Bernice Afriyie | Arts Editor
Featured image: We Are Wolves shows that having ideas and creativity trumps skill or limitations. | Courtesy of We Are Wolves
There are those who read the entire Ikea manual before building a desk, and there are those who consult the manual throughout the entire process. We Are Wolves is neither. Ditching the typical way of forming a band and finding success, this indie punk group from Montreal is anything but cookie-cutter.
Consisting of vocalist and bassist Alexander Ortiz, keyboardist and backup vocalist Vincent Levesque and drummer and vocalist Pierre-Luc Bégin, We Are Wolves has evolved from its beginnings in the visual arts.
“We met in art school where we were studying visual arts and we just applied the same process to music,” says Levesque. “We didn’t really know how to play music at first, so it took a while for us to kind of get started.”
For some, the connection between visual arts and music might not be immediate, but for Levesque and his bandmates, it was natural. A painting, for instance, is comprised of many elements such as paint, brushes, brush strokes, canvas and vision coming together for a single effect, just as music involves different sounds, instruments, paces and beats coming together for an effect.
“The process is pretty much same,” affirms Levesque. “We approach music as a whole composition […] We tend to develop our own skills our own way since we are not graphically trained, but the palette of possibilities is defined by what we are and what we look at.”
As is the case with many bands, the image that We Are Wolves paints for its audience varies greatly from what the band first looked like 15 years ago. At first, Levesque describes the band’s sound as raw, distorted, wild and loud, perhaps like an abstract impressionist painting with chaotic colours and strokes.
At first, an expressionist painting may not appear to have any order or forethought, but like the combatting sounds of We Are Wolves’ beginnings, there’s a method to a madness.
Now on their fifth studio album, there are still traces of that initial chaos and rawness in We Are Wolves’ sound, but one may describe Wrong as a modernist piece. The elements of punk and passion that We Are Wolves is known for in the Montreal and international scenes are still present, but the brush strokes are more reformed and the sound unified.
Traces of the band’s visual arts background still persist in its title. We Are Wolves, a matrimony of community and art, speaks perfectly to the ethos of the band. “The way we used to try out band names is that we would make stencils and spray them on T-shirts,” recounts Levesque. “We went to shows, we liked band merch, so we decided to just try it out on the shirt before actually adopting it. At some point, Alex, our singer, came up to the rehearsal with a T-shirt that said ‘we are wolves’.”
Once you pick a band name, it sticks. “You kind of only get one try at it,” laughs Levesque. “The idea of community, since there was no way we could impress with our musicianship, was all based around having the people on stage and sharing a moment of community and intensity.”
We Are Wolves will be stopping by Toronto on December 10 at the Baby G and Hamilton on December 11 at The Casbah.
