When the Darcys finally released their long-awaited self-titled album on Arts & Crafts last November, they promised that fans wouldn’t have to wait nearly as long for the next one. What they didn’t say, however, was that the next album would be a full-album post-rock reinterpretation of Steely Dan’s 1977 classic, Aja.
At least not officially, anyway. The Darcy’s Aja record, now set for release on January 24 (free, like their last album), has been a poorly-kept secret in the Toronto music scene since its inception.
When I went on tour with the band to Halifax Pop Explosion back in October, all they would tell me “on the record” was that the next album would be “a curveball art project,” even though I had sat in the backseat of their tour van while they played it for members of the Meligrove Band the night before (and later lent them their copy of the original Steely Dan album to play in their own van).
Now that the cat’s out of the bag, I called up drummer Wes Marskell, who took a break from band practice to give some more concrete details.
“Basically, it sprung out of creative frustration,” he says of the album, which the band recorded at the apartment of Marskell and lead singer Jason Couse while their self-titled remained in limbo.
“We had this record that we thought was done, that we thought was finally over, and it just wasn’t. We had to keep recording and mixing and mastering. And as it was lying in limbo, we couldn’t really record a new record because we didn’t know what was happening with our old record. Somewhere down the line, we came up with this fantasy of covering Aja.”
How it turned from a fantasy, a self-admitted joke, into a full-realized album stemmed from the band’s weakness for discretion.
“I started to talk about it openly to people, as if this joke idea was actually something we were working on,” admits Marskell. “It was just something I was spouting on about because I was sick and tired of talking about why the record’s not finished, why the record’s not out. But I planted enough seeds that we either had to deliver on it or look like idiots. And then it was hard to keep it a secret in Toronto because we had run our mouths to so many people.”
Despite the concept’s origin, Marskell insists their version of Aja is no joke. Aja is both his father’s and Couse’s father’s favourite record, and so they made sure to treat it with the reverence befitting of their early musical upbringing. The Darcys’ Aja strips the songs of their professional “yacht rock” sheen and rebuilds them in their own brooding, atmospheric indie-post-rock style.
Doing so, however, was no easy task. Aja is infamously the apex of Steely Dan’s studio perfectionism, an album that was meticulously recorded by Walter Becker, Donald Fagen and the era’s most immaculate session musicians. Legend has it they even rejected a guitar track from Dire Straits leader Mark Knopfler for not being “perfect.”
“We sat down to do it and realized ‘oh fuck, this record is really difficult’,” Marskell says. “It’s intensely dense, and it took a really long time to learn how to play. But what we learned during the process is that these are really dark songs dressed up as ‘70s pop jams. When you strip them down they’re really dark and interesting.”
The Darcys have been practicing playing their chilly version of Aja live and hope to eventually perform the album from start to finish. First, however, they’ll be on tour until April with Bombay Bicycle Club and The Arkells, before they return home to Toronto for a live date at Downsview Park on July 14 as part of Edgefest.
And don’t be surprised if it’s not long before the Darcys next Arts & Crafts release, a full-length LP comprised entirely of originals.
