Give Me Something Beautiful

A recent trip to Montreal brought me into contact with a fantastic band with a grand name – Give Me Something Beautiful. Currently in the studio recording their first full length, Give Me Something Beautiful have a selection of EPs and a live recording available on their website.

The long, and slightly unwieldy, band name befits the uncompromising sound that Matthew Hills, Tyler Krebs, and Raphaël Pellerin have spent the past year moulding into their own – crushing drums, shrieking Jeff Buckley live at Sin-e vocals, and ‘cathartic rhythms’ all mix to give you something . . . er, pulchritudinous.

It is the perceived freedom to Give Me Something Beautiful that I enjoy – are the lyrics built around the music, or is the music carrying Hills’ lyrics to their ultimate conclusion? Either way, the result is a raw, almost jam-style, sound that carries through their available music.

Montreal has had its fair share of publicity in recent years, what with Arcade Fire finding success with Quebec as their home base, and it would be daft of me not to tip my hat to it. Music aside, Montreal is a myriad of visual distractions – rivers, bridges, canals, an old town, a predominantly French speaking quarter, a few large universities, but most importantly (to me), a large forested mountain close to downtown. The fusion of many different types of physical environments generates a joy for being outside. To aide the understanding of the city, my Canadian friend Kevin Smith, of Stevesmittens.com, once described what Montreal meant to him:

“Growing up in Toronto, Montreal always held a certain nameless allure for me. Toronto felt like the dorky younger brother, always wanting to tag along, and Montreal would grudgingly put up with it from time to time, as long as there were no cute girls coming. But it wasn’t until I moved to Montreal for a bit–and perhaps even then not till after I’d left again–that I realized what the name of that allure was. And it was self-confidence. Toronto seems to be the kind of place that needs to define itself in terms of others. Canada’s New York. Or Chicago. Or Hollywood North. Or Cannes. Whatever. I’ve never heard anybody make comparisons like that to Montreal–Montreal is itself, defines itself as that, and lets people take it or leave it. And inevitably they take it–they keep coming back, because no city can party like Montreal and everybody aged 18-20 from the North Eastern US knows it. And if all of that self-aware uniqueness could be distilled into a single image, it would without a doubt be a black wrought iron spiral staircase–the kind you see outside of every lowrise apartment building, the kind that must be a bitch to carry your groceries up when it’s -25 and there’s piles of snow and ice, that kind of staircase–that is Montreal.”

It makes perfect sense that Give Me Something Beautiful should reside in Montreal, for they manage to balance confidence, diversity and beauty to great effect. Throw in Hills’ subtly raunchy lyrics and you have yourself a party.

Take a moment to enjoy their live EP – produced especially to help fund their full-length debut. I am really looking forward to hearing it. - Ball Of Wax Quarterly

Give Me Something Beautiful


Je vous présente ici un trio de musiciens tout à fait spécial. Il s’agit de Give Me Something Beautiful, groupe émergent de la scène montréalaise qui a un EP et quelques chansons à son actif.
Réunis depuis à peine un an, ces musiciens offrent une musique tellement riche qu’on ne croirait pas qu’ils n’en sont qu’à leurs débuts. Chaque sonorité, chaque instrument et chacune des notes se complètent à la perfection pour former un tout complexe, mais si peu compliqué. Écoutez les premiers accords de leur chanson Nothing But Dirty Minded Saints et fondez. Laissez-vous emporter par l’inspiration, par le rêve, et par le son de cette musique unique. Une fois que cela est fait, écoutez les paroles, pensez et appréciez les mélodies assez légères pour faire planer ou pour réconforter une âme en quête d’espoir et de vérité.
Je crois sincèrement que les musiciens de Give Me Something Beautiful (Tyler Krebs, Matthew Hills et Raphaël Pellerin) ont inventé quelque chose de nouveau. Leur musique va droit au coeur et touche l’âme de ceux qui la laisseront les envahir.
Pour le moment, vous pouvez écouter leur musique sur leur Myspace, voici le lien
http://www.myspace.com/givemesomethingbeautiful - Marie-Laurence Rho

Give me something beautiful
Ajouté par : Marie-Ève Muller
Give me something beautiful
C’est juste 50 piastres

Trois gars de Montréal aux parcours divers et aux rêves contradictoires. Une annonce sur Craigslist (le kijijii anglophone) en juillet 2010. Une réunion ou plutôt, une union, créativement parlant.. À peine quelque mois plus tard, Give me something beautiful faisaient leurs premiers spectacles et enregistraient leur premier démo dans le nouvel auditorium de l’université McGill.

« Des amis nous ont invités à jouer là-bas. On s’est installé et là, on a vu qu’ils sortaient des micros. Alors notre prestation a été enregistré, comme ça, pour le fun, sans préparation », explique Matthew Hills, le chanteur et guitariste du groupe. Le premier EP Live @ McGill qu’on peut entendre sur leur bandcamp, amène une atmosphère feutrée et enveloppante. On peut y sentir l’émotivité du live sans le flafla d’une postproduction.

Non content d’un premier EP acclamé par la critique anglophone de la Métropole, Give me something beautiful tente d’avoir accès au mythique et exceptionnel Hotel2tango pour leur premier album complet. «C'est LA place à Montréal pour enregistrer. Tous nos bands préférés ont enregistré là. C'est un rêve.»

Mais pour ça, il leur faut un budget. Ainsi, ils tentent de convaincre le public d’être leurs mécènes à coup de 50$, parce que ça coute cher, vouloir être musicien. À l’aide de deux sites, de leur blogue www.itsonly50bucks.com et de leur site, les gars racontent leur processus créatif, leurs anecdotes de groupes, donne accès à du matériel exclusif. Une manière d’impliquer le public dans la réalisation de l’album.

Et ça marche? « On a réussi à amasser plus de 1300$ depuis le début. Ça vient par vagues. Nos pièces sont presque toutes prêtes alors on a hâte d’avoir le budget complet », raconte en anglais le chanteur sur Skype. Les trois gars ne diraient pas non à signer avec une étiquette, bien qu’ils ne haïssent pas s’autoproduire.

« On veut apprendre, lance Matthew Hills. On joue, compose, écrit, enregistre, mixe, réserve des spectacles, fait des entrevues. On n’a pas d’étiquettes pour le moment alors on veut apprendre à tout faire par nous-mêmes.»

Donc, Give me something beautiful vous demande de leur donner votre support et en échange, ils vous donnent de la musique, emballée par eux, ainsi que leur amour éternel. C’est-tu pas beau, ça? - 94,3 CHYZ

Q&A with Montreal band Give Me Something Beautiful

Give Me Something Beautiful, to me, is as much a mindset as it is a band name. The Montreal band has been hard at work for a while now — at first, playing under various names and just waiting for their sound to develop to the point where a name became obvious. If you listen to either their Live at McGill EP or the 7? they just put up on Bandcamp, I think you’ll agree that they settled on the perfect choice.
This Friday night, shortly after 11 PM, Give Me Something Beautiful play their first Toronto show at Rancho Relaxo. I had the chance to ask Matt a few questions in advance; the answers are below. Hope you can make it out.
Dan: So, the last time I saw you playing live, you were with After the Weather, a band that gathered some momentum and some diehard fans and actually did quite well here in Toronto. What is the number-one thing you took out of playing with that band and put into Give Me Something Beautiful?
Matt: I learned a lot (everything?) from my experiences with After The Weather, and it’s hard to really distill all of that into any one thing. The most positive aspect I can talk about is the flexibility that we used to put into shows; not having a set-list and playing to the room. I don’t know how well we executed that, but it was something we tried. I find it sort of tempting to figure out the order of a set before we hit the stage, but find once I get there that I was dead wrong and need to re-organize. The energy of the room dictates what you should be playing, and that was something powerful I learned from playing in After The Weather.
Give Me Something Beautiful, for the same reasons, also plays a lot more with silences and dynamics. Our range is much wider, and that’s something I learned in the last days of After The Weather; the importance of silence and space in composition. I want to be able to have a conversation with the audience, and for that you have to give them space to exist in the music, too.

Dan: I’m constantly hearing stuff from Montreal acts that haven’t gotten much exposure that it is truly hard to get gigs in that city — stories of booking months in advance to secure a Monday night where it will be tough to get people out, etc. Would you say that Montreal’s musical reputation makes it worth the hassle? Or is it as frustrating as I hear it is?
Matt: Montreal is an incredibly inspiring place to live, and every music scene has its difficulties and frustrations. If there’s a positive that can be gleaned from the way things are, it’s that — as a self-represented artist — you really SHOULD be living your life at least 4 months in advance anyways. Montreal teaches you to do that, or end up playing the off-venues. Some of these venues are perfectly fine, but it’s just as easy to get people to Casa Del Popolo on a Wednesday night as it is to get them to see a show at an off-venue on Friday.
The nature of the scene here is maybe a little more competitive than most places, for sure. This can make things frustrating, but it also makes them extremely rewarding. It at least teaches you, fast, to get your shit together. I feel like the support network has recently started growing again, though, and the loft scene has started to revitalize recently, which has always been an important aspect of Montreal’s scene. My opinion is that any scene is only as frustrating as your mindset.
Dan: I’m currently listening to your 7? on Bandcamp. Will this be available in time for the Toronto show at Rancho Relaxo?
Matt: We are working very hard to get the new Nothing But Dirty Minded Saints 7” together, but it’s coming down to the wire, and we are hand-making the packages — something we used to do in After The Weather, as well. It SHOULD be ready for sale; our goal was to sort of celebrate the return to Toronto with something special, and this was to be it. Of course we’ve run into some technical issues. That being said, we’ll be handing out download codes and, of course, we’ll have our EP for sale as well (also hand-made).
Dan: This is your first Toronto show with Give Me Something Beautiful, what can we expect from you as a live band?
Matt: I think we’re a very intimate and intense live experience. We demand a lot of attention, and our set doesn’t really work in a noisy room or context. We’re a little bit like going to church; we have a focus on the spiritual — or complicated — happiness that makes up life in our lyrics, and this is reflected in our live show, I think. We have a lot of bounce in our step too, but we’re not an aggressive band by any means.
Dan: I’ve been following you musically, well, pretty much since high school. But this band, more than anything you’ve done to date, has an undeniable maturity to it when I listen to it. Would you agree? Is this the music you always wanted to make?
Matt: That’s really difficult to say. I’m well aware of the maturity of our work and, individually, my progress as a musician and writer. I’m definitely at the height of my game in that sense. I think there’s a tendency, when dealing with a singer/guitar player, to imagine that a song-writer is a song-writer by himself, but I’ve always relied intensely on my band-mates for ideas and arrangements and After The Weather, for instance was really a collective. Give Me Something Beautiful is, too.
However, as a person, I’ve changed dramatically since high school (obviously) but also since After The Weather broke up. And I think I’m more in control of the musical and personal choices I make, and so, yes, in a way this is the music I’ve always wanted to make. But my music has always been the music I’ve wanted to make. I’m happier now, but I think that has a lot to do with my self-actualization as a musician and being happy with my personal space.
Dan: Let’s talk best-case scenarios. Say 2011 ends with a bang, what would 2012 bring for Give Me Something Beautiful?
Matt: We’re currently finishing the writing of our first full-length album, which should be out in the first quarter of 2012, in a perfect world. Our fan-funding site has generated just over a couple grand towards the production of our album, and I’m looking to keep pushing for grants. I just received a songwriting grant from Canada Council, essentially allowing me to focus on my writing and music for the next couple of months, so over that time period we’ll be organizing the first quarter of 2012, which should start to include more extensive touring, expanding our range to, hopefully, the U.S., and trying to push to get into the festival circuit (CMW, NXNE, PopMontreal) and onto the radio (college, community, internet).
And, of course a lot more writing. We’re expanding our voice a little; Tyler, the bass player, plays about 90 different instruments well, so we’re building up his little section of the jamspace and adding synths and loop pedals and guitars. Also he has a shockingly beautiful voice, so we’ll see? But I imagine once we finish this album, the real fun will begin. Hopefully, the world doesn’t end, because I can’t wait to see where we go.
Dan: Let’s close this off with something fun. Real talk. What happens first: the Jays win a World Series, or the Habs win a Stanley Cup? - Two Way Monologues

Give Me Something Beautiful
Ce sont trois gars qui font du post-rock/art-rock et qui le font bien. Ça sonne parfois presque Thom Yorkesque. La voix est mélodieuse et douce, et un côté jazzé donne un côté improvisé qui permet de belles envolées instrumentales. C'est enveloppant, très beau et ça s'écoute avec les écouteurs bien enfoncés dans les oreilles ou, encore mieux, en allant les voir en show. - www.Nightlife.ca