One EP length cassette, a forthcoming full length LP and a cross Canada tour including an appearance at Alberta’s Sled Island Festival, York Redoubt refuse to waste any time.
After their drummer Seamus Dalton left for university, best friends Brad Lahead (The Got to Get Got, ex-Tomcat Combat) and Mike Wright (Hugs, Dishonest Mailmen) murdered their former moniker, recruiting Seamus’ younger brother Noah (Watermelon Eating Contest) bringing his own off-kilter sensibility (and kit setup). In the process they created their new musical manifesto: kill to create.
Recorded by Charles Austin (The Superfriendz), Dave Ewenson and Mike between the studio, their Oxford Street jam space and an abandoned school house in Truro, they produced a stunning mixture of Phil Spector’s wall-of-sound and the lo-fi aesthetic sensibilities of Phil Elvrum or Eric’s Trip.
Their debut is a glowing collection of wayward melodies, scraps of pop songs buried beneath broken radios and feedback freak-outs spliced full of field recordings and unorthodox sounds.
York Redoubt thrive on controlled chaos.
After finishing the record, Caleb Langille (Brent Randall and the Pinecones, The Gideons) joined the fold to add muscle as a second guitarist. With their fingers still bleeding from recording their debut, York Redoubt headed back to Truro to produce their Cheap Funerals EP, a violent collection of howled harmonies that cut through the darkness, lauded by Weird Canada as “boundary pushing music that is incredibly accessible”.
York Redoubt then spent their summer in a Sherman tank-sized van, moving from province to province, finally dipping their toes in the Pacific Ocean before coming back to Halifax. During their tour Exclaim! picked “I Said Slightly” as the track of the day, calling it “the bastard child of Sonic Youth and Fleet Foxes”. They also appeared in Halifax’s free weekly The Coast, in the annual “New Music Issue”, saying York Redoubt “sound like Built to Spill and Deerhoof, had both those bands spent time in Halifax in the early '90s”.
Comparisons aside, York Redoubt have created their own fragmented forward looking sound, to be available finally, on coloured vinyl in September of '09 jointly between Noyes and Hot Money Records.
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