night, after our set, we took a break and were about to load our stuff into the van and found the staff had already packed our gear into our van for us,” she enthused adding  she found touring the U.S., audiences are pretty blasé towards North American touring musicians.

They took most of the summer off to make the second and third videos for the new CD.

The first one  was for “Dear” , the most recent was for “Crazy,” which premiered on CBC 3’s website, Sept. 3.  

“It isn’t like most videos where the band is surrounded by girls in bikinis, Instead we got 18 of the band’s dude friends to  dress in next to nothing dancing around. It was pretty fun, and there is a lot of junk,” Miller continued adding they expect to release the third video, for “Cobra Matte,” in October.

“I’m not going to reveal what it is about, but it does involve food,” she  continued adding in January and February they will begin work on their next CD, which will continue in on the more garage punk sound, the band has been building on, evolving from the more laid back blues sound they began with.

“When we recorded this CD, we wanted to play a set and capture it as close to how we perform it live.  So far it’s going over well,” she said.
“Before, we wrote some songs which are just not meant to be played live, usually slower songs, because by the time we got on stage, people are usually drunk and ready to party,” she said adding the Lethbridge show will include most of the CD, maybe some new songs and songs they play live, but have never been recorded.

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