THE BELLE GAME with Bear Mountain at the Drake Underground (1150 Queen West), Friday (October 25), doors 7 pm. $12.50. RT, SS, LN.
Andrea Lo remembers listening to Broken Social Scene in high school, and all the raw, teenage emotions now forever linked to their songs.
Those feelings came rushing back earlier this month when Lo – now 25 – and her Vancouver-based band the Belle Game took up residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts, where BSS members Kevin Drew and Charles Spearin are mentors.
“One evening Kevin performed Superconnected, and my Grade 12 heart just swelled up,” gushes Lo over the phone from Central Park in New York City.
The Belle Game honed their sound on their debut album, Ritual Tradition Habit (Boompa), released this past spring, and its dark orchestral pop featuring Lo’s powerful vocals has already made them critical darlings. But collaborating with Drew and Spearin was both enlightening and educational.
“Working with those guys really challenged us to let go of the structured way we write, and allowed the creative process to proceed more naturally,” says Lo.
“We’d be in our rehearsal space in the Centre and Kevin would walk in and be like, ‘You guys are talking too much. You need to play. Talk less. Play more.'”
The tough love was appreciated. “It was beneficial to be there, in the sense that we had authority figures for two weeks, people to cut the bullshit between us and tell us how it is,” Lo says.
The band had planned to work on new material, but achieved a lot more spiritually and psychologically, something Lo has been working at for the past few years.
On Ritual Tradition Habit she sings about her own history of self-defeating behaviour and thought patterns – a therapeutic experience she didn’t even realize was happening.
“It was a very subconscious process. After I had written everything, I was like, ‘Whoa, I guess I needed to get that off my chest.’
“Ritual Tradition Habit mostly talks about coming to a point in your life where you recognize you’re at a fork in the road and it’s a matter of making a choice: Do you stay in your comfort zone or do you branch out, look inward, change your surroundings and push yourself to become more?”
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