I Heart the Music: Your Online Source for Live Music Reviews and Interviews in Toronto!

It is quite unique these days to find a band that is musically talented, performs well AND are all related. Well, iheartthemusic found this all in the form of Winnipeg threesome Inward Eye. Anders, Dave and Kyle are three brothers who are making quite a name for themselves. They have already been on countless tours – including one that had them opening for legendary band The Who - and they were also the headliners for the opening night party of Canadian Music Week at Tattoo Rock Parlour. iheartthemusic took some time to talk with all three of them before that opening night show show on March 11th. Check out what they had to say:

iheartthemusic: Being siblings, do you feel your parents had an influence on your decision to pursue music?

David: It was pretty natural actually. I picked up a guitar when I was about 14 or 15 and just kind of played around and showed Kyle some chords. He, of course, quickly got better than me.

iheartthemusic: I guess that’s why he’s the guitarist now!

David: I guess so. Then I eventually got a bass and Anders eventually acquired some drums and we would always be jamming together. We then realized let’s play in a band together. We were sometimes jamming with our friends, but it just seemed easier this way.

iheartthemusic: You guys also got a chance to venture into the US to play some gigs there. How did that happen?

David: It started during CMW in 2005 when we played and some of the record labels really liked us and so word got down to the big wigs in New York City that they should check us out. They ended up flying us down and we did a series of showcases there which was pretty mind-blowing and we got a record deal out of it! So it was pretty good.

iheartthemusic: You’ve done tons of touring since then, such as Warped Tour, Lollapalooza and a stint with The Who, so  what is it about touring that you love?

Kyle: Playing live is the highlight for us as a band. Everything else about touring is hit or miss; you’re stuck in a van for long periods of time, eating poor quality food and not sleeping much, but in the end it’s a lot fun too and you get to see a lot of different places. The stage is the best part though.

iheartthemusic: So where has been your favourite place to play so far?

Kyle: Some of the best shows that we have ever played seem to be out West. I remember we played at the Pemberton Music Festival and that was a really good one. We played on the second stage. We had the mountains all around us and tons of people who didn’t know who the hell we were, which was good because it introduced us to a whole new crowd.

iheartthemusic: You went from playing on the second stage at a festival to opening for The Who, that must have been an amazing accomplishment for the band.

Anders: [The Who] have always been one of our biggest influences growing up, ever since we got into our dad’s vinyl back in the day, so it was just amazing. We played a show down in Austin a couple of years ago and their promoter saw us. We then ended up playing a couple of shows in Canada with them and then when the American tour came around their name came up again and it was probably the best tour we’ve ever done and ever will do.

iheartthemusic: You guys are now on a Canadian tour with Mobile and Bend Sinister. I actually got to speak with Bend Sinister last night and they gave me some dirt on you boys. Apparently you can hold your liquor quite well!

David: Yah, apparently we can for skinny boys! I mean there is only three of us, right, so we get to divvy up the booze three ways, so we’ve learned how to handle ourselves.

iheartthemusic: You also just came out with your first self-titled EP in January and you have a video out for the single “Shame.” It has an unusual concept surrounding it, can you tell us how you came up with that?

David: The director’s name was Rémy M. Larochelle and he approached us because he was really inspired by the song so we just let him have free reign with it. He drew a couple of pictures of us looking like crocodilians or something, but I think the clincher for us was the baboon beating up the priest. We were just like this is the man for us, we are going to offend some people so let’s do it right.

iheartthemusic: You were aiming for shock value then?

David: Yah, it’s great because it goes with the whole theme of the song which is about rising up against the oppressors.

iheartthemusic: You are also hitting up Warped Tour again this summer, are you excited about that?

David: It’s going to be a tough grind. I mean Warped Tour is awesome, but it’s definitely a grind. We get so much exposure and it opens a door to the whole punk scene, which we aren’t really in. We consider ourselves a rock band, so it kind of gets our foot in that door too.

iheartthemusic: How is it living together, working together and being brothers?

Anders: Well, we have done it our whole lives so we are pretty used to it!

David: We are like an old married couple; bitter and resentful [laughs].

iheartthemusic: So after Warped Tour what is the plan?

David: We are going to be hitting the road pretty hard in Canada and come back to the Toronto area and do the “401 milk run” as we like to call it; all the little areas. We are also going to be doing another little stint in New York City. We are going to be releasing our full length album hopefully in the fall, so the EP is just a little taster of what’s to come from us.

iheartthemusic: Do you want to add anything for your fans out there?

David: Please check us out on our MySpace site and give us your comments! Let us know if we are complete tools, or you like what we are doing. Be honest because we will always be honest with you!

photography provided by Matt Vardy

iheartthemusic decided to trade in a typical Wednesday evening of relaxing and catching up on our reading in order to experience a loud night of headbanging, long hair and tight jeans. Yes, we realize that we are now well into 2009, however, head banging and long hair is what you get when you attend a show by The Parlor Mob. This New Jersey band invaded Toronto last week for not only one night of electric stage action, but TWO back-to-back  nights at Tattoo Rock Parlour. This was the second time that Marc Melicia (vocals), David Rosen (guitar), Paul Ritchie (guitar), Nick Villapiano (bass) and Sam Bey (drums) were in Toronto and for those few fans in attendance last Wednesday (February 24), they definitely did not disappoint. Having heard that Marc was feeling a little under the weather we were worried that their performance might suffer as a result (this band is known for their live shows). However, Marc’s vocals proved to be on point as we were blown away not only by the notes that hit, but by the stamina that this young musician possessed. From their stage presence and headbanging abilities, to their sound as a collective, The Parlor Mob are on their way to becoming modern day rock and roll legends. David took time out from watching the hockey game (yes these rockers love their hockey too) to chat with iheartthemusic before the show at which point he revealed how the band really feels about being considered rock and rollers…

iheartthemusic: You guys formed in 2004 under the name What About Frank? Why the switch?

David: It was actually just a joke name to begin with. We started as kind of a fluke, we would just be obnoxious and do the most ridiculous things we could possibly do musically. It was still all the same guys in the band as there are now and we were playing the same type of music, but it was the kind of music that a 16-year-old would play. We wouldn’t repeat the same part twice, there was no consistency, it was just as creative as we could possibly be at that time in our lives. When we got more serious about our music we got tired of people asking, “who’s Frank?” and “what, are you guys, a ska band or something?” So we decided to change the name before we got really stuck with it.

iheartthemusic: But who is Frank?

David: He was a guy we knew who went to the Caribbean on a scuba diving trip and he ended up getting sucked into the jet engine of a cruise ship and we never saw him again.

iheartthemusic: That is the most morbid story ever, I don’t really know what to say to that.

David: [whispers] It’s actually not true!

iheartthemusic: Thank god!

David: But that’s all you’ll get…

iheartthemusic: OK, I won’t push it then! So why The Parlour Mob?

David: Parlor Mob was a New York Irish street gang in the post civil war era. They were a gang that you hired to start riots in places. Like if you had a certain area of town that was giving you trouble you’d hire the Parlor Mob and you would pay them to go destroy that area of the city.  It was the whole vibe of the East Coast thing that we kind of adopted for ourselves.

iheartthemusic: It’s kind of like an ode to where you’re from then?

David: Yah, absolutely, and you know people pay us to start riots!

iheartthemusic: Is that something that I can expect onstage?

David: Yah, we’ll see.

iheartthemusic: You guys released your first EP on your own, that’s pretty cool.

David: We actually re-recorded it on our own. We were signed to Capitol Records at the time and they just basically never released it. We pretty much got lost in the whole Capitol/Virgin merger and they just decided that they were never going to release it. So, we decided to give it away for free and told people to download it, burn it, give it away – whatever. That really helped us to get our name out there because this was when bands weren’t giving stuff away for free, especially bands with no money.

iheartthemusic: Was it a marketing tool in a way?

David: I think the way we saw it was basically that when all was said and done we signed to Capitol, we flew to L.A., we made this EP of four songs and we worked with this amazing producer, and then no one was going to release it. We got a year sucked out of our lives, but we worked and we learned a lot through the whole thing and we got a free recording out of it so why not give it away.

iheartthemusic: Then you got signed to Roadrunner in 2007 and you’ve since released your debut album, And You Were a Crow. What’s the significance of the crow for the band?

David: I think the crow means a lot of different things in a lot of different cultures. For a lot of people it signifies death or change and it definitely takes on a lot of those meanings throughout the record, not physical death or spiritual death, but change. It’s kind of like an open-ended thing for us in that I think there’s no specific meaning behind it. The crow imagery means something different in every song and to give it a specific definition is to devalue what it could mean to anyone else. If you listen to the songs on the album you see that it’s used in different ways, so we like to leave the significance and meaning of the crow open for the listener to interpret it the way they want to… I heard  film director David Lynch talk about this once. He said that to define something like that and give it meaning doesn’t allow other people to give it their own meaning. If you define it for them, they will then have those associations in their head already and have a preconceived notion when they go to listen to a song.

iheartthemusic: You guys have a video out for “Hard Times,” can you tell us about the concept behind this video.

David: That was actually director Michael Maxxis‘ idea. He is  Canadian too! We got a couple of different treatments for the video from different directors and the thing that we loved about his concept was that it was all about the band performing. It wasn’t some big dramatic story, which we aren’t really into. We just wanted people to see us playing because we are a live band. His treatment was more along the lines of how are we going to show the band performing in the coolest way possible. He used all this old stock film and projection film which is basically film that you use in movie theatres to project onto the big screen, you aren’t suppose to film on it. He shot on that film and used all this colour stock photography and old hand crank cameras. His mentally was, “I’m going to shoot the band in this way. I have no idea what it’s going to look like because it’s never been done, before but I think its going to look pretty cool.” We had seen all the other videos he’d done for bands like Murder City Sparrows, who we are playing with tonight, and they were just incredible. They all looked like major films, not little music videos; we didn’t want a big budget video, but we wanted something to look classic and timeless… That was all Micheal Maxxis and we were so happy with him and the way the video turned out.

iheartthemusic: You mentioned earlier that you are a live band – so what can we expect from your live performance?

David: It’s very unpredictable, even for us. We always have some sort of set list, so to speak, but we move things around all the time so that when it comes to playing, every single show is different. We like to jam a lot and usually try to make each other as uncomfortable as we possibly can while we’re playing.

iheartthemusic: What do you mean by “uncomfortable”?

David: Performing can get stagnant really quickly if you are playing six nights a week and you’re playing four weeks, five weeks, I think 11 weeks was our last tour. So for us we’ll always throw things in there to try and stretch each other to do things that are more interesting. We push each other to mess up because accidents and mistakes are where the best things come from. The only thing I can say about our live show is that we don’t know what’s going on at any point in time.

iheartthemusic: So we are left hanging, as are you!

David: Yes!  But we are all confident and comfortable with each other as musicians and for the most part it works out. We like to play as aggressively and as passionately as we can but it’s a crap shoot every time. We just chuck it in there and shake it up and throw ourselves out.

iheartthemusic: You’ve described yourselves as “straight rock and roll,” what exactly do you mean by this?

David: We feel like a lot of bands say that they are a “rock and roll” band to the point where it’s like a cop-out of an answer. I really wouldn’t know what else to call us and I don’t feel like we are trying to champion any comeback of rock and roll or anything, we’re just trying to write the best songs we can. I can see how other people would see us in that ["straight rock and roll"] way and it’s nice to be a part of something like that, but we don’t fly any flag. It’s also pretty funny that we are put into that category because we don’t even really listen to classic rock at all.

iheartthemusic: Really? That’s surprising, especially because of your whole look and sound as a band!

David: Yah, we hear that a lot. I think your opinion will be changed when you see us play live. That whole classic rock thing is not something that we set out to do; it’s just been pushed upon us. With Mark, our singer, people compare him to Robert Plant because of his voice, but he just opens his mouth and that’s the voice that comes out. He isn’t trying to sound a certain way. I think that when we play live it’s almost as if we’re fighting that stereotype. We listen to more Temptations than we ever do Led Zeppelin and the whole Motown thing is more prevalent in our music than anything else. When I hear shredder dudes, I’m not into that, it just seems technical and studied and none of us are schooled musicians, we all taught ourselves how to play our instruments. I think we just try and play with as much soul and conviction as we can.

iheartthemusic: You’re taking off on a UK tour soon, is that a first for you guys?

David: Yah, that’s a first for us. We’re headlining so we’ll see how it goes. We are incredibly excited to get over there. Our record is coming out there on the 16^th so we’re going to go over and do the best that we can as far as playing. I know that there’s a lot of radio promo and stuff like that going on, and they’ve been spreading the word about us so hopefully there are some people that come out to the shows. We’ve been a band for about five years now and we never thought we’d be in Europe playing, none of us actually thought we’d be in Canada playing. You don’t start off with intentions like that and it’s just great to see things snowballing and getting to where they are at now.

iheartthemusic: Do you feel that you’ve had a moment where you had to step back in amazement at how far you’ve come?

David: For me it was Lollapalooza. It was August 1^st and my birthday, ironically enough, and we were playing on a side stage but there was probably eight to 10 thousand people in front of the stage. They were there getting ready for the show like half an hour before we went on! When we started playing it was the most incredible feeling looking out and seeing that many people. You see a lot of people singing and everyone is just having such a good time. There was nothing like that in my entire life. Not to mention that Mark, our singer, mentioned that it was my birthday and the first few rows started singing me “Happy Birthday.”

iheartthemusic: What’s the plan for the next year?

David: I think we’re going to be touring a lot. We just booked a festival in the Czech Republic, which is cool. So we are just going to be doing a lot more touring and at the same time lots of writing. We have one new song we are playing tonight and, once again, we don’t really know how it’s going to go when we play it live. We aren’t looking for any overnight success, we want to build slowly and just play in front of as many people as we possibly can because that’s where we feel the strongest, up on stage performing.

check them out online at: www.myspace.com/theparlormob