Sep. 10, 2008 - Issue #673: Sex in the City 2008

NQ Arbuckle

NQ Arbuckle gets it together and heads west

The last time that Neville Quinlan, the singing guitar slinger for NQ Arbuckle, was out in Alberta—a couple of years ago now, touring on his band’s 2005 album The Last Supper in a Cheap Town—he admitted that the group was already halfway through the recording of its next album. At the time, the quartet was working new songs into shape on the road, and as soon as the players had a grasp on them they slipped into the studio to record them one at a time, with hopes of pulling together a complete record. But the resulting recordings aren’t to be found on X O K, NQ Arbuckle’s latest.
 

“We ended up doing a bunch of songs that didn’t make it on this record because we were doing it in that weird way, and then really what happened was we suddenly realized that a year had passed and we hadn’t got our shit together, so we said, ‘OK, fuck it, we’re going in these weeks’ and then really started recording it in earnest,” Quinlan laughs, adding that even the songs that the band tried to record during those one-shot sessions went through some changes along the way. “So, ‘My Baby’ has gone through three different versions, and then ‘Huntsville Affair’ has gone through a bunch of different versions. So it’s little things like that where we just ended up being like, ‘OK, enough dicking around.’”
 

It’s not unheard of for a band to record songs more than once before finding a version that is deemed worthy of the finished record, but those “different” versions are quite often little more than the same song played the same way—maybe the band feels that one version is a better take than the other, but the differences are not always apparent to listeners. For Quinlan, though, there can be a lengthy road between the first version of a song and the one that ultimately makes the album.
 

“Yeah, like with ‘Huntsville Affair,’ [the album version is] drastically different,” he says. “A lot of the times I haven’t a clue what any of the songs mean until you sort of sit with them a little bit and then all of a sudden you realize that it’s not as angry as you thought it was or it’s not as happy as you thought it was, and then you kind of slow it down or speed it up accordingly. Arrangements are always on the go.”

 

Those arrangements start out with Quinlan putting fingers to strings and lyrics to chords, but listen to the way the band members play off of each other, working together to dress the songs up or strip them bare as needed, and it becomes obvious that, despite the NQ in the name, this is no solo act: NQ Arbuckle is a band where every player is necessary in the fight to keep the music alive.
 

“I just write the words and the chords to [the songs],” Quinlan agrees. “I sort of walk into our space and start playing, and then the guitar player’s gonna write the riff, the drummer’s gonna come up with a tempo that’s suitable, the bass player’s gonna come up with arrangement stuff—I can’t claim to just be going in and Svengali-ing everything. I don’t have the musical chops for that. It’s very much a group effort, and really, all songs are written by the whole gang.”
 

For Quinlan, the writing process is made considerably easier by the fact that the band is made up of four buddies from Toronto. He explains that he started playing with the Kesper brothers—drummer Mark and guitarist Peter—because they were in his favourite band until that group broke up, so he joined up with them, and bassist John Dinsmore is also an old friend. 
 

(Incidentally, there’s a Wikipedia page for NQ Arbuckle that says that Dinsmore was a professional bullfighter before he joined the band.  Quinlan says that he doesn’t think that’s true, though. Still, it’s an impressive rumour to have kicking around.)
 

The friends-jamming-on-the-back-porch approach carries over into the recording process as well, where the quartet—along with the occasional guest or two—put the songs down live. Of course, Quinlan says with a chuckle that tracking things live is only partly due to the band being able to do it.
 

“We’re not clever enough to be able to do it otherwise,” he says. “I’d like to try and do stuff where you’re overdubbing stuff and tightening things up and cleaning it up, but fuck, I’ll never do it. We’re too impatient. You know when you hear about bands and they do a song in a week or in a month of recording? I think, ‘My God, how can they possibly spend all that time doing it? Don’t they know what it sounds like?’ And yet I’d love to do something where everything is sort of done at a different time.

“That’d be kind of fun to do, but it never ends up actually working that way.” V 
 

Wed, Sep 17 (8 pm)

NQ Arbuckle

With Elliott Brood, the Pale Moon Lights

Pawn Shop, $20

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