We’re doing a free show in Montreal, as part of the Festival du Nouveau Cinéma, curated by longtime friend and associate Adam Traynor. Details are to be announced soon, but I can say that it’s on Monday October 10 and that it will be a good lineup. Update: the lineup has been announced! Adam’s totally insane and awesome web series Le Ball Trap will be screening, followed by performances by the WP, Sarah Neufeld (violinist for Arcade Fire and an acclaimed solo artist in her own right) and Le Ball Trap music composer Victor Le Masne. And the whole thing is FREE! More details here.
I recently joined Spotify and have been enjoying it a lot. The “Discover Weekly” playlist is a great feature; I find most online entities’ efforts to target my taste comical to the point of poignancy, but Spotify does a pretty fine job of predicting what I will like. I started compiling a playlist of my own, and plan to update it and create more of them over time. Almost the entire WP catalogue is on there too, as indeed it is on most streaming platforms, so if you too enjoy listening to music this way, check it out.
Today is the fifth anniversary of the release of History of Pain. It’s an album that took us a long time to make (we worked on it for at least two years on and off, starting before the previous record Hard Feelings even came out) and one that I like a lot, though I think it’s a bit misunderstood, partly of my own doing.
I sometimes think it’s the most underrated WP album. I’ve been thinking about putting together a “Greatest Hits” compilation for the 20th anniversary of the WP in 2019, and I thought of assembling a parallel “greatest misses” or “shoulda-been hits” collection… but when I started to mentally compile it, almost all the tunes were from History of Pain.
Murray wanted to bring out the garage rock side of the WP, and as it happened, we were listening to a lot of that kind of music at the time. Not the generic three-chord garage stuff, more like a lot of classic power pop and glam rock, and more current stuff like Jay Reatard, Reigning Sound… basically we were listening to WFMU a lot. Plus, I felt like I had really taken the “rock anthems with keyboards instead of guitars” angle as far as it could go. So it seemed to make sense to put the guitars up front.
Somehow, in the promotion of the album, the angle emerged that “they replaced their synths with guitars and changed from electro to garage.” This is a bit misleading; the WP was never really strictly electro, there were guitars on many of the Lost Illusions/Hard Feelings songs, and History of Pain has keyboards on every song but one. But it is a “rock record” for sure, and I think some of the people who dug the raw synth-punk of the early WP were a bit underwhelmed.
Between that, the fact that our distributor went belly-up just before the album came out, and a million other little strokes from the fickle finger of fate, it felt like the record didn’t quite get the attention we thought it deserved. But whatever, I still like it.
Speaking of History of Pain, to promote its release I got a bunch of talented friends to do remixes, and released them for free on this site. For your convenience, this Summer of Pain series is now available on the WP Soundcloud page. Hope you enjoy it!
As far as the present and future of the WP, I’m working on some new songs and strategizing my next moves. Wherever you are, I hope to connect with you soon.