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NEWS : STORIES
Just when you thought the latest wave of super cool New York bands had passed, here comes another to make you swoon. The Stills may hail from Montreal, but their perfect-for-brooding sound recalls 1980s England, with flashes of big-city bravado.
Disinterested in the idea of becoming another Simple Plan or Sum 41 in order to make a dent, the Canadian outfit headed for New York and cut an EP, Rememberese. The highlight track, "Still In Love Song," could have been the B-side to PJ Harvey's "Rid Of Me." Both songs paint their singers as emotionally battered die-hards who refuse to let go of a poisonous romance. Riding a buzz that grew louder with each live show, the group won over a sizable following after a string of performances that included opening for Echo and the Bunnyman as well as the dapper gents of Interpol and the always-explosive Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Like Interpol, The Stills mix dark romanticism and splashy intensity. "Lola Stars and Stripes," from their Logic Will Break Your Heart, is a house of cards built with steel beams - tense yet delicate. It’s ultimately broken by the same passion that created it (cue Joy Division's "Love Will Tear Us Apart"). VH1 spoke with Fletcher as he traveled along the Canadian-American border during a tour with Ryan Adams. He admitted to considering therapy and taking the band with him. VH1: I read that The Stills are a bunch of really neurotic guys who read into everything each other says. Is that true? TF: [Laughs] Yeah. We've grown up for the past 10 years together. Dave and Oliver have grown up together since they were four - so ... you know. Dave is especially ... not psychoanalytical, but he gets into people's minds and how they work. I think we do the same thing by consequence, y'know? We've all had our share of insecurities. When we're together, we work off each other in negative and positive ways. The negative is definitely a kind of collective neurosis. It's good because it gets you talking about things. VH1: Do you know that Sleater-Kinney regularly attend band therapy? TF: Really? [Laughs] I heard that [New York indie rockers] Blonde Redhead do as well. VH1: Maybe it's something you should consider. TF: Actually we have considered it. There was a point about a year ago where we were just arguing heavily, and we were all considering it. VH1: Are you a fan of Woody Allen's movies? He's the master of neurotic comedy. TF: Definitely. Dave has a box set. Whenever we had the chance we go rent his other movies and watch them several times. VH1: He's got a movie called Love and Death and you have a song called "Love and Death." TF: Yeah. Actually, I think Dave was down in his basement just screwing around with some chords and some words and he had the first line: "I'm just so bored of wasting my time." He looked up and saw the box for the movie Love and Death and was just like, "Love and death are always on my mind." VH1: Songs like "Fevered" and "Gender Bomb" have this hazy but startling imagery. Are you a vivid dreamer? TF: [Laughs] Yes, I am. I go through phases where I guess it's light sleeping - lots of REM. I always remember them right when I wake up. They're always quite weird. VH1: Do you use them in your music? TF: I think so, but it's just a general approach to things. I also went to film school and got really into David Cronenberg and weird things like that. It influences the way I dream and the way I choose to write lyrics. VH1: What do you guys like to do on your off-time on the road? TF: There's lots of driving involved so there's a lot of listening to music and listening to new discs that we get - a lot of reading, too. VH1: What have you been listening to? TF: Broken Social Scene, Ryan Adams' new record, Postal Service, The Dears, a lot of old ska and reggae. For the past few days, it's basically been that. VH1: What's the Montreal music scene like at the moment? TF: The Dears figure quite prominently in the Canadian scene, and they're friends of ours. Godspeed You Black Emperor! have been around for a while. There's this new band The Unicorn. These are all bands coming out of a small English community in Montreal. It's about half a million English-speaking people in a 7 million-French-speaking population. It's a small scene. Sometimes it feels incestuous and a bit cynical and limiting. You can get caught in a rut in Montreal unless you're really pushing really hard and you're determined to push out of it. Otherwise you go elsewhere. VH1: How come you went to New York and not Austin or Los Angeles? TF: It's down the road from Montreal, basically. Most of our friends are there, and they're ex-Montrealers who've been working on music with us for several years. Our manager and producer Gus [Van Go], and our other manager were in a couple of bands [together]. It just felt more natural to be working on music with them in New York. [Our label] Vice Records is in New York and they're all Montrealers, as well. VH1: Your music fit very seamlessly with the bands emerging from New York at the time. TF: I guess it was good timing. VH1: What helped your music blend in so well with the scene? TF: Oh God. Well, I think you internalize your surroundings. A few songs were written in New York and I think the general character of the way we arranged things and sounds are a reflection of that in an oblique way. Obviously we're affected by experience just as much as anybody else [is] going away and leaving home and doing something for a while. At this point, it's hard to be very descriptive about that. VH1: You’ve been compared to The Smiths and The Cure, but there's also a very modern dramatic appeal to it. Where do you pull your ideas from? Tim: There are a lot of those influences, you know, The Cure and The Smiths, but we also get comparisons to Echo and the Bunnymen and bands that really haven't influenced us but I think that our sound reflects an era more. But the other aspect of our music is something more American. We're all really into the Pixies and bands like Wilco, and indie music. Greg is really into indie music from Chicago and other Midwest states. Greg's role in the band is also one that shapes our sound more towards that modern aesthetic. VH1: Was it hard to leave home? TF: Not really. I think we were all pretty sick and bored of it. Gus gave us the idea. He was like, "Why don't you come down to New York and bring all the songs you were working on the four-track and let's do something with it." We didn't have much else going on. I had just finished school. We always wanted to play music in a band and do it properly. Summer was coming; we were just like, "All right, let's do it." It's not really a stretch.
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