Time: 9:30 p.m.

Cover:

 The Zolas:http://www.myspace.com/thezolas

The Zolas' debut album 'Tic Toc Tic' mixes infectious indie-pop songs with hairpin turns, schizoid piano throwdowns, and a sort of cabaret strut. This prog-pop treasure chest is equal parts catchy and cryptic; it's like Justin Timberlake meets The Beatles, or maybe Coldplay meets The Clash.

There’s something happening on the west coast. Whether it’s in the air, the water, or the drugs, a pool of talent has formed around the notion that you can have your pop and eat it too, with brainy, prog-influenced weird-beards like Bend Sinister and arcane psycho-confectioners Mother Mother demonstrating that musical complexity can still be hummable. Commercial, even.

Throw The Zolas into the picture and dammit – you might even call it a scene! Not that it’s ever been a concern to long-term musical partners Zach Gray and Tom Dobrzanski, who established their gifts for intricate songcraft three years ago under the name Lotus Child.

Since then, the duo has finessed its formula into something even busier yet no less direct, filling their new album Tic Toc Tic with hairpin turns, schizoid tonal shifts, multiple parts, and a sort of cabaret strut.

Miraculously, between New Pornographers vet Howard Redekopp’s unfinicky production and the clarity of Gray and Dobrzanski’s vision, Tic Toc Tic works like a charm. Complex without being alienating, it aims equally and with dead-eyed precision for the head, heart, and groin.

Guitarist-vocalist Gray hits on the twin poles that define Tic Toc Tic when he reveals an equal passion for the visceral Scandinavian dream pop of Mew, whose influence is obvious, and the classic music hall rag of the Kinks, whose influence is anything but. Not on first listen, anyway, though the presence of Ray Davies is felt in Gray’s lyrics. Particularly when he turns his attention to the mundane, like the character in “You’re Too Cool” who wrestles with his vulnerability at Vancouver’s hipster HQ the Biltmore. Or the confessional “Body Ash”, which documents a relationship on the ropes. The directness of its sentiment echoes what Gray describes as Davies’ “populism”.

Boxing the listener with their virtuosity right off the top, opener “You’re Too Cool” is six minutes of fortified waltz-time piano dissolving into what Gray characterizes as an “anti-chorus”. “The Great Collapse” is swaggering and deceptively sunny power-pop for apocalyptic future scenarios. “Marlaina Kamikaze” bounces between big band stickwork from drummer Ali Siadat, braying trumpet, and a decadent stride-piano breakdown.

Meanwhile, “You Better Watch Out” has Gray anguishing over a cute girl on a bus while cascading piano arpeggios and Aidan Knight’s hyperactive bass push his suffering to operatic levels of high drama. “Queen of Relax” is featherlite prog, and “Cab Driver” somehow contrives to be both the most straightforward number on Tic Toc Tic, and the most demanding. “It’s the most fun to play,” says Dobrzanski, who caps the song with a libidinous boogie-woogie throwdown sizzling enough to give “Honky Cat” era Elton a case of pianist envy. “It’s a rock-out,” he continues. “I like the athleticism involved in parts of it. It’s actually work.”

If “Cab Driver” finds the Zolas in an almost conventional mood, “I’ve Got Leeches” and album closer “Pyramid Scheme” both explore the fringes of the songwriting team’s expanding universe. Gray describes the first as “baroque” and “Bowie-esque”, while the latter, he admits perhaps a little freely, “is one of the tracks where we never cared if anyone ever listens to it.” As such, it includes what Gray calls “a vaguely Maori, haunted house, war chant section.” Deadpans Dobrzanski, “That moment might come across as a bit out there.”

In truth, Tic Toc Tic is a little out there from bar one to its closing outburst of unbound inspiration. Perhaps it has something to do with the duo’s seasoned friendship – they met as choirboys in Grade 9 – or a working relationship that begins with Gray broadstroking ideas and passing them along to Dobrzanski, his classical musically inclined “details guy”.

Whatever alchemical thing lies beneath the sparkling progressive pop of Tic Toc Tic, the partnership has made its great leap forward. It’s our job to catch up. And we should consider it a pleasure. 

Henry and the Nightcrawlers www.myspace.com/henryandthenightcrawlers  or www.henryandthenightcrawlers.ca

The Pacific Northwest – forests ever green, intertwined with life and moisture, tracked by back roads, the lost and lonely, the seeking and the sought, and solitude; here arose Henry Alcock-White. At first, the boy, time spent exploratory – knee deep in the marsh, soul bent on catching tadpoles or trout; and time spent farm-wise – herding renegade sheep, and sending thoughts across the wilderness of home in British Columbia. Close ever to the sea and the swamps, shushing cattails and bugling bull frogs, the roar of floatplanes, and the damp, salty moan of the country – this place is the pulse, the rhythm of Henry's music and the course of his blood.

Then later, the man, time spent exploratory on another other rocky island, Aran Ireland – remote west coast, time of difference, time of delving – to hone that pulse and craft the sound, to listen to the wind, walk cliffs and again, soul bent on the catch (Mackerel this time), to search for the musical fissure in which to securely place his art.

He found it, the fissure, in between two rocky islands – and went home to Vancouver.

Back in the city, Henry formed Henry and the Nightcrawlers, and joined the prog-pop-indie-rock band Bend Sinister. Fissure opened - over the course of two years the debut album of Henry and the Nightcrawlers was written and recorded: 100 Blows comes out in the spring of 2010.