Manitoba Music

Les Jupes

Indie, Pop, Rock

"...as epic as it is primal and as stirring as it is sad and introverted".
[National Post]

"A triumphant debut."
[FFWD Magazine]

"Patient and profound."
[Hour Magazine]

Les Jupes are a new band from the centre of Canada versed in expansive musical landscapes, sharp lyrics and an observer's eye for the world. They are four Anglos with a French name making big, broad and determined music. And they are at the centre of a prairie renaissance growing around Head In The Sand Records.

Their debut album Modern Myths is built on Michael Petkau Falk's baritone charging through waves of psychedelia and driving rhythms. Pounding, introspective, at times fierce, at times playful. It is purposefully dyslexic - an echo of the characters entombed and a mirror of the writer. Having moved to Montreal and quitting music in 2005, this album culminates the creative turnaround of "the patron saint of the Winnipeg music scene" (Jaxon Haldane) - a process which also brought us the Record Of The Week Club in 2009.

Modern Myths was recorded over a year and a half when Montreal producer/engineer Marcus Paquin (frontman of Last Gang's Silver Starling) found time from working on Arcade Fire's The Suburbs. Marcus and Mike have that rare magic found in friends who share similar musical visions.

And what of the songs? There is one for Nikita Khruschev, Stalin's Ukranian heir and cold-war architect. There is one for someone wrestling with depression and an eating disorder. There is one for Chicago. There is (ironically enough) one for people who take things too seriously. There is Awake, My Ghost! written the day before a kind man and passionate music-lover took his own life. And there is One Solemn Oath, the album's thematic centre.