604 Decades — the newly-launched archival series within the venerated 604 Group — is taking its first official look back at Vancouver’s rich, if unexplored arts history with an overview of cult shoegazers Movieland. While the trio hadn’t reached the top of the marquee when they were active in the early ‘90s, the stunningly psych-spiraled melodicism found on their demos and rarities collection proves that Movieland should have been a blockbuster. The album arrives digitally and on vinyl on
The heart of Movieland is singer-guitarist Alan D. Boyd, an Edmonton-raised musician who briefly flocked to Montreal to play bass in garage rock legends the Gruesomes before working his way out west to Vancouver in 1991. It’s here that he started working at a bagel shop alongside drummer Justin Leigh, and after a few shifts bonding over British bands like The Stone Roses and Slowdive, the pair reached out to bassist John Ounpuu to start quaking out some gain-blasted, heart-swelling hypno-jams of their own.
“We were doing long songs, and they were noisy,” Boyd sums up of the earliest Movieland material. Recorded at long-gone arts hub-cum-recording studio Downtown Sound, a four-song debut cassette — which now kicks off reflected leather jacket rebellion (“Rant”) and the dangerously mesmerizing epics (“Everything”) that the band had been working out onstage at various arts college warehouse parties. Things got loud; bass amps exploded; speakers got kicked in. And while rooted in the 12-string jangle of a Rickenbacker guitar and a nitrous whiff of distortion, the dawn of Vancouver rave culture and seedy-side-of-town hang sessions likewise seeped into the group’s lysergic groove.
“There were a lot of drugs in Vancouver at that time,” Boyd contextualizes. “I never really liked weed, but everybody seemed to smoke it; and there was an interest in psychedelics amongst the people that we were all friends with. It definitely informed what we were doing, that cannot be denied.”
By the time Movieland started writing their second demo, Boyd had moved into The Mansion, a crumbling rental within Vancouver’s upscale Shaughnessy neighborhood that ended up housing a bunch of derelict-looking musicians, filmmakers, and sandwich artists. “The neighbors called the police the day we moved in because they thought we were breaking into the house,” Boyd recalls with a laugh. “We’d rehearse there and make music, but we would also have massive parties with bands and DJ’s. Nobody heard anything outside, because the house was really well soundproofed.”
Deep within the walls of the Mansion, Boyd began tunneling into a series of experimentally layered, melancholy shoegaze songs on a borrowed Tascam 8-track. Among them was the entrancing, love life-mining “I Relate,” a will-they-or-won’t-they number that anchored the band’s second demo cassette.
“‘I Relate’ is another song about a girl, and about being in this flux state after meeting somebody. Like, ‘Is this person the person that I want to be with?’ It’s just all that young man’s self-doubt, you know? Playing that kind of angsty, self-referential music in the 1990s — when next door the grunge scene is happening and it’s all big and loud — felt very different. Very exposed.”
A small but dedicated fanbase bought tapes and showed up to off-the-grid indie venues for live performances, but there wasn’t much exposure beyond that. Movieland never got their breakthrough opening for a big touring band. One time an A&R scout for a major label showed up to a local gig, but they opted to sign the opening act instead. Boyd notes he received a bunch of glowing rejection letters from other labels. Then Ounpuu and Leigh left the lineup to start up the pop-driven alternative quartet Pluto, who did end up singing to a Virgin Records, with the help of their lawyer, future 604 Records co-founder Jonathan Simkin.
Undeterred, Boyd linked up with bassist Cam Cunningham, an old friend from Edmonton, and drummer Clancy Denehy (Perfume Tree) to track the final two, melodically gain-freaked Movieland anthems — “Build Me a Dream” and “She’s a Mountain”. While blistering earworms like these led some in town to give Boyd a snickering nickname — “My Bloody Alantine” — he didn’t seem to mind. “I get that they were making fun of me, but I also thought, ‘If I’m achieving that on an 8-track, then I’m pretty happy.”
The good times, however, eventually ended. By 1994, Movieland still weren’t making any headway around town. Boyd’s biggest brush with fame at that point was making mint tea for Bryan Adams during a shift at a coffee shop. Feeling like the local music scene had become a dead end, Boyd wondered if Movieland had officially hit its final act.
“I stood on the Cambie Bridge one day and gazed at the city, with those mountains behind it, and I said ‘what a lovely place, but it doesn’t feel like I can get anything done here.’ A couple of days later we were drinking Framboise beer at the bar and I said ‘I’m going to London’. I sold all my stuff.”
Boyd left British Columbia to roadie across Europe for SNFU — again, old Edmonton friends — and he opted to stick around the UK, where he’s been living for the past 30 years. He’s been working steady ever since, whether writing music for films and TV, or while performing in Little Sparta with the Mekons’ Susie Honeyman.
But when Simkin — one of Movieland’s biggest boosters at the time — reached out about the old music, Boyd passionately dug up the tapes — as well as early live footage, show posters, and more — to put together. The nostalgic, aggressively amp-dialed project has reawakened Boyd’s shoegazing spirit, with a series of newly-written Movieland tracks set to head our way through 604 Decades at a later date. Turns out Movieland’s early ‘90s curtain call may have been a bit premature
“It’s a good time to do this. People who were part of that scene will get a kick out of listening to this again,” he says of the archival release, adding of bringing Movieland to a younger generation of music fans, “Now I’m talking to my son and people his age about seeing My Bloody Valentine, and they’re in awe. Then they hear our stuff and go ‘that’s really cool!’ You think to yourself, ‘Where were you thirty years ago? Oh right…you weren’t born yet.’”
SOURCE: Official Bio
LINKS:
https://www.facebook.com/MOVIELANDband
https://www.instagram.com/movielandband/
