As good as their word
Dave Jaffer
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Priestess: But these faces are made for radio!
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Montreal rockers Priestess keep a promise and kick some ass
Sometimes the world doesn't shock or surprise. The Yankees, after spending about half-a-billion dollars signing free agents, won the World Series. Yawn. Michael Jackson died with a ton of prescription meds in his system. You read that and say, Yeah, of course that happened.
In the same vein, it didn't catch many people unawares when the new Priestess album, Prior to the Fire, turned out to be awesome. Why not? Because their 2006 debut, Hello Master, hinted at greatness. Because we all knew they had it in them, Prior to the Fire was Priestess simply making good on a promise.
Artists are often their own harshest critics, but even Priestess frontman Mikey Heppner seems buzzed when discussing the new record. "I think we really nailed what we wanted to achieve," he says. "We wanted to make a good collection of songs that we would get stoked on and record it as straight-up as possible, keeping the intensity up."
That seems to be exactly what they did. If anything, Prior to the Fire captures the intensity of a Priestess show and puts it on a record. For this, props are most certainly due producer David Schiffman (System Of A Down, Audioslave), but also the band for writing a diametrically different sophomore album, complete with progressive aspects and great pacing. A rock album qua rock album, it makes you want to buy a van and paint a naked mermaid with a sword on its side.
Why the slack-jawed awe and unadulterated praise? It's an experiment on my part, a feeble
attempt to win them some radio play, which still matters a hell of a lot. Why? Apparently Montreal, despite being the band's home, isn't the best place for them to play. "We seem to be bigger elsewhere in Canada," Heppner says. "There's kind of like, radio situations. Out west, for example, we get a lot of radio airplay, which is really crazy. No band like us gets radio airplay out here. It doesn't exist.
"You can say whatever you want about radio," he continues, "but at the end of the day, the difference that it does make [is huge]. For example, the amount of support we get from the radio there, it really makes a big difference. We see it when we go play a show in Vancouver. We'll play a 1,500-seater there, you know? We're stoked if we can sell out like, 400 people or 500 people here."
Do we really want to be beaten by Vancouver? At anything?
Priestess
w/ Early Man and Trigger Effect
At Le National (1220 Ste-Catherine E.), Nov. 19
