Music

8 reasons Elevation Recordings is the best record label started by an NHL player

by Mark Teo

Photo: Sportsgraphs.com

Among fans of the Toronto Maple Leafs, Boyd Devereaux is remembered—loathed, even—for scoring the least-celebrated hat trick in team history. In the final game of 2009, he won the game for the bottom-feeding Leafs, and as a result, the team would draft fifth instead of seventh, missing out on the prospect they wanted—Brayden Schenn. (His brother, Luke, was then a Leaf.) Instead, the team chose a high-risk, high-reward gamble in Nazem Kadri.

So, back then, Leafs nation hated Boyd Devereaux. More than any fanbase should ever hate an NHL journeyman—beyond Toronto, he played in Edmonton, Detroit and Phoenix, ending his career in Switzerland with HC Lugano.

But I’ve always backed the guy. Not only because his hat trick ended well—five years on, Kadri’s one of the Leafs’ biggest stars—but because he had indisputably excellent taste in music. While most NHLers blasted pop-country or celebrated Justin Bieber ironically, Devereaux went headfirst into subterranean independent fare—and even invested money into his own boutique label, Elevation Recordings.

Follow him on Twitter, too, and you’ll realize it’s no fluke. Dude knows music:

Savages killed tonight at Mod Club. Crowd was crazy. Great night!

— Boyd Devereaux (@wakingsound) July 17, 2013

The beats on Yeezus are amazing.

— Boyd Devereaux (@wakingsound) June 19, 2013

Some awesome Toronto heaviness…Indian Handcrafts.

— Boyd Devereaux (@wakingsound) January 6, 2013

@UffeBodin ya, dig all the Swedish bands killing that style…Graveyard, Witchcraft, Burning Saviours…is Ghost Swedish too?

— Boyd Devereaux (@wakingsound) October 1, 2012

 

Yes, y’all. Boyd Devereaux is a Graveyard fan.

But back to his label. According to its lore, Elevation was a partnership between Devereaux and ex-Dirtbomb Joe Greenwald, a friend he met while living in Detroit and playing for the Red Wings. And, as AUX contributor Jesse Locke noted, the label was “more avant than Guy Lafleur Disco,” and it was certainly more experimental than ex-Wing Darren McCarty’s hard rock outfit, Grinder, or ex-Bruin defenseman Matt Lashoff’s blues project. Indeed, Devereaux’s label was as weird as it was excellent, dabbling in small-run releases by mostly Canadian noise, post-metal, and ambient acts. Like who, you might ask?

 

Nadja

Aidan Baker is an adored name in Canadian experimental music, and that’s largely due to his work with Nadja, his ambient / drone / noise project with his partner, Leah Buckareff. The Toronto duo’s been prolific—wander over to their Wikipedia page, and you’ll find handfuls of full-lengths, short-players, and splits—and they crossed paths with Elevation in 2007, when the label made Nadja’s Guilted By the Sun EP its first release.

 

Blood Meridian

Blood Meridian—the Vancouver band, not the film. Emerging from the psyched-out metal scene that produced Pink Mountaintops, Lightning Dust, Hard Drugs and, of course, Black Mountain, Blood Meridian twisted country and folk into something wonderfully bizarre (and occasionally heavy). No surprise, really, considering drummer Joshua Wells and singer Matt Camirand also play in Black Mountain. Elevation handled Blood Meridian’s second, and last, LP, Liquidate Paris.

 

Thisquietarmy

Thisquietarmy, a.k.a. Eric Quach, is often celebrated by the same folks who adore Nadja—like Baker’s project, they dabbled in ambient territories, but they also added very clear post-metal, black metal, and shoegaze influences. Thisquietarmy has more than 20 releases to his name from handfuls of international labels, but Devereaux and co. released his Blackhaunter EP.

 

Laura

Elevation made their first foray overseas with Laura, a cinematic post-rock act from Australia. Though they’re lesser known stateside, they’ve toured with heavies of the genre: Japanese post-everything standards Mono, metallic behemoths Isis, and genre legends Cult of Luna, to name a few. Their 2011 Twelve Hundred Times LP is a sprawling gem; Elevation, for their part, released 2,000 copies of Laura’s Yes Maybe No in 2008.

 

Orn

Toronto-based Orn seemingly formed and disappeared to little fanfare—it appears that their 7-inch, Teeth / Knowing, is the band’s best-known artifact. The songs on their Myspace reveal them as a savagely minimal, sludgy doom, but according to Soundweave, they broke up in 2009. They supposedly have an unreleased full-length floating somewhere in the abyss—we’ll leave it up to you to find it.

 

Whisper Room

Elevation loves some Aidan Baker, so it makes perfect sense that they’d cut a record of his kraut / electronic / experimental project, Whisper Room. Like Nadja and thisquietarmy, Whisper Room also had work released by Montreal-based Alien8 Recordings—who evidently had similar tastes to Devereaux—and thankfully, the band’s Elevation-released disc, the out-there Birch White, is hosted in its entirety on Broken Spine Productions’ Bandcamp.

 

Residual Echoes

California-based Adam Payne’s project, Residual Echoes, classifies their Elevation-released Firsts EP as part of the “faster Los Angeles years.” Since the Elevation years, however, Payne has evolved into a guitar mastermind, whose screaming riffage leans as heavily on J. Mascis as it does on classic rock. “Dosed Clothes,” above, is a prime example of Payne’s ability to bottle up fuzzed-out madness.