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Music

Fevers

FEVERS with ADALINE, THE BEACHES and BARBUDOS at the Horseshoe (370 Queen West), Tuesday (September 3), doors 8:30 pm. Free. See listing.


Fevers are a very Canadian band. They come from towns large and small, they’re bilingual, they live in the capital.

They’ve also embraced a genre of music – electro indie rock – in which Canadian bands currently thrive, though they arrived there in a roundabout way.

“For us it was totally by accident,” says guitarist/vocalist Colin MacDougall, fresh off the Fevers 24-hour album release party in Ottawa.

“I’d been playing in the rock genre for a while and I was eager to try something out, but all I knew was indie rock.” Fate had him playing on the same soccer team as British expat Jim Hopkins, now the band’s bassist and programmer, who was expert at producing beats and samples on his computer. The two “musically hit it off,” wrote a few songs and eventually took guitarist Martin Charbonneau and drummer/percussionist Mike Stauffer into the fold.

For a while it was MacDougall’s voice on the demo tracks, but the group soon realized they needed “a voice.” They found it in bilingual singer/songwriter Sarah Bradley, a Sudbury transplant, after Charbonneau met her at a Franco-Ontarian music festival. In possession of more than an ethereal, Andrea Corr-like croon, Bradley leant the group creative diversity.

“Sarah’s a great songwriter herself, so this last record was a collective process. Her songs came on and my songs came on and it all came together,” says MacDougall. Fevers, however, are very much a fivesome. For their debut LP, No Room For Light (independent), they holed up in a cottage an hour north of Ottawa to write and make working demos before linking up with producer Laurence Currie and recording in their home city as well as Toronto.

Thrilled to embrace a new-wave digital sound, the band keeps a foot in traditional songwriting, too. “It’s important that in general all the songs are able to stand alone, so you could sing them around a campfire. They still have a good song structure, a good vocal hook, a melody.”

Hence that massive Ottawa party – where the band played three shows in 24 hours, ranging from stripped-down acoustic to full-blast dance-rock. (Their album lies in the middle – nuanced indie-electro that’s dancey on one track and rock ‘n’ roll on another.)

Their tour won’t be quite as intense but will have them travelling across eastern, northern and southern Ontario for six shows in eight days. “This will be our first time cramming ourselves into a van, bringing tents and sleeping on people’s lawns,” says MacDougall, before adding with a laugh, “We love each other now as a band…. We’ll see at the tail end of it.”

julial@nowtoronto.com | @julialeconte

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