"I'm on the fence about ghosts. People say they see them, but they could just be lying," says CROSSS' Andy March. "I'll go out on a limb and say I believe in psychic surgery, something like exorcism, but you know, the real kind, the underworld/subtle-body type."
The high priest at Youth Club Records summons the supernatural with Ryan Allen and Nathan Doucet to release CROSSS' first LP,
Obsidian Spectre, at the Seahorse on Friday. Also up for grabs: a wicked new EP by reverb-surfing Monomyth and screamo by Castle Wolfenstein.
CROSSS' first long-play comes out after March lucked in with one of Toronto's most interesting labels, Telephone Explosion Records, home to releases by Ty Segall and Soupcans.
"They took to the demo, asked us to expand into an LP, and Bob's your uncle," says March. CROSSS recorded the A-side at Echo Chamber Audio in Halifax; the B-side was laid down at Drones Club in Montreal, "in one continuous improvised take, from beginning to end."
With a bunch of members before its current lineup, CROSSS' dark and heavy distortions have been chilling bones since 2009. But March says the LP, which he's been working on for a few years, is a good record to take in alone: "Maybe at night, maybe as something is dying and something else is sprouting up, the coming together of disparate things."
The show starts off CROSSS' 30-plus date tour across Canada and the US, including Calgary's Sled Island music fest in June.
For March, who presently lives in Hamilton, the show is a return to Halifax, "which is still home, probably," he says. "I believe in travel, and if travellers who leave their bodies behind are ghosts, then, okay, yeah, I probably believe that there is something you could call ghosts."
CROSSS
w/Monomyth, Castle Wolfenstein
Friday, May 17, 10pm, $7
The Seahorse, 1663 Argyle Street