This Hisses Defy Homogeny with Neo-Punk Sophomore Album

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BY Stephanie Izsak on May 16th, 2013 in | 0 Comments

[Patrick Short, Julia Ryckman and JP Perron of This Hisses] This Hisses are having the time of their lives. The Winnipeg based trio are mid-leg of a Canadian tour in support of the sophomore offering Anhedonia, a second release from Transistor 66 Records following 2011’s Surf Noir. And from the dark corner of Pats Pub in downtown Vancouver where I met the band, they’re just picking up steam.
JP greets me with a friendly and wide-eyed boy-face and a greased up mustache that hooks to his cheekbones that I must fight the urge to touch for the next 30 minutes. We’re joined by Patrick and Julia, who keeps her sunglasses on the whole interview despite our dark little corner. She promptly orders a Belvedere G&T. I like these people.
Say the name of the band three times fast. Do it. Fun, huh?
This Hisses is being labeled as ‘glittery and cinematic’ with a ‘decidedly rock n’ roll aesthetic’. When I started prepping for the interview I found the repeated adjectives struck true, but there is another indelible quality to the This Hisses sound that really got me. When I asked them about genre, Patrick is quick to jump on the idea that they are an enigma on the Canadian independent music scene, having nothing to do with the homogenized push towards indie rock or neo-folk that seems to be bleeding out the veins of many young acts.
“I don’t like categories. I always find that whatever I’m doing, whatever this band is doing…one category doesn’t cover it. We’re basically a post-punk band in the sense that everything we do is informed by punk and the experimentation that might have happened in the early 80s. Bands were trying something a little different, but obviously had their roots in punk.”
The experimentation pays off here, the sound possessing an organismic beauty and clustered cohesion that sets them just parallel to the world of punk, swimming somewhere in a world less aggressive and more euphoric (depending on your definition…words, words, words…).
The band is mellow but chatty, fueled by good houses and the highs of tour life- notably a show at Wreck City, a make-shift venue/art installation erected along a city block in downtown Calgary the night before its demolition. JP beams at regaling the experience, Julia defining it as “definitely the coolest show I’ve ever played on tour. It was such a unique environment and a really diverse, inspired crowd to play for.”
To me, Winnipeg is a frozen popsicle that mysteriously pumps out artists and musicians of a caliber that the lay-person would think required a big bustling city with diversified cultural tensions to produce. “There are a lot of musicians in the city, and it’s not a big city,” says JP, “Per capita we have a lot of musicians and a lot of venues and a lot of competition- I think people sort of push each others buttons, and it makes for a great scene. And it’s been that way since the sixties with the garage-rock scene.” Obviously, I dont know my Winnipeg.
“It’s pretty slanted towards punk and metal,” adds Patrick. Why is that?
“We have really violent winters,” says JP, “they’re long”.
“People just kinda wanna get gross and trashy and metals pretty good for that,” quips Patrick, “Folk is…pleasant? I don’t know.”
“There’s a lot of garage rock. Our label is mostly made up of garage rock bands, and it’s mostly Winnipeg bands” says Julia, “there’s just tons of art.” When I plug that I’m an actor in my other non-paying life gig (sorry Rogers, maybe next month!) Julia smiles, “There’s tons of support for the Fringe! And film, lots of very solid arts and part of the reason is that it’s a very affordable city to live in.” The band carries a strong pull towards the collaborative, crossing paths with Winnipeg filmmakers in events like ‘Band Vs. Filmmakers’, where the two genres are paired, mixing sound and visual to create a cross-medium piece. If I had to keep any of the over-used descriptive terms for this band, it would in fact be cinematic; from the lace and smoke addled dream-esque video they created for track ‘Blacksmith’ with video kids Gwendolyn Trutnau and Ryan Simmons, to the evocative language they use to describe themselves (JP is listed as the ‘wrecker of all things wood and skin’) the band certainly thinks in the visual. Apres vous:

[Album artwork for This Hisses release Anhedonia] Without pretense, all three have a dogmatic devotion to being a musician of some form.
“90s alternative rock ruined my life,” says Patrick, “because once I got into things like the Smashing Pumpkins I started not doing anything else and just playing guitar all the time. I think as a teenager in the 90s, I was on the periphery seeing grunge music and alternative music happen, but I was too young to really get into it. Then when I got a little bit older, seeing how crappy rock music got in the late 90s, so then I got into punk rock. A lot of bands I was in before, same thing- they kind of vaguely remember Nirvana and they they kinda went ‘Hey, why did everything suck so much after that?’ And they started looking at the stuff that came before Nirvana”
From his rock- saturated youth to her upbringing in musical stock- Julias father having been a drummer in touring cover bands- “Back when you could make your money doing that,” she says- the opposing forces are surely part of the effective alchemy of the band, “I grew up with classical music, classical singing then got into opera repertoire- and I still study that- but in my mid-twenties, and this is funny because most people grew up listening to the kind of music that inspired them, that took them down this path…and I really did not know a lot about rock or punk until my mid-twenties. My brother gave me a Patti Smith record.”
One of the crucial elements in some of the best bands around is that their biggest fans are their bandmates- it simply makes for inspired music, good work begetting other good work. “I used to go and see this guy, JP, play in his old band Mohogany Frog…and he was just the most incredible drummer I had ever seen in Winnipeg. The way he moves, the way he structures rhythm, its all just like poetic. I almost want to say that (to JP) sometimes you play with a classical vibrato, you know? Giving and taking with some of the tempo.” Cue the boy-face blush and.. want…to touch…the mustache……
Julia mustered up the courage to ask JP to form a band with she and her old family friend Patrick. JP quickly came to reciprocate the admiration, “It’s amazing, actually. Obviously she’s got to warm up and get her voice right, but then once she’s gone on a take, it’s like- she’ll get it right. Like, right away. And if your standing in the studio during that take…it’s an amazing experience to see that happening”. Oh, the goddamn love.
I asked the band what the biggest challenges were being an independent Canadian band. Aside from the great distances one must cover to play multiple metropolitan cities (and by that I even mean Saskatoon) in this great BIG land of ours, they cited the strict ‘merican laws that make traversing down south tricky for a smaller act.
“Touring Europe makes a lot more sense,” says Patrick, “I mean they don’t even check your Visa’s half the time. You just go there and do a tour and everything is really close together and people want to give you beer”.
Do they care about generating a following in the States?
“It’s really hard to do,” Patrick continues, “Unless you do certain kinds of music, it’s really hard to find people, to create a crowd”
“It’s on our list of something to eventually get towards doing” says Julia, “Right now it’s really pushing the album in Canada, and we’ve talked a lot about how we would like to go and tour Europe.”
“We do want to go and play New York and Portland, though!” JP says and then bursts into giggles.
Oh, I say, do you watch Portlandia?
“Uh..Patrick knows a lot of bands there” he says, and I am so uncool. He sees my loser-kid eyes and adds, “but Portlandia is hilarious”. Mmm moustache.
This Hisses continue to slither across the country, heading east to shows at Le Cagibi in Montreal on May 31st, The Horseshoe Tavern in Toronto on June 4th followed by a spot in NXNE at the Hard Luck Bar on June 12th. Their album is available on iTunes.

These guys are going places, homogeny be damned.