With the trite and often make-up-break-up saturated lyrical content of modern music, the alt-country outfit Elliott Brood are known for taking a different musical tack; time travelling.
The space-time continuum-bending trio of Casey Laforet, Mark Sasso and Stephen Pitkin are known for their love of storytelling, a deep love of history and using everything from peanut butter jars to suitcases as musical instruments.
Celebrating a decade since their first EP Tin Type, the self-dubbed genre creators of “Death Country,” “Frontier Rock” or “Revival Music” are touring through the annals of time to Banff and Western Canada this fall.
Elliott Brood play The Banff Centre with Lucas Chaisson on Monday (Sept. 23) at 8 p.m. Tickets are $20 and can be purchased at banffcentre.ca.
Using aggressively strummed, distorted acoustic guitars, or a banjo that is shredded like an electric guitar, EB is known for a boundary-pushing musical style.
Much like the unidentifiable sound of the band, guitarist and vocalist Laforet was a cross-genre music lover from a young age.
“I grew up in Windsor, so there was always a lot of good Motown around, but I didn’t listen to it because that was my parents’ music,” Laforet said.
“The first soundtrack I ever loved was the Rocky IV soundtrack and it had a lot of really stupid, loud rock music. But I was also really into hop-hop, and liked N.W.A., Ice Cube, and The D.O.C. and then I was a victim of Nirvana when they exploded. I was a grunge kid – through and through.”
Attending the same high school in Windsor, Ont., Laforet and lead singer Mark Sasso both moved to Toronto in 2000 to pursue their musical dreams.
It was shortly after their calculated relocation that they magically met their drummer, sound engineer and third band member Stephen Pitkin.
“We were playing in the city and just gigging and we played at the Cameron House and Steve was doing sound there at the time, as he is an audio tech,” Laforet said.
“He came up to us after a show and asked us if we were recording, but we told him that no one had asked us yet. So we had six or eight songs and we recorded it in Mark’s apartment. Steve brought some gear over and we started recording, and he engineered our first record for us – then we asked him to play our CD release party, because we didn’t have a drummer at the time, and he’s been in the band ever since.”
Since joining forces, EB has been nominated for three different Juno awards, but the tenacious prospectors finally struck gold in 2013, winning Best Roots and Traditional Album of the Year in the group category for their fifth record, titled Days Into Years (DIY).
Moving away from the boxed-in, trite subject matter of makeups and breakups, Laforet sees music as a way to create and communicate stories about time-sensitive characters.
“A lot of the music we listen to is The Band or Bob Dylan or stuff like that, and they can mime those kinds of stories, and put you in a certain place. We try to use some kind of historical context to set an environment but we can go many places from there,” he said.
Focusing on the First World War, the band took a more electrically focused path and let the distortion of their electric guitars ring out on DIY, with Crazy Horse-esque tones on songs like “Northern Air” and “If I Get Old.”
“It’s important for us to tell a good story and we don’t mind changing the sound around,” Laforet noted.
“We like to take it to another time. We don’t do a lot of present tense. It’s almost easier to tell the actual story if you take it back a few years.”
The misleading name of the band, Elliott Brood, is also the name of an actual character, who often travels silently through different eras, and tells stories from a bystander perspective.
“We almost look at him like a thief in that he steals the stories and he’s the one telling them to you. We created him out of this photograph of a really old man, walking past a flourmill in the late 1800s, on one of our first tour posters. I always envisioned Elliott Brood to be that guy – with a long, white beard and someone who is watching it all and taking notes,” Laforet added.
Laforet and crew are happy to come back to Western Canada, and have some fond memories of Canmore from past tours.
“We played the Canmore Folk Fest a few years ago and there was a rule then that you couldn’t dance in front of the stage,” he added.
“The kids just weren’t having that while we played, though, and they sort of broke through the barriers and came and danced at the front and it just sort of happened. It got in the paper and I think the headline was ‘Crowd overwhelms security – folk fest dance party’ or something like that.”
