Oregon Music News

“Louder and faster.”

That was the mindset of The Pack A.D.’s Maya Miller and Becky Black as they entered to the studio to record their fourth album, Unpersons, which was released on September 13th, 2011.

The gritty BC duo of Miller on drums and Black on guitar and vocals has always stunned with their potent, feral energy and a raw sense of their own “sloppiness”–a punk ethos their looking to embrace moving forward.

“You don’t have to be perfect, which we’re not,” Miller laughs.

The last time The Pack A.D. played Portland, it was a little-attended affair in the corner of Rontoms on a Sunday night.  Before that gig, I described them as:

A female Black Keys pulsing with crude, bluesy energy and endlessly crashing cymbals, drummer Maya Miller puts Meg White to shame while singer/guitarist Becky Black drawls and hauls with the best male garage rockers.

And while I’m sure they’re sick of The Black Keys comparison, they’ve got a leg up on the Akron duo–not to mention it’s still a wise positioning tool as the Carney/Auerbach team is the hottest rock duo since The White Stripes broke up.  It took The Black Keys seven albums to ditch their blues, but The Pack A.D. has made their first foray outside of their roots in three albums less.

It’s funny.  Neither of these bands really cared for the blues in the first place–it was just an easy starting point.  The Keys cite the influence of Wu-Tang and hip-hop (as they demonstrated with Blakroc) while Miller admits she’s been listening to dubstep lately.  Plus, her and Black have oft plotted “a secret side project”: “We’ve been talking for a while about doing an alternate band that would be an electronic band purely,” Miller confides.

Don’t worry, that won’t happened under The Pack A.D. moniker because as the blues get pushed aside in favor of garage punk, the girls still maintain their intentions to only record what can be reproduced live as a duo.

“We don’t really have any pretense to elaborate, orchestral pieces or anything like that,” Miller explains.  ”We wanna have as much fun as we would have if we went to a show.”

And for both audience members and The Pack A.D. to have fun, expect the music to get “louder and faster” while the lyrics reveal on their geeky pleasures: songs about break ups and monsters, in particular, on Unpersons.

“Sirens” features “an undersea creature” originally inspired by an episode of Angel (more on this later). There’s a Frankenstein reference plus robots and ghosts on ”Haunt You” (below).

In 2011, “We played the least amount of shows we’ve playing in three years,” says Miller.  Well, that’s about to change as The Pack A.D. hits the ground running in 2012 starting with a string of four NW dates in January, including the Doug Fir on the 19th, before more dates all over the US in March.

In the weeks following the holidays and leading up to their first dates of the new year, OMN spoke to Maya Miller on the phone from her home in Vancouver, BC.  With two and half months of touring already under their belts supporting Unpersons, The Pack A.D. already hit up most of Canada and the Northern US plus recently returned from Europe.

What’s been the most memorable tour experience so far supporting this record?

We did Canada and then some US dates and then we went to Europe and did shows in France and Germany and Italy and Switzerland.  We played a show in Paris and when we played our song “Sirens” this girl jumped up on stage and grabbed the mic and proceeded to do the chorus parts.  We couldn’t really stop her because Becky has to keep playing guitar and I can’t really leave the drums.  To her credit, she actually got it right.

I take it that nothing like that has ever happened before.

No. People will come up on stage and mosh around and launch themselves out into the audience. A very weird, new phenomenon we have is that some crowds will mosh to us–I think it’s because they can’t really dance to us so they just mosh.  But, people have jumped up on stage before but never actually presumed that they could sing the song.

Do you find people mosh more in certain places or countries? 

Uh, yes and no [laughs].  It’s kinda happening everywhere… I dunno, Vancouver, it’s happened in Toronto, it’s happened in the Prairies, it’s happened in the States like Fort Wayne, [laughs] Indiana… that was one memorable place.  It seems to happen a lot.  I don’t really understand it.  You know, more power to those people, I guess.

Besides the moshing phenomenon, what’s been the overall response to the album so far?

It’s been really good. I think with this one we kind of moved away a lot from what we were doing before, and I think that generally fans have been pretty accepting of that.  We just tend to play a loud, fast show anyways so I think they were kind of prepared for it to get louder and faster.  The response has been really super good actually.

These are the first Portland and Seattle dates, right?  

Yeah.

I believe the last time you were in Portland you were playing the corner of Rontoms in March 2010. 

Yeah, I think the last time we were in Portland was well over a year ago.  I don’t even think we had our third album out.  It’s been a while, we’re really overdue actually.  I’m pretty excited to go back.  Both of us really like Portland.

You guys were just at home for the holidays so did you finally get a chance to spend some time apart, away from one another?

Yeah, that’s actually what we do.  This is our time where we don’t do anything.  We actually have it blocked off so we’re not even seeing each other till we get back together to go out and do these shows.  It’s really good because you know, we spend a lot of time together and it’s just one other person.  The breaks are good.

Does anyone else ever join you on tour?

We usually bring a sound tech and sometimes we have a driver too so that always helps to just have other people around.  We’re pretty good, when it’s just the two of us, we know when to talk and when not to talk.

Obviously you two must have a pretty good dynamic to make it work for as long as it has.

We do actually.  What’s really fortunate is… we’re still friends.  Let’s put it that way [laughs].  That’s the reason why we never even added a third or fourth member to the band.  It just works and for whatever reason we manage to continue getting along with each other, and we think that if we threw someone else in it probably would disturb things, throw it out of whack and then it would be horrible.

Have you ever considered bringing someone else into the band, even if just for a single recording?

We considered it for literally five minutes when started the band.  We were like, “Oh maybe we should get a bass player.”  And then we just didn’t do anything about it.  I think it was just laziness, and then that just kinda kept going.  We’re still trying to maintain [the sound] in recording where we don’t want to put anything that we can’t really reproduce without bringing in other people.  So, it just seems easier to keep it the two of us.

There’s something about the power and authenticity of your sound that is incredible, especially when you know that it’s all coming from just two of you and it’s all being played completely live–which can be an amazing feat these days. 

Thank you.

The pure grit of your music also makes me think of simpler times before so many electronic devices came to the stage. Do you draw inspiration from a previous era?

That’s a funny question.  You’d think that we would but I don’t think that we do.  We both listen to a lot of electronic music actually.  Lately I’ve been listening to dubstep much to everybody’s chagrin but [laughs] no one wants to hear it in the band.  I don’t know why.  The stuff that either of us listen to compared to what we actually play is usually really different.  I really don’t know, I think it’s just that we come together and this is what we like to play when we’re together.

Are you at all technologically inept?  Could you use these devices if you had them? 

Well, I think we would become a totally different band.  We’ve been talking for a while about doing an alternate band that would be an electronic band purely.  It’s a secret side project, we just haven’t gotten around to it yet because we never seem to have time.

I’ve read that Unpersons is an album about breaking up.  What’s the significance behind the title?

The title… we both really like the book 1984 by George Orwell and the movie version so that actually came from that.  Break up songs, you know, they’re more fun to write than love songs–love songs are kinda dull.  Most of the songs are actually about monsters on the album, in one form or another.  There are ghosts and Frankenstein-type creatures and undersea things.  I dunno, it’s mainly monsters and break ups but the break up songs, like I said, are more fun to write.

What kind of monsters are featured on the album?

Well, in “Sirens” we’ve got an undersea creature of some kind of squid-like proportions, I’m sure.  Then we’ve got “Ghosts” and the Frankenstein thing on “Body Parts.”  And there’s another monster going on there… oh, if you consider robots monsters, but I don’t.  I like robots a lot.

“Sirens” (below) made a bunch of year-ender lists, congrats. 

Yeah, thank you… was kinda surprised.

Please enable Javascript and Flash to view this Flash video.

But I heard that while title might reference a mythical sea creature, it’s also a reference to an episode of Angel… like the Buffy spin-off?  Really?

Yeah, I know… I actually admitted to that one.  When I first started writing the lyrics it was inspired by an episode of Angel but then it kind of more changed into a general undersea creature.  But if anyone’s any Angel fan, they’ll know the episode that it’s definitely lifting from.  That’s my own sort of geeky admission.

And on that note, let’s talk about your image.  If I had to go on just your music and maybe a few press photos, I’d think you two were the hardest, badass Canadian chick rockers ever.  

[Laughs] We’re really nice people.  We’re really not… [laughs]

But upon closer inspection… I noticed your Star Wars belt buckle on the cover of We Kill Computers… 

Yep, yep.

And then there’s the Angel reference… so what kind of things are you actually into?

We’re into video games.  I just got for Christmas, I’m so stoked, it’s so awesome, I got the A Game of Thrones board game and you can get expansion packs of cards.  We’re both into comics.  Yeah… I’m obsessed with Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Angel, I wish they’d continued on.  We both have really geeky interests, we’re not very cool at all.  And we try and kind of put them in there because that’s the kind of stuff that we like.

You worked with engineer Jesse Gander at Hive Studios in Vancouver but producer Jim Diamond (The Dirtbombs, The Paul Collins Beat, The White Stripes) flew out to help.  Tell me about the recording process for this album.

It was different.  It was the first time we’ve ever really had a producer and I think that we didn’t have one before for a number of reasons, or we just didn’t think about it.  But it was fantastic, we couldn’t of asked for a better scenario.  I think a lot of times bands will go in with a producer and then everybody’s miserable and they want to change the sound of the band and that sort of thing.  Jim was amazing to work with, totally gets what we are and what we’re doing and just brought in these things that were so subtle.  It was really great to work with him.  He wanted to go to Vancouver, so that’s why we ended up recording in Vancouver and then the flip side deal was that we wanted to mix in Detroit.  So he came to Vancouver and we did that and then we flew out to Detroit and mixed at his studio.  It was great, it was like hanging out with a friend.  Actually, in a way, he was like the third part of The Pack temporarily.  He brought some really good stuff in.

On this record the sound, as you mentioned before, has gotten a bit louder and faster and lost some of the bluesyness of your earlier stuff.

Yep.

How would you say your sound evolved?  

Well I think it’s definitely gone, to my ears, we’ve gone garage punk, which I like the title of that because it allows for an energy and sort of a sloppiness–you don’t have to be perfect, which we’re not [laughs].  We like to keep it real.  As far as moving away from the blues, we only started playing that way because it was something that came natural at the time and was easy to do.  But then as we kept playing shows we realized we didn’t actually like those songs and we didn’t like playing the slower stuff–it wasn’t entertaining to us.  We liked playing stuff that was loud and fast so I think we’re finally getting closer to what we actually like with this last album.  I can’t even hear the blues in it anymore, maybe there’s one song that still sounds a little bluesy, but I think we may have finally stepped away from that on this one.

And of course the track “8″ epitomizes that punk spirit… 

Yeah, that was definitely influenced by the band Nomeansno.  We had a joke, we we’re practically their house band for a while–we supported them on three different tours in a row and that song is kind of our song to them in a way… the punk thing.  They put on such an amazing live show and I think that’s the best part of playing music; it’s not so much the recording, it’s actually playing the show itself and getting a response.  I think it’s fun to play stuff that’s fast and punky and kinda silly.

Looking through your Facebook and Twitter you’ve got a signature where you dub yourself “your band.”  What’s that all about?

That actually came from… well, I’ve seen this in movies and I’ve even done this before but you know if you’re at a bar or a club and your favorite song comes on, you ever heard someone say, “Aw, that’s my jam?”  [Laughs] So that’s where “your band” came from and we’re your band because we just wanna have a good time and we want people who are listening to have a good time. We don’t really have any pretense to elaborate, orchestral pieces or anything like that.  We wanna have as much fun as we would have if we went to a show… hence, we’re “your band.”

What’s next?  Have plans to release any new singles?

“Sirens” was released in Canada but it’s getting it’s official US release and along with that we’re releasing a video for “Sirens.”  I believe our song “Haunt You” is being released as a second single in Canada.  We’ll see how that plays out… this is an official targeting American thing.  We’ll see if it works [laughs].  We’re just a wee band from Canada, you know.

Forget the ass-kicking, rocker personas that you’re holding in your imagination, the girls of The Pack A.D. definitely have a sense of humor.  Check out the video for “Take”–an homage to Gary Numan’s video for “Cars”:

And see The Pack A.D. rock the Doug Fir on Thursday, January 19th with My Goodness. Doors at 8pm, show at 9pm, $10 advance, $12 day of show, 21+.