New Romantics

Bright future: Matt Didemus (left) and Jeremy Greenspan, a.k.a. Junior Boys. (Timothy Saccenti/Domino Recording Co. Ltd.)

If Hamilton’s Junior Boys have a signature song, it’s Teach Me How to Fight, which comes late in their shimmering, nocturnal first album, Last Exit. Over an aching synth hook, vocalist Jeremy Greenspan issues the following plea: “Can you teach me how to fight? / Show me what it’s like to give back pain? / Show me how to throw, throw him down?”

Last Exit’s chilly electronics, breathy vocals and precise synth-pop melodies are the furthest thing from fighting music — not to mention the last thing you’d expect to come out of Steeltown, a rumbling city if ever there was one. When I first heard the record, I pictured the boys as translucent bedroom musicians, soft as down, seconds away from flittering into the ether. Then, I paid attention to their lyrics. Junior Boys, I learned, might not be pugilists, but they sure knew how to take it on the chin. “You called and forgot me on my birthday,” Greenspan sings elsewhere on Last Exit, “you’ve gone and left me all alone.”

There is plenty more existential ennui on their sophomore effort, So This Is Goodbye. Evoking a bruised dawn sometime in the near future, a glass and concrete nowhereland that resembles everywhere you’ve ever been and everywhere you’re likely to go, the album is a soundtrack for disaffected urbanites — like extras in a William Gibson novel, where the sky is “the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel.”

Like their debut, Junior Boys’ follow-up has received a rapturous reception. I recently spoke to Greenspan on a wretched cellphone line — he was somewhere in the Arizona desert, en route to Tucson — and asked him to comment on the online chat-room canard that he designed his music for critics. To his credit, he laughed.

“I don’t know how conscious I was of that,” he says. “I didn’t make the group for anything. It was just something to do. I had friends writing reviews — I got some e-mails asking for demos, and after a while it got big enough in terms of critics listening to us; those critics that made it inevitable that the record would get properly released. But why they latched onto it, I don’t know. Maybe because the people that liked it were influential? I have no idea.”

Courtesy Domino Records.

Regardless, it’s hard to think of another band that has been the beneficiary of so much critical adoration. In a universe where sophomore releases are often viciously pilloried, So This Is Goodbye may be outstripping its predecessor in terms of hosannas. Perhaps it’s the ingredients in Junior Boys’ music that make it so critic-proof: the romantic gloominess, the electronics that recall the best of the new wave, the effective pop hooks. For someone who musically came of age in the ’80s or early ’90s — i.e. most critics writing for the influential publications — the band’s music is like OxyContin: one dose and you’re hooked.

“We make pop with synthesizers,” Greenspan points out, “and we’re not ironic about that.”

No one could accuse Junior Boys of irony — they’re remarkably unafraid of their influences. Last Exit, made partly with Johnny Dark, who provided about half of the stuttering 2-step programming, betrayed a preoccupation with febrile garage beats. Matt Didemus, who assists Greenspan on the electronic production side, has burnished the band’s percussion, creating smoother, sleazier, almost soporific house beats for the new album.

“This time, we had a number of central obsessions,” says Greenspan. “We remain interested in new wave, but our main obsession was disco, particularly in late disco, electronic disco. The sonic moods and tempos became extremely interesting to us.” Greenspan and Didemus were after those slow, nasty grooves; the work of disco production stalwart Giorgio Moroder, or even Prince’s Controversy, comes to mind. So This Is Goodbye also recalls the tenor of Whit Stillman’s criminally undervalued indie flick The Last Days Of Disco. “In the morning, there’s a million names to chose from,” sings an exhausted Greenspan on In The Morning, “you don’t care, just take one.”

This plaintive weariness, and the inclusion of snippets of voice loops (clicks, deep breaths, gasps), gives Junior Boys an almost uncomfortable intimacy. This is seriously clever electronic music, yet without the chilly dullness of producer Nigel Godrich, who helped make Thom Yorke’s The Eraser such a one-note dirge.

“We tend not to be perfectionists in our mixing,” says Greenspan. “If we have a model, it’s David Briggs, Neil Young’s producer. His genius was to capture a moment, a mood. And often the mood we were tying to capture is fragility, emptiness and sparseness. That requires imperfections — and for me, what it means in our mixes is that we nurture space.” The result is an album that evokes drinking alone in the Tokyo boutique hotel bar Bill Murray frequented in Lost in Translation.

Says Greenspan: “We learned from dance music the extent to which musicians themselves are responsible for arrangements. The electronic instruments work in mysterious ways — our job is just to nurture them, capture moments on them. That’s what’s exciting to me about dance music: this new type of arrangement, which is a post-human machine, cyborgian moment. We wanted to nurture the ghost in the machine as much as possible.”

The album’s sound enhances Greenspan’s obsession with those quiet spaces after dark, when there’s nothing left to drink, nothing left to say and no one left to say it to. The Boys conjure a late night/early morning weltschmerz — most pointedly in covering Frank Sinatra’s solo drinking standard When No One Cares, which they pull off without irony, and without slipping into the maudlin.

The album’s title track, with its dainty electro plings and achingly slow 4/4 groove, conjures up Junior Boys’ icy northern ethos. It also reflects their understanding of human relationships as pugilistic contests: “So this is goodbye, no need to lie / This creature of pain, has found me again / So this is farewell, the fight’s final bell / And I fall where I stand, so give me your last hand.”

This is an album of brief dalliances, of momentary flits of beauty. But it is, ultimately, about battling impermanence. In this, Hamilton’s finest have crafted an electronic peon to longing. Junior Boys may never be able to “give back pain,” but they articulate it with startling precision.

Richard Poplak is a writer based in Toronto.

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