Ones&Zeros The City Don't Care Release Party, with guests The Flintettes, Friday, June 20 at 8 p.m. at The Media Club. $8. For more information onesandzerosmusic.com.
In new song "The City Don't Care," Vancouver musician Jason Maxwell turned his creative eye to the celebrated local landmarks that have already been, or are at risk of being lost.
Maxwell references the recent fight to preserve Vancouver's Waldorf Hotel, which he describes as "such a great place," and a "mecca for local music for a long time," as a prime example.
"We have real milestone events that are linked to many of these places and they're getting torn down and replaced with these other commercial enterprises. A lot of our identity gets tied to those places and situations that are linked to those places, so their loss can have an impact on us and on our identity," he says, explaining "The City Don't Care" is about that and alienation in urban environments.
The song is serving as the title track of Maxwell's new project Ones&Zeros's forthcoming EP. Its message is delivered in an indie rock fashion, characterized by dual male/female vocals, and backed by gritty guitar riffs, representative of Maxwell's early '80s new wave and post-punk leanings.
After years of playing in local bands (namely punk, and noise rock outfit Lung in the mid-'90s to early 2000s), recording, touring parts of Canada and the United States, and opening for big acts like the Pixies and The Flaming Lips, Maxwell took a hiatus from the music world. He turned to academia, completing undergraduate and graduate studies in psychology at Simon Fraser University, as well as spent some time travelling and working in Asia.
"The music bug was kind of there in the background and I had some local friends here that said, 'Why don't you come out and play music again?'" says Maxwell, a North Vancouver native.
Eventually, Maxwell could ignore the call of his long-held passion no longer, and in January 2012, just for fun, started playing music again, as well as songwriting, a creative pursuit he had always undertaken in his previous bands.
"Maybe because I was away from it for (awhile), a lot of music started to come together, more so than in any other band that I've been in before," he says. "And so I was sitting on all of this stuff on my computer, all these different songs, and I thought it was kind of a shame to not do something with them."
Teaming up with some local friends and players, Maxwell went on to found rock band Ones&Zeros, eventually recording an eponymous five-song EP that was released in June and is currently receiving airplay across North America on both campus and independent radio stations.
Initially a four-piece, Ones&Zeros' lineup has continued to evolve and now includes six musicians, one of which is Maxwell's younger sister Amanda Rawlings, a North Shore resident, who's serving as lead vocalist. The siblings sing primarily in harmony, a 60-40 split, explains, Maxwell, who also offers up guitar and keyboard instrumentation.
Other band members - a group of experienced local musicians who have or are continuing to play with other local bands - include: fellow North Vancouver native Greg Hennessey, guitar; Nathan Shubert, keyboards (The Wild North, Minto); Michael Lauder, drums (The Modern States); and Duncan Stewart, bass.
"They're really great people and really easy to work with and we're able to plow through a lot of this music that's sitting on the sidelines just because they are so talented," says Maxwell.
Maxwell is looking forward to the new and expanded lineup's debut live show, in celebration of the release of their second EP, The City Don't Care, Saturday, Jan. 4, 2014 at Vancouver's The Media Club. The five-song EP was recorded this summer at Vancouver's The Hive, engineered and mixed by Andy Schichter and produced by Maxwell.
Reflecting on what many of his songs are about, as in the case of "The City Don't Care," social commentary seems to be a common thread. It turns out they're quite often rants and gripes about things like the state of the world, or sort of the folly of our daily lives in many cases, he says.
While Maxwell is finding himself gravitating to the political more and more these days, it's something he certainly explored back in the day, albeit in a slightly different format.
"We were ranting about things in the punk days for sure, the state of affairs in the world," he says.
"I find it hard to avoid that kind of stuff really. You think about notions like 'the personal is political' and so forth and it's hard to disentangle ourselves from the things that are going on in the world around us," he adds, The same cannot be said for commercial radio content, he says, which doesn't typically reflect those sorts of concerns. "Most of it tends to be focused on making money, getting things and partying all night long and all that kind of silliness," he says. "For me, a lot of what's going on around me and what's going on in the world tends to crop up in these songs. In that sense it's probably serving a kind of cathartic purpose for me as well."
Despite the seriousness of their lyrical content, Ones&Zeros' music is upbeat and is sure to please audiences. Performancewise it's fun to play and high-energy for the most part, says Maxwell.
"It's not all downer music by any means. I think the music's pretty lively and a lot times people will say, 'Oh, that's really kind of immediately catchy stuff,'" he says.
When asked what the future holds for Ones&Zeros, Maxwell says he's looking forward to continuing to have fun playing music with such a strong collective of players, and playing more shows and potentially a festival or two this summer. He also remains focused on songwriting in the months ahead.
"And, if an indie label happened to offer us some help with the distribution of some of the music, well that would just be a bonus - icing on the cake," he says.
Ones&Zeros' new EP, The City Don't Care, is streamable via SoundCloud, soundcloud.com/ones-4. To find out more about the band, visit their Facebook page, facebook.com/OnesAndZerosMusic.
