Brave Irene - ST

Tracks

Side 1

		Track Name	Length
	1	No Fun
	2	River to the Sea
	3	Tangled Line
	4	Bank Holiday

Side 2

		Track Name	Length
	1	Longest Day
	2	Hit The Grass Running
	3	Good Ideas
	4	Campfire

Photos

Videos

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Information/Write-up

Local music has seldom seemed as continental as it does with jangle pop girl-buddy quintet Brave Irene. Consisting of exactly zero members under the Vancouver “born and raised” banner, and with two members having indefinitely departed the continent the very weekend the band wrapped recording for their debut 12” (out March 2011 on American pop-preservationist label Slumberland), the band is nonetheless quintessentially local.

“I have been in other bands that were spread across different cities and we were never quite sure what to call our hometown,” says vocalist/lead-songwriter Rose Melberg, who returns to the group dynamic of her earlier bands Go Sailor and Tiger Trap after a decade of gorgeously sparse and accordingly vulnerable solo work. “But Brave Irene never did anything outside of Vancouver. We practiced here, we played our only two shows here, we went to shows other together, almost every member played in other Vancouver bands... I think we are all very strongly attached to our community here. I never had any specific ambitions for this to be much beyond just being an extension of my great life here in this city.”

Sounding more like the jubilant kiwi-bop of Look Blue Go Purple than the worn out din of a Black Tambourine clone, Brave Irene started as a casual collaboration between Melberg and co-vocalist Caitlin Gilroy, later expanding into an all-bespectacled five piece including Amanda Pezzutto on bass, Jessica Wilkin on keyboards, and Laura Hatfield on drums. “I pretty much met everyone just through mutual friends and playing shows in town,” comments Melberg. “We probably all played shows together at some point, or at least with maybe one degree of separation with band members.... I imagined playing music with all of them long before we started the band.”

Brave Irene could likewise be seen as the result of a perfectly aligned network of coffee klatch covens and pay-what-you-can performances by the Apollo Ghosts, Collapsing Opposites, and Unreliable Narrator (all of whom share members with the on-hiatus Irenes). “Vancouver should be acknowledged as a breeding ground not a trapped locality,” says Hatfield. In this sense, their music acts as kind of a “structure of feeling” to East Van ‘09 (to quote Raymond Williams); it reveals an affect produced by the relationships within a community.

And Brave Irene’s debut thrives on relationships. Lyrically, it has the feel of a roman-a-cle – maybe not with the hyperlinking of a Destroyer ballad, but it is still set very much set in Vancouver. Musically, the band utilizes the talents of five friends related to each other through the experiences and influences of other bands.

“If there were only one band in Vancouver, would it continue to be called a Vancouver band?” asks Pezzutto. “So much of music depends on the connections to other bands and places. Even when I was describing how I knew the others, I could only do so with reference to other bands. I would have such a difficult time talking about Vancouver's music scene without speaking about the networks and connections.”

It’s a S.O.F. which seems to manifest itself strongest in the band’s two far-flung ex-pats. Wilkin, who moved to Varanasi, India, to work for World Literacy Canada, recalls how “living and travelling abroad for the past 10 months, when I get bouts of nostalgia and homesickness, I'm often thinking of the 6 months we spent working on these songs and hanging out and practicing and eating Budgie's burritos and drinking bubble tea. I associate the band with home at it feels very Vancouver to me.”

Curiously, Hatfield – who moved to Gothenburg, Sweden, to continue her studies in Museum Curation – also mentions both Budgie’s and bubble tea in our conversation. “That's as local as it gets: several culturally disparate items recombined into one giant Vancouver diaspora,” she says. She adds: “One day Brave Irene will be reunited in Vancouver and music and happiness will prevail.” Awesome!
-Patrick Geraghty, Beatroute

Rose Melberg: guitar, vocals
Caitlin Gilroy: keyboards, guitar, vocals
Amanda Pezzutto: bass, vocals
Jessica Wilkin: keyboards
Laura Hatfield: drums

buy the album here: http://www.slumberlandrecords.com/catalog/show/159

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