Random Family want to be your favourite band. It’s music by way of collage: pop meets post-rock meets indie, before a delay pedal devours the whole thing and regurgitates it in a glittery shower of sound. You can catch Marcus Retterath, Aaron Lyons and Alec Forbes filling Lee’s Palace with sonic dreamscapes tonight at 9:30 p.m. Try them on for size, wear them like a coat.
Your songs grow out of very different seeds — upbeat pop; washed-out psychedelia that wouldn’t be out of place on a “chillwave” (sorry) album; ambient Explosions in the Sky-type instrumental barn-burners. Do you guys set out to make a certain "type" of song, or does it just come out that way?
Often I’ll bring the initial riff to the band, and we’ll just kind of work organically off of it. It all really depends on that initial riff and where it takes us. We never set out to make a certain type of song, but we might pull on influences once we realize where a song is headed. We’re a really adaptive band, and we love to play our songs in different ways every time we get together to practice. We never force it, and rarely will a RF band practice ever dissolve into ‘I think the song should go here next…’ It’s just not how we operate.
How do the songs evolve? Is there a central songwriter, or is it totally collaborative? You’re the rare band where I’m not sure.
I suppose that I’m the central songwriter. I say ‘I suppose’ because I bring the original riff to the table, but it often changes so much once the boys get the rhythm behind it. Better too. Each member is a self-taught musician, and that frees us from the pressure of working within convention. Sometimes the ideas don’t start with me, though. The verse bassline in ‘Trouble’ was written by Aaron, and it kicked off the creation of that song. I added my guitar, he figured out the drum beat, and Alec filled in the bass for the rest of the tune.
I’m reading Broken Social Scene into the feel and vibe of these songs, especially the crescendo-to-relaxed-to-crescendo-to-relaxed dynamic. Do they figure into your thinking, or if not then who?
We really dig BSS, and most of the acts on Arts and Crafts for that matter. BSS definitely influenced songs like ‘Wait’ and ‘Touble,’ the more upbeat stuff. A lot of the instrumental tunes are influenced by Do Make Say Think, who are one of our biggest influences. That record changed the way I felt about music a long time ago. We also pull from more ambient influences like Sigur Rós. When I listen to Sigur Rós and Do Make Say Think I feel something. And that’s what I want RF to do. I want people to listen to these songs, and not necessarily the words, and feel something. Feel a movement in the music, whether it’s happy, or sad, or reflective.
Listeners have remarked on your MySpace about the cinematic quality of your music. Who would (hypothetically) direct the (hypothetical) Random Family film, and what would it be about?
The obvious answer for me here is Spike Jonze, just because I like his work and I especially love what he did with Arcade Fire and The Suburbs. His movies, whether you like them or not, are very immersive and he knows how to develop character in a short amount of time. I suppose the film would have to include lots of different locations and backgrounds to cover the different moods we convey. I think a good RF movie would just be entirely based off the story in The Gun. We’d be covering all the bases (laughs). Father issues, war, love, redemption, purpose. ‘EverythingReturnstotheWater’ may be our most cinematic song — definitely an apocalypse scene. We’d love to get some videos together, and it may be one of our upcoming projects.
What’s in the future for Random Family?
Well, we put out a CD in May and we’ve just been promoting it with shows. So we’re looking forward to playing more in Toronto and just spreading the word about that. We’re planning on recording once again in the late fall/early winter. Just an eight song EP to get some new material off our chests. We also want to release the songs we didn’t put on the CD on the Internet for free download. There are some gems there that just didn’t make it on due to time constraints or us feeling that 19 songs was too many for a first release. Fourteen seemed a more reasonable number for an indie band (laughs). So expect all of that in the next few months. We’re really excited to be playing our first gig with Collective Concerts tonight at Lee’s Palace, and hopefully they’ll pick us up to play the area more. We’re dedicated and we’re having fun.
Random Family, Lee’s Palace, Aug. 4