Music

Doldrums' Airick Woodhead likes bands, not brands

by Mark Teo

Most reviews for Doldrums’ new album Lesser Evil call it an Orwellian concept album, one about a drug that fuses collective consciousness into a single, dystopian dream. Doldrums—who is, presumably, the narrator-cum-protagonist—leads a rebel faction who fights for the ability for individual dreaming. It sounds pensive, imaginative, and, as its narrative goes, dizzyingly complex—just like Montreal-based Airick Woodhead’s music. The only problem? It isn’t what Lesser Evil is about. Not even close.

“Pitchfork did an hour-long interview with me and they didn’t record it,” says Woodhead. “So they misquoted me a lot [about the concept of Lesser Evil]. I had an idea for a synopsis that paralleled my music and art—it was around a protagonist who fought for independence in a world where everyone shared dreams. But that storyline is a fictional representation of the rest of the world. It’s not a concept album. My lyrics aren’t directly about that—they’re about the personal things in my life.”

Which isn’t to say that Lesser Evil is about doing laundry and drinking Depanneur 40s in the park. In conversation, Woodhead acknowledges the idiosyncracies of his lifestyle that inform his music: He’s acutely aware that, as an artist on the ever-hot Arbutus Records, he’s blurred the boundaries between his public and private life. He’s adamant about maintaining a local—and literal—community, despite the ever-changing rules of socializing. And, in his music, he’s exploring the themes many artists do: Lesser Evil thinks about legacy, its place in capital-C Culture, and how technology is affecting the creative process.

So, yeah, Lesser Evil isn’t exactly 1984. But it is intensely personal. “Lesser Evil,” he says, is about people wanting to become ideas—if only to live forever. “Golden Calf” is about the external quest to find a purpose—through, say, travelling—only to discover meaning internally.

“It’s pilfering the most trying parts of our lives to spread around a message, or to help deal with problems you’ve had in the past,” says Woodhead. “And at the end of the day, [being an artist] has gone so much farther than being a commodity.”

What Woodhead is talking about, then, is his distrust of being called a brand, a product with a handy story attached. Perhaps he’s read his reviews: As a product, Lesser Evil has been described as combining avant-garde sound manipulation, David Bowie’s androgynous vocals, shoegaze’s distortion, electronic music’s instrumentation, and pop music’s penchant for cannibalizing genre. As a story, there’s plenty of angles, too: It’s the result of Woodhead’s time spent with few fixed addresses. It was recorded on Grimes’ borrowed laptop. It was—back when Woodhead called Toronto home—Arbutus’s first non-local signing.

None of these designations sit easy with Woodhead. “We’re all bullied into subscribing to a particular brand, and that’s such bullshit,” he says. “There’s a lot of pressure on people to succeed, or be a part of something, and that’s something I struggle with. But I do want to be part of a community that dedicates themselves to something local. Where the artifacts you engage with aren’t something being sold to you, where you’re appraising things that are being created around you.”

Perhaps it’s Woodhead’s way of saying that he doesn’t want his music lumped in with larger cultural trends. And maybe he’s right: Lesser Evil’s doesn’t conjure any immediate comparables. It sounds—shockingly—original.

“The experimental side you hear in my music is the result of actual experiments,” laughs Woodhead. “I try out a lot of different things, like new ways that I can use creative technology, or create expression without technology, and how these [elements] play with each other.”

Yet one element Woodhead says doesn’t play a part in his music—which is a head-scratcher—is pop culture. “If you hear pop in my music, it’s because I grew up writing pop songs. I’m not bound to any larger cultural phenomenon.”

Despite his reputation as a technophile, Woodhead certainly isn’t a hyper-ADD Tumblr kid. “I barely pay attention to what’s popular right now—in fact, I was the last person I knew to get Facebook,” he says. “I’m actually kind of a luddite.”