Controller.controller’s music is somehow no longer on Spotify. So now I have to actually watch some of their music videos. I’m not sure what’s going on in this one.
I must be your mother / All your life is all my fault
I just found out that Toronto band controller.controller are reuniting for a couple of gigs in February. These guys were Canada's equivalent to Bloc Party or Franz Ferdinand back in the mid noughts when that whole angular Gang Of Four dance punk revival was going on. Let's hope this isn't just a one time thing and they decide to record new music.
"Tigers not Daughters" is taken from the 2005 controller.controller album X-Amounts.
Controller.Controller Try To Keep Their Cool Amid The Chaos
Originally published in Eye Weekly.
Frontwoman Nirmala Basnayake nurses a coffee and speaks with a scratchy voice that bears faint resemblance to the one that's been blaring almost every night in almost every Canadian city for the past five weeks. Drummer Jeff Scheven passes around paper towel to alleviate his mates' post-tour sniffles. Guitarist Scott Kaija sits quietly; his six-string accomplice Colwyn Llewelyn-Thomas, even quieter. Only ever-debonair bassist Ronnie Morris looks like someone who could step up to Controller.Controller's rep as Toronto's suavest disco-punk sex machine, but it's only Wednesday afternoon, and his chair's just too comfortable.
When Eye Weekly first sat down with these same five people two and a half years ago, they were talking about how they came together. Today, we can only hope they're not falling apart. Because everything they've achieved in the past two years -- opening slots for Franz Ferdinand; Pitchfork praise for last year's debut EP, History; international tours with Death from Above 1979 and The Organ -- has come with a price, at times a painful one.
Earlier this year, Scheven's appendix ruptured, forcing the cancellation of some gigs. Controller.Controller's long-suffering van -- previously subjected to a blown transmission, blown tires and inter-cabin fires that have left the band stranded everywhere from Kamloops to Medicine Hat to Moncton-- recently died for good in Halifax. And then word spread of a particularly contentious gig in Kingston last week that saw Basnayake's voice short-circuited by laryngitis and some unspecified band members embroiled in onstage fisticuffs.
Throughout the post-punk revival of the past three years, the "death disco" descriptor coined by Public Image Limited in 1980 has been liberally applied to any band rocking minor chords and a 4/4 groove. But Controller.Controller's recent travails make you wonder if they're in danger of taking the term too literally.
"Hey, we're all here together right now," Scheven assures me.
"Yeah, do you want to see us high-five each other?" Kaija says with not a little sarcasm. "It's such a cliché, but being in a band is like being in a family. You actually spend more time with these people than you do with your own family. You can have the worst fight with your siblings and two hours later you're playing Frisbee. Some shit's inevitable, because there's alcohol involved, and no sleep...
"...and you're in a van every day for five weeks," Llewelyn-Thomas adds. "You're not supposed to do that as a human being."
"A lot of other bands I've seen, people will let stuff fester," Kaija continues. "As bad as things can get with us, ultimately it gets dealt with. Like that Kingston night -- which I don't want to talk about -- the problem was dealt with before the van was loaded and we left."
Says Basnayake, "I just never saw us as a band that would ever be like, 'We're totally going to kick asses on stage' and be this hard-drinking, brawling band. Because you're so often together in this little compartment, you have to get over your problems. Otherwise, someone will drive the van off the road..."
"...and that someone would be Scotty," Scheven quips.
"I might do it out of rage," Kaija admits, "but Jeff would do it out of absent-mindedness."
Everyone is laughing, like one big happy, hungover family. And so, with the acceptance stage of the recovery process out of the way, we reach the next phase: dancing, of course. For that we turn to X-Amounts, Controller.Controller's new full-length debut, which arrives under decidedly different circumstances than those that facilitated the band's initial ascent.
Gang of Four reunion tours aside, the great post-punk party of 2002 has been effectively deserted. The Rapture and Yeah Yeah Yeahs have gone AWOL, Liars went weird, Radio 4 went wack, LCD have gone O.C. All of which begs the question: what's the future for a genre that already has the adjective "post" in its name?
X-Amounts doesn't purport to have the definitive answer, but it does proffer some intriguing theories. Controller.Controller's unmistakable bassline pulse, rhythmic precision and foreboding lyrical intimations are still in full effect -- cue lead single "PF" and ferocious closer "Magnetic Strip" -- but they're thrown off-kilter by some curious intrusions: psychedelic guitar washes, interlocking vocal melodies, dubby breakdowns and, with "BLK GLV," electronic noise terror (composed by resident tech-head Scheven). Summing up the intent of the album, Kaija says, "I'm not interested in just being a dance band."
But with History producer Rob Sanzo once again casting the band's funk-noir in an alluring pink-neon pop glow, X-Amounts is just sly enough to sashay onto modern-rock radio playlists.
"It was weird being out west, where the album is being played on radio," Morris says. "The station in Victoria even had those automated ID tags, like [in his best automated radio-guy voice], 'Controller.Controller!'"
"It was so nice to be in Victoria at this radio station, which is basically like [102.1] The Edge, and see that they're playing not only the single, 'PF,' but other songs from the record, and they're playing them outside of Canadian Corner or Indie Hour and rotating them with..."
Morris pipes in with his worst Chad Kroeger: "Look at this photograph! / Every time I do it makes me laugh!"
If only it didn't make us cry. The fact is, Controller.Controller can handle the treacherous cross-country treks, the blown transmission, tires and appendixes, the fires in the van and, yes, even the occasional punch-up. Because, as the cliché goes, the 45 minutes onstage each night make it all worth it, and clichés are clichés because they're right every time. But sometimes it's countered by the depressing knowledge that, in the time it's taking you to read this sentence, Nickelback will sell more records than Controller.Controller has in their entire career.
"But whatever we think about them, we know the words to that 'Photograph' song," Basnayake admits. "On tour, we heard that song every hour, every day. You could flip to a station and joke about hearing it, and then you would. But you know, their fans don't give a shit who likes them and who doesn't."
So until we live in a world where Chad Kroeger knows the lyrics to "PF" by osmosis, Controller.Controller will keep it together by doing it for the kids instead of the cash.
"When kids tell me, 'This is my first show,' that's all I need to hear," Basnayake says. "I remember my first show; I don't remember half the shows I went to last year. To be a part of someone's formative experience, that's way better than being on the top 10 list of someone who won't care about us next year."
CONTROLLER.CONTROLLER
CD RELEASE PARTY FOR X-AMOUNTS, WITH NO DYNAMICS. FRI, NOV 25. SPIN GALLERY, 1100 QUEEN W. $10 FROM ROTATE THIS, SOUNDSCAPES, THE SOCIAL.
In honour of our Holiday Record Guide, we asked Controller.Controller to play jukebox jury on 10 of this year's hottest dance tracks. "We're excited to do this," says Basnayake, "since Gang of Four slagged us [in Alternative Press] for their jukebox jury."
NO DYNAMICS, "I've Got You on My Mind"
JEFF: I was wondering if you were going to play this. This girl sounds sexy! [He would know, he's dating her.]
MADONNA, "Hung Up"
NIRMALA: Ah! I fucking love this song! Every song I really love sounds like it's underwater. I actually went out and bought this record... after I downloaded it.
AMERIE, "One Thing"
NIRMALA: I love this too!
JEFF: There's actually a tiny little sample of this in our song "BLK GLV," the little bongo sound.
FRANZ FERDINAND, "Do You Want To"
SCOTT: I like Franz Ferdinand, but this song, not so much.
RONNIE: My mom's Scottish and she heard this and was like [in Scottish accent], "That Franz Ferdinand band you played with -- they're not gay, are they?"
THE ARCTIC MONKEYS, "I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor"
SCOTT: Is this The White Stripes?
JEFF: I don't like it when people say "dancefloor" in songs. I think I'd take Tangiers over this.
DAMIAN "JR. GONG" MARLEY, "Welcome to Jamrock"
NIRMALA: We listen to this on tour.
SCOTT: I'd much rather listen to this than the current British flavour of the month.
M.I.A., "Bucky Done Gone"
NIRMALA: Here I am trying to carve out a niche as a 29-year-old Sri Lankan and I just get stomped out by another one. As a 29-year-old Sri Lankan, you think, "There's not going to be much competition; I'm pretty much unique in this game." What the fuck?! Did I ever expect there'd be another 29-year-old Sri Lankan girl on the scene?
MISSY ELLIOTT, "Lose Control"
JEFF: You can play as much rock as you want, but if you really want to get things moving at the club, this is the stuff. Although we were DJing in Montreal at this after-party, playing this type of thing, and this girl came up to me and was like [in French accent], "It was really nice to meet you but you're playing really crappy music. People come here to hear the Ramones or Tool.
ANNIE, "Chewing Gum"
NIRMALA: I really like this song. The lyrics are very clever. It's very well-produced.
How appropriate -- the moment I click on the tape recorder, the lights at The Paddock fade into their dimmed evening setting, the waitress fires up the table-top candles and the five faces of controller.controller appear in a gauzy glow. Anyone who's caught the punk-funkin' fivesome's performances knows that controller.controller love their mood lighting -- preferably a dark red backlight that turns the unassuming players on stage into fiery silhouettes lost in the groove.
But more importantly, controller.controller's engimatic stage presence redirects the spotlight to the audience -- whose loose limbs and pelvic thrusts are as integral to the experience as the discordant disco grooves grinding out from the stage.
"The first time I saw people dancing at our shows, I was taken aback," says Basnayake. "It felt like a big accomplishment."
"The show we played at Cinecycle in April was the most fun I've had," Kaija says. "There was no real lighting system, no big sound system, and we were right there on the floor with the people at the show."
"Being surrounded by dancing people is the best," Scheven says. "We want to take music out of the bars. The city's riddled with bar shows -- it becomes boring after a while."
Ironically, for a band that seems primed for a lifetime of playing illicit loft parties for sexy, diagonally coiffed fashionistas, controller.controller's roots lie in that most unglamorous of places: the classified section.
"I had played music for a while, but I wanted to take a good year off school and make something serious out of it," Llewellyn-Thomas says. "So I spent the summer locked in my room, working on my chops, scanning the want ads -- I came across this cool one and called the number."
"I was trying to make music that was a little more accessible," says Morris, who placed said ad last year. "And an easy way to do that is to give people a beat to dance to, instead of pretentious hard rock or noisy metal, which I used to play.
"After I hooked with Colwyn, Jeff called," Morris adds. "He was making fun of me because I said I wanted a drummer 'who wasn't afraid to play dance beats,' and Jeff kept leaving these messages like, 'No! I'm afraid to!'"
To complete the rhythm section, Morris -- at this time, still a guitarist -- took up the bass and enlisted his old buddy Kaija to double up with Llewellyn-Thomas on guitars. "Suddenly," Kaija says, "it was like, 'OK, this is cool.' When the four of us got together, it was just instant."
"But what I had in mind, I thought, would be better with female vocals," says Morris, who sought out a singer under the presumptuous belief that "every girl in the world can sing!" When several failed auditions disproved that theory, all eyes turned to Llewellyn-Thomas' friend Basnayake, who would occasionally hang out in the band's rehearsal space and join in on covers of "I Wanna Be Your Dog."
"Colwyn booked a show and we had no songs," Kaija says. "So it was like, 'We've only heard Nirmala sing a little bit, we have no idea if she can write lyrics and she's never performed before.' But she really delivered."
While Basnayake chalks up her seemingly cool stage demeanour to being "paralyzed by fear," her presence pushes controller.controller beyond the typically icy post-punk playing field into a more mysterious, seductive headspace. So mysterious, in fact, you won't even notice her lyrics are "appropriations and recontextualizations" of various Duran Duran, Blur and Smog lines.
"I couldn't have done this before now," Basnayake says. "It was all about these guys pushing me -- if I wasn't in this band, I wouldn't be doing it. That's what helped: four people saying, 'We're going to get you onstage -- do it!'"
But just as Basnayake was getting comfortable with life behind the mic, her nerves were tested when controller.controller's lone recording -- a crude mp3 demo surreptitiously posted on the secretarcade.com message board -- wound up being played on CIUT'sNo Beat Radio program and resulted in inquiries at the Rotate This counter. "I hated my vocals on that!" she laughs.
It's not the most ceremonious way to launch the band's discography, perhaps, but it's a telling indicator that, after just a few live appearances, controller.controller have got people worked up. Whether it's just a by-product of omnipresent nouveau-post-punk fever is of little concern to the band -- controller.controller are out to prove they're not some Brooklyn buzz band's bitches.
"There's so much good music now where people just want to get down, whether it's post-punk or hip-hop or dance hall," says Scheven. "That's our biggest influence."
