Pitchfork

For Canada's reigning rock melodramatists the Dears, the a-pop-calypse is always nigh. To celebrate they've penned such feel-good hits as "There Is No Such Thing as Love", "22: The Death of All the Romance", and "No Hope Before Destruction". And come this fall, the chipper, Montreal-based sextet will unleash its latest opus to hyperbolic woe, Gang of Losers. Rather than build on the success of 2004's (mostly) well-received No Cities Left, however, the combo tossed their blueprints out the window when making Gang of Losers and overhauled their entire recording process.

"When we recorded our last album it was a total nightmare," Dears keyboardist Natalia Yanchack recently disclosed to Pitchfork. "We did it all digital. A lot of albums that are recorded now are just composed of takes; there's no actual musicianship involved. You play something 40 times and nail one little part. That's what destroyed us with the last album."

"It felt so foreign to us. It was the worst thing we could ever do."

To repent for the sins of Cities, the Dears enlisted the aid of a 700-pound friend: an outmoded tape machine. As Natalia joked, "it's a beast; it looks like it should be on the set of the original 'Star Trek'."

Beast or no, it allowed the Dears to eschew the piecemeal recording approach that hampered their previous album and cultivate a rawer sound that's "just us," according to Yanchack.

"This time everything is live, every take was played all the way through," she revealed. "You can hear it. There's this soul to the recordings."

All said, Gang "still has its own huge-ness", and-- if the song titles are any indication-- still resounds with the Dears' charming, Moz-esque bombast. The record is slated to arrive on Arts & Crafts in America October 3, MapleMusic in Canada, Bella Union in the UK, and Speak n Spell in Australia. Special guests include Chris Seligman of Stars on French horn, and the Reverend William Lightburn, father of chief Dear Murray Lightburn, on saxophone.

C'mon, feel the melodrama:

01 Sinthtro
02 Ticket to Immortality
03 Death or Life We Want You
04 Hate Then Love
05 There Goes My Outfit
06 Bandwagoneers
07 Fear Made the World Go 'Round
08 You and I Are a Gang of Losers
09 Whites Only Party
10 Ballad of Humankindness
11 I Fell Deep
12 Find Our Way to Freedom

Yanchack and the junior Lightburn also have a little side project going, colloquially known as holy matrimony. Their first "release", a wee Lightburn christened Neptune, arrived September 30 of last year. Awww! Despite being present throughout the recording of Gang, this littlest Dear wasn't phased in the slightest by ma and pa's crashing guitars and soaring keyboards. Indeed, quite the opposite.

"She just slept through it. I guess she's conditioned to it because I toured until about six or seven months [into the pregnancy]," Yanchack mused. "I guess being on stage she got all these low-end vibrations and it was calming to her." Perhaps we'll catch a glimpse of lil' Neptune, now free from the womb, rocking out backstage at one of these upcoming Dears live engagements:

06-25 London, England - Hyde Park (Wireless Festival)
06-26 London, England - ICA
06-29 Montreal, Quebec - Metropolis (Montreal Jazz Festival)
07-01 Toronto, Ontario - Harbourfront Centre
08-19 Stafford, England - V Festival
08-20 Chelmsford, England - V Festival
08-22 Dublin, Ireland - Marlay Park (Bud Rising)