Of all the things that The Real McKenzies will own up to being, the one that they will cop to first and most happily is that they are a Canadian band; it is who the been since forming in Vancouver, BC in 1992, it was who they were when American audiences became aware of the band in the mid-Nineties and it is the calling card that the band has dropped as they've toured the world. The Real McKenzies are as proud of their Canadian roots as they have been of their Scottish heritage and now – twenty years after they first began performing – the band has taken special care to proudly reaffirm where they come from, and how integral it is to everything the band does. “We started our tour in Toronto this time and, to do that, we had to get all our equipment here so, while the other guys in the band flew across the country, I drove with the equipment and crew across the country,” says singer Paul McKenzie proudly. “It took us three days and it was absolutely incredible! I've made the drive before, of course, but I'm always a bit stunned by it. It's a very beautiful country we live in and, every time I make the drive, I'm always stunned by the things we see. This time, we saw at least 155 deer grazing on the side of the highway just waiting to jump out at us as we were coming across! They were just there – totally un-phased by our presence – and it was a sight to see.”
Perhaps a little disarmed by his own recollections of the trip, Paul immediately sloughs through the rest of his account (“Anyway, we drove the gear out here, met the rest of the band at the airport, made our way through immigration and blah blah blah blah, and now we're ready to rock n' roll!”) but, even in that, the fact that Paul McKenzie is a proud Canadian is unmistakable and, when pressed, he'll proudly own that fact too; in fact, he'll flat-out tell anyone who asks that being a proud Canadian is precisely what inspired the world which appears now on Westwinds – The Real McKenzies' eighth album. “When it came time to start writing for this album, we had been traveling around the world for a while and, because of that, we wanted to try and focus back in on where we came from,” explains the singer of the process which ultimately yielded Westwinds. “That was something that we really felt like we needed as a band, so we wrote a bunch of songs about being Canadian and what it means to be Canadian for us. It's even more important to us now because I feel like we're in the shadow of America even more now than ever before and we want other Canadians to stand up with us and be proud to be Canadian – say 'Hey – we are Canadian!'”
That sense of national pride is perfectly evident in every micro-tone of Westwinds as, for the first time in their twenty years, the band has really seemed to go out of its way to balance the blue and white Celtic colors they've always flown with an equal measure of red and white Canadian ones. After a bit of stage-setting to open the record (“The Tempest” stomps hard with spare instrumentation, and lines like “We are all born free but forever live in chaos/ And we battle through existence on and on!” are self-explanatory), The Real McKenzies hit a sprinting pace down “Fool's Road” which no listener – whether they were a fan of the band before or not – will be able to ignore. Here, guitarists Mark Boland and Kurt Robertson actually manage to match the tempo and melody set by piper Gord Taylor in a way that both intertwines the 'Celt' and the 'punk' seamlessly and functions as the most hypnotic hook the band has written to date, hands down. The speed, delicacy and power of the sound presented in “Fool's Road” is just awesome and the band doesn't break stride or lighten up through songs including “The Message” (which comes close to the sort of New Wave-y style that Against Me has been playing with for the last five years), “My Luck Is So Bad” (the perfect modern-day Scottish lament – you have to hear it to believe it), “The Bluenose,” “Burnout” and “Hallowe'en” either – every step of the way, the McKenzies lock in with a perfect attitudinal cross between Celtic and Canadian roots and punk brass, and McKenzie – now showing a age in his growling throat, but in an aged (and not wizened) way – barges in on top, all “I've survived it all” bluster. That material is great and would be worth the price of admission on its own, but the McKenzies take the album a step further and add some cover songs to the mix in order to show listeners how the dots they're mapping out should be connected. Fine Celt-and-Canadian numbers like “The Massacre Of Glencoe” (by Jim McLean), “Hi Lily” (by Rick Tucker) and “Barrett's Privateers” (a personal favorite, by Stan Rogers) have been laced carefully between The McKenzies' original material in this run-time, but the surprising this is how well they fit in, fit together and flow along here. The inclusion of those songs turns out to be a true delight because, like the improved songwriting on Westwinds, they perfectly enrich the album and actually bolster the authoritative voice of it. “We really did want to try and incorporate a bit of every flavor across this great last of ours,” explains McKenzie with pride. “I mean, our band is from British Columbia, but we tried to get a bit of flavor from all the difference sources across the country – be it Manitoba or Ontario or the Maritimes.
Making sure we included all of that was important, but we felt like we really needed to exemplify our connection with Canadiana,” continues the singer, “and while a lot of that was reflected in the other choices we made for the record, some of the changes that happened in the sound also a lot of it had to do with the fact that, after twenty years, we've finally started to grow up. It wasn't just us too; a lot of the sound of Westwinds had to do with the people we were working with and the studio we were recording in. We were recording in Nanton, Alberta, for over a month with award-winning producer and new friend, Steve Loree at Crabapple Downs. He's a pretty no-nonsense kind of guy and we really had to work for him, but that worked out pretty well because we had no distractions. Crabapple Downs is located in Nanton and Nanton is about eighty miles south of Calgary and there's nothing there – NUH-THING – so we just spent our time in the studio honing our craft, and it turned out to be the perfect thing for us. It was good – we couldn't get into any trouble at night, so we just hung around the studio and drank beer. We were drinking and writing and carrying on and having a good time, it was wonderful! I don't know if I'd be able to say enough good things about Steve Loree and his beautiful wife Kitty.
“I can hear all of that in Westwinds,” continues McKenzie in a tone which suddenly becomes more contemplative. “Even if you were unaware of it before though, I hope that people can pick up on at least some of it in when they hear the album too.”
With Westwinds now out [on Fat Wreck Chords in the United States and on Stomp in Canada –ed] and beginning to generate an ample amount of respect (not just praise – some reviews have weighed in with a tone that is both heartfelt and respectful), the standard issue craziness of tour promotion has begun to take hold. While they're currently on a cross-Canada tour to promote Westwinds with Reverend Horton Heat, the Real McKenzies have also agreed to embark on an American tour on their own beginning on May 18, 2012 before going to do an extensive tour of Europe this summer and then re-entering the studio to record another album. The whirlwind pace may sound imposing and the obvious question would be to inquire on when the band plans to write more music that they'll be able to capture in the studio but, according to McKenzie, no concern is mandated; Westwinds tapped a new spring in The Real McKenzies that the singer can't wait to better explore. “One of the reasons we did Westwinds like we did was to place as much focus in these songs on our country – on where we're from – as possible,” says McKenzie frankly as he begins to lay out his band's future plans. “We'd like to do more of that on future albums too; between the amounts of Scottish and the amount of Canadian history that we've included in our music so far, we've really only taken a couple of thimbles full out of the reservoir. If we focused only on our history, the Real McKenzies could occupy the rest of our careers with that work; we're definitely going to include more, but we have other ideas too so we're going to do a lot of it because we love it, but we're also going to push out further too.”
Artist:
www.realmckenzies.com/
www.myspace.com/therealmckenziess
www.facebook.com/therealmckenzies
www.twitter.com/#!/real_mckenzies
Further Reading:
The Real McKenzies – Westwinds – [Album review]
The Real McKenzies – Shine Not Burn – [Album review]
Tour:
Click here for a current and regularly updated listing of shows by the Real McKenzies.
Album:
Westwinds is out now. Buy it here on Amazon or here on Fat Wreck Chords' website .
