Music

Weed's muscular riffage grows from Vancouver's fertile music scene

by Josiah Hughes

Photo: Andrew Volk

Year after year, we’re reminded that Vancouver is an absurdly fertile music city. In 2013, offerings from The Courtneys, Young Braised, and Jay Arner (all of whom have been profiled in AUX recently) are among the Canada’s best. The year could’ve ended there, but instead, fuzzy indie punk act Weed had to up the ante with Deserve, a dazzling, rambunctious debut that combines muscular rock riffing with a penchant for poppy song craft and feedback-drenched noise passages. Put simply, it rules.

Will Anderson formed Weed with Kevin Doherty when the two were living in New York City. The project didn’t transform into the dense alt-punk project it is today until rhythm section Bobby Siadat and Hugo Noriega were on board.

“I think I decided I wanted to be in my own band the night after seeing Ducktails perform a basement show. So I think I wanted to rip off that guy-with-a-guitar-loop-station stuff as much as possible,” Anderson recalls. “I like to think that the heavier influences were there all along, but we didn’t really permanently flip the distortion switch until Hugo and Bobby were on board.”

Speaking of that name, don’t bother with your goofy jokes about puffing blunt smoke. Anderson’s heard them all, though he doesn’t seem too concerned with it. “All band names are stupid,” he declares. “I definitely have moments of regret, but they’re fleeting. The word ‘weed’ is pretty much associated with one thing, so yeah that’s pretty much the first joke we hear at every stop.”

They’re not exactly hot-boxing their practice space and firing up the lava lamps, either. “Only one member of the band ‘raises the flag’ with any regularity, and a lot of people seem to find the irony completely hilarious,” Anderson says. “I definitely thought it would be funny to have a recording project called Weed because I’ve never even tried the stuff, but obviously wasn’t thinking too far ahead.”

There’s not a whole lot of getting wasted at Weed shows, either, because they insist on playing all ages-friendly spaces exclusively. Hardly taking a hardline stance against bar culture, Anderson says he simply finds them to be cooler places to play.

“A lot of people think I worship Fugazi or something, but when I decided all-ages shows were cool it had nothing to do with any of that. I wouldn’t even hear about Ian Mackaye for several more years,” he admits. Instead, growing up in small-town Wisconsin, his knowledge of music was limited to shitty bar shows. “One night I finally wound up at a hardcore show in Eau Claire where this band called Regret was playing,” he recalls. “All I was listening to at that point was Weezer and Death Cab and wimpy stuff like that. When I saw this great hardcore band crush a 15 minute set and then find out they refused to play shows that were age-restrictive, it just blew my mind.

“When I started Weed, I knew I wanted to play cooler shows. I never saw any cool shows at bars,” he says. “They were always at DIY spaces and weird thrift stores that high schoolers could hang out at.”