Jul. 25, 2012 - Issue #875: Shout Out Out Out Out
The Weekend Kids
Sat, Jul 28 (8 pm)
With Desiderada, Forester, Vermin in Vinyl
New City, $5
'A lot of bands mix hardcore and punk with dance music. It's the strangest thing," notes The Weekend Kids' guitarist Pete Nguyen. He's discussing sights seen on the cross-country tour his band took last year with Old Wives, two resolute Edmonton punk acts that found younger bands across Canada putting an unexpected spin on the genre. "There was a show we jumped on just outside of Toronto, in Cambridge ... There was a bunch of young bands, 18-years old or younger playing, and they were all auto tune and digital drumbeats and backtracks and stuff."
"They were full-out bands," he adds. "They just had all this extra stuff. It was the weirdest thing we ever played. And Old Wives, they're a lot older than we are, they were completely just thrown off by that stuff."
Not that Nguyen thinks it's necessarily a detriment to the scene, or his band's place in it— "It's cool that they'll still like bands like us, but they'll also like bands that are different," Nguyen says—But The Weekend Kids seem dedicated to a different evolutionary arc.
The youthful three-minute blasts of punky catharsis that graced its debut, Of Friends and Foes were followed by an EP, Run This Town, that saw the band sharpening its focus to the specifics of Edmonton. And now, as the band starts the initial shaping of new material—an upcoming split 7-inch, an acoustic EP and eventually another full length—the early songwriting they've done is hinting at a more mature album on the horizon.
"We're starting to write our lyrics a lot differently" Nguyen says. "For our first full-length it was a lot of writing about having fun and drinking and stuff like that, and now it's become a little bit more serious. [On] the Run This Town EP, the lyrics were really specific to Edmonton at the time. And it was a lot about playing music and touring and stuff like that. We had a lot of friends from different bands sing in the EP with us.
"There's a couple songs I've started writing, that we've started playing, that are about our shift ... 'Cause all of us are Asian, right? And for a long time, it didn't really matter to us," he says "But it really matters to a lot of other people in a different way. People would come up to you and be like, 'I didn't think you were going to be any good.' And they mean it as a complement in some ways, and I know they don't mean it that way ... but a lot of the newer songs are about being born in a different country and moving here, and growing up and trying to do the things you want to do, but not be treated as if you're a special case, doing the things you want to do. The lyrics are a little more specific this time around."
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