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Made up of Mike Wright (bass, vocals), Caleb Langille (guitar, vocals), Brad Lahead (guitar, vocals) and Noah Dalton (on drums; Dalton replaced his older brother Seamus after he left Halifax for school), York Redoubt may play with clock radios on stage, but no one can accuse them of wasting time.
Currently touring across Canada and into the States, the band recently produced a short run of cassettes to tide fans over until their anticipated debut record comes out on vinyl (as a split release on Noyes and Hot Money Records).
Lo-fi, melodic and mathy, with a penchant for adding unusual noises to recordings, York Redoubt sound like Built to Spill and Deerhoof, had both those bands spent time in Halifax in the early '90s.
"We love Halifax and we love The Beatles," says Lahead. "New bands around Halifax probably influence us the most." (SJ)
http://www.thecoast.ca/halifax/york-redoubt/Content?oid=1140870 - The Coast
York Redoubt
“I Said Slightly”
6/19/2009 By Ian Gormely
The Pixies loud-quiet-loud aesthetic got hijacked in the '90s as lesser bands (Silverchair, Bush, Everclear) ran ragamuffin with the sound, making it the most clichéd dynamic shift this side of a Korn breakdown. But as necessity is the mother of invention, a new generation of bands is taking the Pixies sounds to new extremes in both directions. I like to think of it as "noise-not noise-noise."
One of the best practitioners of this new aesthetic is Halifax's York Redoubt. Featuring Brad LaHead from the Got to Get Got and named after a national historic site and former military base in their hometown, the trio find a striking balancing between art rock and pop. Their best track "I Said Slightly" from The Ryan Allen EP is a fun, breezy example of their sound; out of a wall of lo-fi noise comes catchy, melodic singing. I especially dig the single note guitar line that follows the vocals. Then back to that awesome, arty noise. It's like the bastard child of Sonic Youth and Fleet Foxes.
The Ryan Allen EP is available for free download here. All three tunes will be included on the band's forthcoming self-titled EP, hopefully out very soon.
http://exclaim.ca/articles/generalarticlesynopsfullart.aspx?csid1=134&csid2=804&fid1=39324 - Exclaim
This trouble pulls my mouth shut...
...Whenever I'm with...you
http://www.herohill.com/2009/05/stingray-of-day-york-redoubt-i-said.htm - Hero Hill
Halifax has this propensity to insert pop into everything it produces. Maybe it’s because the musical land-scape is like a giant venn-diagram with every genre-cloud fornicating until the only thing left is post-frat-orgy-remorse. Who cares? At the end of the day you end up with boundary pushing music that is incredibly accessible. York Redoubt’s debut cassette, Cheap Funerals, takes the insane time-changes and chord progressions often seen in arithmetic-rock and calculates its anti-derivative (with respect to time) to produce math-pop; it’s weird, it’s changing, it’s catchy. There are red-line vocals, noise freak-outs, songs that sound like pre-Sook-Yin-The-Wedge, panned-guitars, and more! And they’ve fit it all on a four-song cassette. Bravo!
http://weirdcanada.com - Weird Canada
From the looks of it, these are two otherwise unrelated Halifax bands that O'Hanlon's managed to book on the same night. The post-punk lovers in Dog Day are making their way back home now. Night Group, their 2006 album, was released by Tomlab, the German label that's behind Final Fantasy, Casiotone for the Painfully Alone, and the Books and that's cool as Henry Winkler in his prime. Nowadays, they're on plain old Outside, who released Concentration this past May. The noisy guys of York Redoubt are on their way to Sled Island Fest in Calgary and, with the four tracks they have up on their MySpace, are kinda blowing me away. Mix innocent vocal melodies, heavy math rock instrumentation, and occasionally dark-as-coffee lyrics, and you've got the appeal of York Redoubt.
http://prairiedogmag.blogspot.com/2009/06/live-tonight-snfu-dog-day.html - Dog Blog
Gostei muito da resenha feita pelo Ian Gormely, pro Exclaim, no sábado. Pela descrição, e sem ter ouvido o som desse trio candense, fiquei entusiasmado, pois se por um lado a música atual vai nas fórmulas baratas, por outro, há um povo experimentando e levando as novas sonoridades a extremos. Geralmente, de difícil digestão, mas o que importa é essa inquietação e busca por uma sonoridade própria. Eis a linha dos canadenses, que disponibilizam seu EP aqui, intitulado The Ryan Allen, o qual possui três faixas.
Eu vou colar aqui o que o Ian diz a respeito da música “I said slightly“, a qual eu colo pra você ouvir, depois: “…out of a wall of lo-fi noise comes catchy, melodic singing. I especially dig the single note guitar line that follows the vocals. Then back to that awesome, arty noise. It’s like the bastard child of Sonic Youth and Fleet Foxes” (daqui).
http://www.innewmusicwetrust.com.br/2009/06/22/york-redoubt/ - In New Music We Trust
Discography
The Ryan Allen EP - June 2009
Cheap Funerals (Cassette) - June 2009
Coming:
York Redoubt (LP) - September 2009
Photos
Bio
One EP length cassette, a forthcoming full length LP and a cross Canada tour including an appearance at Alberta’s Sled Island Festival, York Redoubt refuse to waste any time.
After their drummer Seamus Dalton left for university, best friends Brad Lahead (The Got to Get Got, ex-Tomcat Combat) and Mike Wright (Hugs, Dishonest Mailmen) murdered their former moniker, recruiting Seamus’ younger brother Noah (Watermelon Eating Contest) bringing his own off-kilter sensibility (and kit setup). In the process they created their new musical manifesto: kill to create.
Recorded by Charles Austin (The Superfriendz), Dave Ewenson and Mike between the studio, their Oxford Street jam space and an abandoned school house in Truro, they produced a stunning mixture of Phil Spector’s wall-of-sound and the lo-fi aesthetic sensibilities of Phil Elvrum or Eric’s Trip.
Their debut is a glowing collection of wayward melodies, scraps of pop songs buried beneath broken radios and feedback freak-outs spliced full of field recordings and unorthodox sounds.
York Redoubt thrive on controlled chaos.
After finishing the record, Caleb Langille (Brent Randall and the Pinecones, The Gideons) joined the fold to add muscle as a second guitarist. With their fingers still bleeding from recording their debut, York Redoubt headed back to Truro to produce their Cheap Funerals EP, a violent collection of howled harmonies that cut through the darkness, lauded by Weird Canada as “boundary pushing music that is incredibly accessible”.
York Redoubt then spent their summer in a Sherman tank-sized van, moving from province to province, finally dipping their toes in the Pacific Ocean before coming back to Halifax. During their tour Exclaim! picked “I Said Slightly” as the track of the day, calling it “the bastard child of Sonic Youth and Fleet Foxes”. They also appeared in Halifax’s free weekly The Coast, in the annual “New Music Issue”, saying York Redoubt “sound like Built to Spill and Deerhoof, had both those bands spent time in Halifax in the early '90s”.
Comparisons aside, York Redoubt have created their own fragmented forward looking sound, to be available finally, on coloured vinyl in September of '09 jointly between Noyes and Hot Money Records.
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