Think About Life's family business

Think About Life is the type of band that makes music writers
want to quit. It’s hard to write about them in any honest and
meaningful way without descending into lifeless party-band descriptors.
(“An exuberant live show! Charmingly shambolic!”) And really, it
doesn’t really do them justice. The facts, on paper: A few years ago,
Montreal musicians Martin Cesar, Matt Shane and Graham Van Pelt took
the energy that fuelled Montreal all-ages shows and
Casio-and-drum-machine house parties and created a self-titled EP. They
toured with Wolf Parade and went to Japan. They crowd-surfed, sweated
and screamed. They were, in short, cool as all shit.

For most groups, this is a decent start: a not-bad album and a spot
on Alien8 Recordings, along with some of the best outre acts in the
world. But this spring, three years after their debut, Think About Life
re-emerged with Family, a disarmingly tight new record with
dreamy vocals, sparkling samples and a groovy, amazing optimism. (The
group also boasts a new drummer, Greg Napier, formerly of Halifax’s own
Special Noise.) During a phone call from Montreal on a frigid
post-Thanksgiving morning, multi-instrumentalist Van Pelt insists the
story behind his band’s very grown-up new sound isn’t a big deal at
all.

“Oh, it’s not a very interesting story!” he says. “The first album
was recorded when we had been a band for three months. We just recorded
everything we came up with in our jam space. Martin sang, I wrote the
keys and Matt did the drums.” With the new album, “this was the first
time we sat down and worked everything out as a band. There wasn’t a
lot of delineation between roles. It was a real group effort.”

It would seem, then, that Family was borne from a literal
closeness between the three members: a moment of clarity when they all
realized they had lots in common when it came to sampling and song
content. “Having My Baby” takes its title from a sample that Van Pelt
and Cesar loved, sped-up and uttered throughout the song in a voice
that sounds female. Meanwhile, Cesar sings as if he were the one having
the baby and begs his girlfriend to stay. It’s a strange, heartfelt
role reversal laid over spangling keys and drums, reminiscent of the
Go! Team at their finest. And Think About Life does share that British
band’s childlike exuberance—there’s little hipster detachment or
posturing here. Van Pelt says the group couldn’t front the “right”
attitude even if they tried.

“We wouldn’t be able to pull off a really harsh stance,” he says.
“If you see us in person, we’re not super well put-together dudes
pulling off bold fashion statements or something. I’m not into that
kind of stuff. It’s not what I want to write.”

When he’s not playing with Think About Life, Van Pelt plays and
records with his sometimes-band, sometimes one-man project Miracle
Fortress, whose album Five Roses was nominated for a Polaris
Prize in 2007. Van Pelt sighs when asked whether he considers either
group a side project.

“Depending on what city you’re in, Think About Life or Miracle
Fortress is more popular,” he says. “I take both seriously. It’s funny
how you get in this loop of speculation. Someone speculates about you,
and you start to speculate about why they’re speculating.”

As more people get turned on to Family and witness Think
About Life’s ridiculously fun live shows on this leg of their tour, one
has to wonder whether Van Pelt, Cesar and now Napier will remain
unaffected by the ever-encroaching blob of media conjecture and that
old standby, blog hype.

“Ha! I’m not unaffected by that at all,” Van Pelt says. “Sometimes,
if you go to SXSW or something, you have an anxiety attack. I guess
more people are talking, and maybe there’s too many people talking
about it. My relationship to people consuming our music is based only
on live shows, because that’s where we see it. People make unqualified
statements, but it doesn’t change the fact that I really enjoy the
music most people make. And it’s nice to see when people are really
into what we’re making.”