Dog Day reform to make 'Deformer'

by Nicole Villeneuve

October 11, 2011

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When the dual-coupled quartet of Halifax’s Dog Day dissolved down into one amidst half of the group’s divorce, the remaining husband-and-wife duo, Seth Smith and Nancy Urich, decided to forge on, even if nothing would really be the same.

Since the two have been playing music together (you might know them as part of Halifax’s Burdocks before their Dog Days), they’ve yet to settle into a predictable pattern; Dog Day’s 2009 album Concentration, for instance, was made bigger through some pro studio time and came out a bonafide indie rock monster. Now, the recently released third full-length Deformer could easily have been called Reformer.

“We were left with Nancy and I trying to figure out what we’d do with the band; If we’d start something else,” Smith says on the phone from Hamilton, ON while the band—on only their second tour as a two-piece—scours pawn shops for some treasures to take home. “I still had a lot of songs written already, enough for a record or two, and they definitely had the Dog Day vibe. Nancy learned the drums, and we just took a few months to kind of recalibrate, and we just tried it as a two-piece. We wanted to make a different-sounding record anyway and it seemed like a nice change to freshen things up.”

Deformer isn’t like the Dog Day you knew: it’s stripped down, less immediate, and a little more spontaneous. While the intention was to embrace the group’s dynamic change and make something different, the soundshift was also a matter of their recording environment this time around. Last year, the band also split Halifax for the shore, purchasing a house about 30 minutes outside of the city. In their own world, with their dog and the ocean, they were free to experiment.

“We’ve been spending a lot of time out there alone anyway and we built a makeshift home recording studio there. When you’re two people, you can learn a song much faster. And when your studio’s downstairs, you can record that as soon as you want. I think some of that spontaneity came out on this record.”

Smith and Urich also made the artwork (Smith’s a screenprinter by day) and released the album on their own Fundog records. While more work put on less people seems like the wrong way to take things easy, Smith insists that having the control is key.

“We just felt like scaling back a bit. It ends up being a bit more work but it sounds how you want it to sound. When you’re in the studio, it can be a lot of pressure when money’s involved. We kind of just wanted to get back to recording something ourselves, taking our time with it, being kind of casual, and relaxed.”

And the band is already planning on changing things up again: they’ve got a new seven-inch planned for early next year with Eric’s Trip guitarist Chris Thompson. “It’ll be neat to do the three piece. All I know is that Nancy and I will be in it forever. We’ll just do that, and whatever else happens, will be icing on the cake.”

Tags: Music, Interviews, News, Dog Day

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