The Darcys are a Canadian art rock quartet consisting of Jason Couse, Wes Marskell, David Hurlow, and Michael le Riche. Their dark, eclectic music has earned them a nomination for the 2014 Polaris Music Prize long-list as well as a 2014 Juno nomination for Alternative Album of the Year. In celebration of the one-year anniversary of their 2013 album Warring, The Darcys are beginning another Canadian tour spanning from Thunder Bay to Vancouver, with more tour dates yet to be announced. After grabbing some “Wespressos” (a play on Marskell’s first name) from their favourite local coffee shop, Couse and Marskell sat down with The Varsity to discuss the state of Canadian art and their continuing music career.
Art Rock
Reflecting on their body of work, it makes sense that The Darcys are labeled as art rock, which Marskell references as “sort of like rock or alternative rock. It was a tag that was sort of applied to us. It sounds really pretentious.”
Art rock, a subgenre of rock music, is loosely defined as music with a complicated or conceptual twist that is influenced by other forms of art. The Darcys’ discography follows this, tracking an intense journey heavily influenced by literature.
“I got this [New York Times] list of the best 25 works published in the last 25 years and [Cormac McCarthy’s] Blood Meridian was number two on the list,” Marskell explains. “All of those books on that list were all books we read or I read during the making of [Warring] and they all have similarities… but those I think informed the record as much as anything else did.”
Couse and Marskell of The Darcys. EMILY SCHERZINGER/THE VARSITY
McCarthy’s influence has leaked into more than just the band’s latest album. McCarthy’s Cities Of The Plain inspired “Hymn for a Missing Girl,” a throttling 22-minute composition released by the Darcys for the April 2014 Record Store Day that sold out in limited edition vinyl in five minutes.
Marskell also references Don De Lillo as an influence, as well as Philip Roth’s American Pastoral as a “big book when we were writing.” As a result, Marskell explains that the writing on Warring was “less specific and the lyrics are not one-liners. They’re more drawn out.”
Canadian art
The amount of American literature that has influenced the band is not to take away from the Canadian-ness of the album. Their most recent album is also arguably the band’s most Canadian effort.
“There’s something sort of effortlessly Canadian about our record that we weren’t even trying to do,” explained Marskell. “As a Canadian living in Canada, producing a document of being Canadian, it sparks a similar idea [to other forms of Canadian art]. There’s the Canadian sublime element. I think that, with that beauty and that awe, there’s an inherent darkness to the whole thing.”
Similar to Alex Colville’s paintings or Alice Munro’s short stories, there are elements of sinister Canadian nature tracked throughout the album that the band picked up from touring the country. Couse points to the “universal experiences” of travelling vast distances and the creeping isolation of being on tour.
“There’s so many times… your car breaks down outside of Edmonton, or you slide down the side of a mountain in B.C., and it just has this darkness that’s just inherent to the landscape and it comes out lyrically,” Marskell elaborates. “When you start to connect a few images, you see a very bleak, dark space and it’s a portrait of touring Canada as a rock band.”
“Hunting,” the second track off of Warring, even goes so far as to track the death of Tom Thomson, a Canadian artist, through the lyrics, in an attempt to understand his death and how, as Marskell explains, “generally, people are drawn to the darker bits of the world.”
Couse and Marskell of The Darcys. EMILY SCHERZINGER/THE VARSITY
“Play in School” Campaign
One of the topics Marskell and Couse were visibly most passionate about was the beginning of their “Play in School” campaign, which initially involved a series of free performances and workshops in 2013, hopefully to extend to schools across the country in 2014.
They are openly critical about the music programs in high schools, citing the “antiquated model” of teaching classical music instead of having more modern options, such as music editing programs.
“There’s a lot of awesome and interesting and financially stable jobs in the music industry beyond just playing in a band,” Marskell explains. “I think we were hoping to spark some debate.”
Although school music programs “are great for introducing people to a different way of thinking,” Couse admits, it isolates a large population of students that are interested in the technological side of music.
“Just because you don’t excel in the music program doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use resources that are still in a school or could be in a school,” Couse explains. “I mean, we always went in our own direction with that kind of thing. Every time we could apply a school project towards music, we would. And all of a sudden it became our full-time hobby.”
Next steps
Ultimately, The Darcys are still excited by Warring, and are looking forward to their tour and the future of their promising music career.
“We’ve been trying to reinvent our creative process and how we write songs,” Marskell explains. “I think it’s been a really interesting period for us because it really allows us a lot of freedom. We just have a blank slate.”
“We’re trying to forget everything that we know about writing music and kind of reestablish the way we work and reestablish the way we think about it,” Couse explains. “Warring was something that we wanted to do for so long, and we did it. But what does this mean as a symbol of something that represents us and our lives in the world? I mean, now it’s a year old and it’s away from us. And, in the words of Tom Petty, ‘the future is wide open.’”
