Snake Charmer

Andre Ethier. Photo Davida Nemeroff. Courtesy Paper Bag Records.

As one of six Deadly Snakes, André Ethier has spent the better part of the past decade at centre stage of Toronto’s most rollicking (and, in ideal cases, least sober) rock ’n’ roll show. The band’s live act is a staple of downtown after dark, but fated to expire in the near future. The Snakes are on the verge of splitting up, and will soon play their last concert together.

“But it’s an amicable breakup,” Ethier says, seated outside a café in Kensington Market, T.O.’s cramped enclave of fresh food vendors, vintage clothing stores and head shops. The guitarist and singer sips a cup of cold water — the city air has been hot gravy since sunrise eight hours ago — and continues. “Who knows, we’re still friends. I know I don’t want to do big, crappy, boring American tours with them, or do anything that’s too disruptive to my life. But I would love to record with them still, and have fun again.”

The Deadly Snakes started close to here, in the basement of a Kensington laundromat, for what was supposed to be a one-off gig at a friend’s birthday bash. The crowd’s response was bombs over bohemia, so the band played on. Their wild, blues-bred brand of garage rock soon earned them a citywide — then national, then international — reputation as must-see performers. The standard Snakes concert feels like a party at midnight: big and brash, with inhibitions on mute and the speakers on blast.

Last year’s Porcella, their fourth LP, is perched on the shortlist of Canada’s inaugural Polaris Music Prize for homegrown album of the year. (With very minor thanks to, um, me. I’m one of more than 100 Polaris jurors, and included Porcella among the five picks on my ballot.) The band bows out having never achieved the retail prowess of an Our Lady Peace, or headlining North American arena tours à la Nickelback. They depart, though, leaving no doubt of their indie credentials.

As the Snakes cease, Ethier, 28, is reviving his solo career. His sophomore album, Secondathallam, will be in record stores soon — and is sure to renew past comparisons to Bob Dylan. Critics made the link explicit via ga-ga reviews of Ethier’s debut, 2004’s André Ethier With Christopher Sandes, Featuring Pickles & Price. He possesses one of the great voices in contemporary Canadian rock. It’s a raw growl when he sings it low, as if scratched by scotch and sandpaper. In the upper register, it’s almost dulcet, with an intermittent, weary lilt.

Ethier recorded AEWCSFP&P’s 12 honky-tonking folk songs alongside Sandes, a pianist, guitarist and producer who has been Ethier’s friend since they attended high school together in the early ’90s. Their rhythm section, Pickles and Price, are alter egos for the Deadly Snakes’ Andrew Gunn (drums, guitar) and Matthew Carlson (trumpet, guitar, bass).

Secondathallam reunites those players alongside a few session musicians. Its title is a compression of “Second at Hallam,” with Hallam being shorthand for Hallam Music, the east-end Toronto studio where the Snakes recorded or mixed their albums — and where Ethier et al. made AEWCSFP&P. The last was cut in just two days. Almost all of its tracks are mixed from first takes. Secondathallam, recorded last September, is different. Ethier ceded production responsibilities to Sandes, who worked to bring the new album a fuller, cleaner sound.

“I see [Secondathallam] as a collaboration between [Chris and I],” Ethier says. “My songs were the skeletons, but he scored the horn parts; most of the guitars, piano or organ — almost every instrument was overdubbed by him. So this was his chance to f--- around in the studio. I think he had a good time. I was on the couch.”

Courtesy Paper Bag Records.

Sandes moved to Paris after finishing his work on Secondathallam. Ethier mixed the songs to prepare them for release, then bickered with Sandes over the result. “He’s a bit of an exaggerator, he speaks in hyperbole. Or e-mails in hyperbole. From France. Drunk, on wine. He makes angry hand gestures while typing, I’m sure,” Ethier says, speaking in, yes, hyperbole. (They’ve since squashed le boeuf.)

AEWCSFP&P was about faltered relationships, sins and forgiveness. Its lyrics parse like semi-autobiography — more intimate than Ethier’s songs for the Snakes, but nonetheless with some distance. Secondathallam’s 11 songs resume the imagined narrative, with more of the same melancholy creeping between their lines. The Best We’ve Ever Had praises a love supreme (“Baby let’s get tied, I don’t want to sleep tonight/It’s the best we’ve ever had/You know it’s the best we’ve ever had/So darling, don’t feel bad”); moments later, though, Didn’t I Love You Better Than Him urges a lover to quit the memory of a past suitor (“Turn away from his light, turn away from the shadow that it makes/From the trials of the innocent, bound to burn at the stake/You should run from his choir, plug your ears to the din”).

Ethier wrote most of the album two years ago, around the time of his wedding to his high-school sweetheart. “I’ve been with [my partner] for almost 11 years. We broke up a bit, for a while, a few years ago. She moved to Vancouver and I went to Montreal for school,” he says. “The songs don’t represent newlywed feelings, they’re 11-year-old relationship feelings. And even in that, they’re not 100 per cent honest feelings, anyways. A lot of times, a song will take on its own personality and not necessarily reflect the reality of my life.”

His school in Montreal was Concordia University, where he earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts. Ethier is as talented a painter as he is a musician. In 2002, the New York Times called a collection of Ethier’s canvases, then showing at Manhattan’s Derek Eller Gallery, “modern fairy tales in which happy endings tend not to count, painted with consummate ease.” Ethier maintains an art studio in Kensington Market, and has upcoming exhibitions planned for galleries in Turin, Madrid and Stockholm. In past years, he has earned the greater part of his income selling art, not albums.

Secondathallam stands a slim chance of bucking that trend. Ethier is no household name, and don’t strain your eyes watching for billboards or big-budget videos promoting his wares. But within the country’s hipster demographic — a rare but fervent breed — the album figures to sell like umbrellas in a rainstorm. Take a tip from the people in skinny pants, Canada. This time they’re right.

André Ethier’s Secondathallam is due for release on Aug. 8. The Deadly Snakes’ final show is Aug. 25 at Toronto’s Horseshoe Tavern.

Matthew McKinnon writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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