When Rodrigo Michellangi writes song lyrics, he makes sure to check them first with his English-speaking friends before belting them out on stage.
But amidst the challenges of moving his life over to Canada from Venezuela, where he was a drummer in a successful rock band called Los Mesoneros, he calls the process of writing in a foreign language “freeing.”
Add the pressure and commitment that comes with being a student in York’s film production program, and suddenly you’re living the life of The Uproarious: a trio of Venezuelan expatriates/York students with nothing but a few demos to their name and a few Toronto gigs under their belt.
More than just translating lyrics, The Uproarious, made up of Héctor Besson, Guillermo De La Rosa (also a film student) and Michelangeli, is translating an entire cultural movement for a Canadian audience — a culture of rebellion and whimsicality.
The trio is trying to bring the sound that came out of Venezuela at the end of what Michelangeli calls a “musical void” from the mid 1990s to the mid 2000s.
At a time when the government was unstable and there was little support for local arts, the local rock and roll scene of the 80s receded, giving way to popular American music.
In the mid-late 2000s, bands began self producing and distributing. Bands emerged, combining rock, groove, reggae, and folk. All members of The Uproarious were part of bands at the forefront of this musical rebirth.
The sound and attitude that Uproarious is carrying over to Toronto is fun, colourful, cheeky, and creative.
In the music video for “Cuando Llega El Momento” by Los Mesoneros, the band incorporates the distant bell-like sound made by stroking the rim of a wine glass with a damp finger.
Rawayana, another band Michelangeli is part of, adds humour to their projects, with dramatized slow-mos and quirky album art (see: Rawayanaland’s head of broccoli in the middle of an ocean).
Although their sound takes on an energetic, can’t-sit-still garage rock sensibility with yelping vocals and major chords, unlike the indie feel of their music back home, the The Uproarious brings the same kind of whimsicality to their performances in Toronto, sometimes with politicized lyrics about the situation in Venezuela.
In one of their performances, they clang pots and pans together for percussion.
Because they’re a new band starting out, you won’t find much of their content online, but The Uproarious is constantly gigging around Toronto and tweeting updates, frequenting venues like El Mocambo and the Absinthe Pub. Their most recent gig was at Rancho Relaxo on September 22.
