Back in the late 90s, you could usually find most of Toronto’s indie suspects clustered at Ted’s Wrecking Yard, a ramshackle-but-charming hole in the wall on College St. Far removed from the trendy martini bars that now litter the strip (sadly, the space that once housed Ted’s is slated to become one of those ubiquitous boutique hotels), Ted’s served as an incubator for many of the city’s nascent acts, including Broken Social Scene (who played several shambolic extended-jam shows at the club billed as “John Tesh Jr.”).
During that time, many a winter’s night was warmed up by dropping in to catch Latin-tinged outfit Apostle of Hustle, who used their weekly residency to flesh out their mellow, liquid take on guitar-based art pop. Apostle frontman Andrew Whiteman went on to join Broken, and as that crew took off in a big way, his own project took a bit of a back seat. Though he and Apostle cohorts Julian Brown (bass) and Dean Stone (drums) did make a record in 2001, it got derailed by the Broken steamroller and never saw wide release.
But recording Broken’s seminal You Forgot It In People in 2002 with producer Dave Newfeld led Whiteman to finally make the Apostle record he’d always dreamed of-Newfeld produced the sessions, various members of Broken were called upon to lend a musical hand, and the band’s in-house label, Arts & Crafts, released the album, Folkloric Feel, last September.
While it has the same expansive feel as Broken’s material, Folkloric Feel pushes the limits of ‘pop’ much farther, drawing on Whiteman’s extensive musical vocabulary (a veteran of the local scene, he logged time in the Bourbon Tabernacle Choir, Que Vida, and Do Make Say Think over the years, and also worked for a time at venerable literary imprint Coach House Press after attending U of T in the 80s). The Apostle sound is rather like an impressionist painting, dense and lush, the layers of sound revealing something slightly different with every listen.
“The songs went through radical reworkings” since the days at Ted’s, Whiteman says over the line from his Toronto home as his bandmates rehearse in the background. “I’d say probably the greatest change happened through the recording with Newf. Right before we went on tour with Feist in October in France, there were all these financial difficulties and stuff, and Dean was playing with Sarah Harmer, so Julian and I thought we were going to just do it as a duo-so we basically got all our instruments around us and tried to figure out how the hell we were going to play this Newfeld-produced layered loop. In the end, we got Justin [Peroff, BSS drummer] to come along and play drums, but even then, we’ve definitely gone through a lot of reworkings. Recreating, identity changing… that’s kind of what we’re good at.”
Europe proved especially receptive to Apostle’s high-art approach to pop-several French dates with Feist and an opening slot for Broken’s European tour in the fall meant that Folkloric Feel was being front-racked in record stores over there right alongside Feist’s rabidly-received Let It Die.
“Yeah, we’ve got something going on there,” Whiteman agrees. “Especially for us in France-at that time, our French distributor had folded, so these were people coming to see Feist; they had no idea who we were, they didn’t even know what the word ‘apostle’ meant-it took me the whole tour to realize it was ‘apôtre’-that’s what ‘apostle’ is in French. But we got fantastic feedback, and a lot of great reviews, and people stealing my ideas…”
Um, back up a minute there-people what?
“Just a rumour,” Whiteman laughs. “Julian and I do this thing where, when we go to a different place, we want to open our show with a theme, just to say, ‘Here we are in your country,’ you know? So for France, we learned an Erik Satie song, and that was really fun to play at the beginning of every show, because there was always a certain amount of people that definitely recognized it, and some people you could tell were going, ‘Where the hell have I heard that before?’ and then I just heard through the grapevine that a couple of people kind of got into that idea a lot, other French musicians and such.”
Back at home, despite Broken’s current notoriety and a bucketful of superlative reviews, Folkloric Feel has taken longer to catch on. Whiteman admits that his association with the beloved supergroup is both a blessing and a curse when it comes to his own work.
“In some senses, I don’t think my record would’ve gotten listened to, let’s be honest, if it wasn’t (adopting a whiny voice) ‘lead guitarist of Broken Social Scene’-that definitely got it through some doors. It might have worked against me; it might have worked for me. Some people might be like, ‘So what? I don’t want to hear about fucking Broken anymore. Sideproject? Get outta here!'”
One person who thinks that Apostle deserves an army of followers is none other than Leslie Feist, who often sat in on the Ted’s sessions back in the day, and who sings velvety backup vocals on several tracks on the record.
“I’ve been asked to make my ‘desert island’ albums list a bunch of times this year, and Apostle of Hustle was always at the top of the list,” she offers from Paris. “I can see how that could be seen as sort of dubious since I’m on the record-but I still stand by that! This album is the finally-courageous creeping hand down your back at the dance as you press into the guy you have a crush on… It’s sexy and beautiful and dark and confused.
“I watched this album being conceived for four years, through a 4-track, a church, a rented fluorescent-lit jam space and finally Stars and Sons [Newfeld’s studio]. It’s common to fall in love with someone’s urgent, raw demos, and then when you finally hear the record you feel disappointed, like they had thought about it too much by then, or there were too many cooks in the kitchen by the time the songs made it into a studio. But that’s not the case with this one (though I think the earlier versions of some of these songs deserve to come out in a box set someday). It’s an entirely rare album and I recommend it with all my heart.”
Apostle’s legion will undoubtedly grow now that Whiteman finally has some time away from Broken to take his crew on the road. The trio will be joined by flamenco dancer Ilse Gudino, who will lend vocals, keyboards, and Spanish percussion to the mix. As Whiteman chats on the phone, she’s practicing in the background with Brown, and despite Whiteman’s avowal that Gudino has never played keyboards before, the sound is intoxicating.
“Part of me could feel like [the album has gone under the radar], and be upset. Like, we just got turned down by VideoFACT, whatever, but that happens to a lot of bands. Also, we released the record in September, we played one show at Clinton’s and one at Pop Montreal, and then we were gone. And we’ve been gone. We haven’t played Canada at all. So I hope doing part of the Exclaim tour with the Stars [Apostle will be playing only the Western Canada dates], and going to Kingston and Ottawa next week will be good. We haven’t played Canada, and I really want to do that. Hopefully that will raise the profile some more.”
Whiteman’s looking forward to the change of pace of touring with three people instead of the Broken circus. He’ll open up a benefit show for the Toronto Public Space Committee (the fine folks who publish the nifty Spacing ‘zine) at the Bloor next week by playing some choice covers solo (look for him to tip his hat to his pals in Stars, Metric, and the Dears) before dashing over to the Drake for Apostle’s set.
“You go from playing in Broken into a three-piece band, and you’ve got to cover all the bases-it’s like, ‘Whoa, Jesus, I’ve got to sing, and do all that playing, and control the samples, and… It’s really fun.”
Apostle of Hustle plays February 18 at the Drake Underground (1150 Queen St. W.). Tickets are $10 at Soundscapes and Rotate This. Andrew Whiteman performs solo at the Welcome to Our Living Room benefit (with Sarah Harmer, Jason Collett, and others) at the Bloor Cinema the same evening at 8:30 p.m. Tickets are $14. For more info, see http://publicspace.ca.
