Here’s a tagline to save the music industry: See a show, learn a language! Even if it really only works with a group like French Canadian band Malajube, it’s still an interesting concept. After all, how did a small, French speaking indie band from the Montreal break into a market that STILL makes a huge deal about Selena and what a crossover sensation she was? Witness a Malajube show, and you’ll understand – a roomful of young American music fans enthusiastically butchering the French language as they sing along to the animated performance in front of them. You might not know what the hell you’re saying, but after a certain point, words in music don’t really matter anyhow. Mathieu Cournoyer (bass) and Thomas Augustin (keys, vocals) spoke with me about this phenomenon, and a few other issues (including bear hats!) at their show at Johnny Brenda’s in Philadelphia. More pictures after the jump.
You guys have been on tour for almost two years now. How has the experience been for you?
Mathieu: Oh, great. We’ve seen so much, so many different countries. Kind of tired though.
Understandable. I saw that you’re playing a bunch of shows in Quebec coming up – are you all excited to be going home for a bit?
Mathieu: Yes, definitely. We have kind of a bigger following there, bigger shows.
Thomas: People sing for us there. They sing so much that we don’t have to sing sometimes.
Do you even find it odd to come to an English speaking area and have people singing along who have no idea what they’re singing?
Mathieu: Yes, it’s very funny. But wherever we go, there always seems to be a couple of Quebecers in the crowd, who teach other people.
You guys have gotten a lot of positive attention for you album artwork and music videos; you won a few awards for it. How did that distinctive look come about?
Thomas: Well, first of all, we decided to prefer video where we are not there, performing, looking cool, so we use animation. It’s been always the same people with us; we use animation and one good source of visuals is obviously the artwork of the CD, with all the drawing and stick figures everywhere, so we always use that.
I remember seeing the video for “Montreal -40” and just being completely amazed by it.
Mathieu: Yes, it’s a very cool video. Not so fun to shoot!
Really?
Mathieu: Yes, we shot it outside in Montreal, and it was probably almost -40 when we were shooting. Very cold. And this one shot we had to do for the beginning and the end, we had to dress up and shoot it around 20 times. And at the time we had no idea what it was actually for, we were just standing around wondering what to do.
Well it was definitely worth it in the end, I’d say. You guys had Quebec rappers Loco Locass perform on your song “La Russe.” Why did you decide to include rap on your CD, and can you explain to me why it sounds so much cooler in French than in English?
Mathieu: Well I think it was just that they’re friends. They’re pretty big in Quebec, but they’re pretty big separatists – very different from us, really. They’re very political, and talk a lot and we are just the opposite. And one day they just stepped right in and we wrote some lyrics and it took only one day, I think. And on the album its actually just one half, maybe even one quarter of the song – everything else was too, ah, vulgar, to be put on. When he was writing he was just swearing all the time. The part that we cut out – they were just going crazy! We had to cut most of the song.
Ah, well you can put that out with b-sides then.
Thomas: It was actually on the internet for a little while, I believe. I think we’ll keep it there.
Do you guys ever get tired of English media focusing on the French thing?
Thomas: No, not really. It’s what makes us different from all the other bands coming from Canada. People are always interested in what is different. They are just curious, I guess.
Any other French speaking bands from Quebec that people should be listening to?
Thomas: Hmm…no not really. There’s not that many. I mean there are plenty of bands but not ones that we want to talk about!
Mathieu: Vulgaires Machins?
Thomas: Ah yes, they a little bit more political, more punk rock.
Tell me about Dare to Care Records. How did you get involved with them?
Thomas: It’s actually a friend of ours. He had this label for probably four-five years before we signed with him. It was just this one guy releasing punk rock albums. And he just asked us to sign and offered to release a thousand copies of our first record. And we were like “Oh no, that’s way too much!”
So you’re sort of the first band on the label to get a lot of recognition?
Mathieu: Yeah, he didn’t really ever sell more than a thousand copies of an album before.
In your pictures, I always notice one of you wearing a bear hat.
Thomas: Ah yes, that’s one thing we got tired of in our two year tour. It got really disgusting, mushrooms and fungus growing it in. I think we washed it once.
So no more bear hat?
Thomas: No, now we are on to beards!
Are you recording soon?
Thomas: Yes! We are going home, taking a month vacation then hopefully writing songs. We’ve been on tour so long. It’s very important for a band to be writing songs, and we had never planned to be on a tour for this long. One country after another kept releasing it, so we’d go here, there.
Your music has a very diverse sound. Are there any new elements you’re hoping to incorporate to the new recordings?
Mathieu: We want a big chorus with a bunch of people. On the one song we had 40 or 50 people, and liked that. I guess we’ll just look around and find things we like.
