Warm indie rock tunes from Montreal

By Wang Yu

Patrick Watson, a Canadian indie rock band, promises to warm up the winter when it performs in Yugongyishan on January 17. The Montreal-based group, which has performed with Feist, The Dears, Phillip Glass and James Brown, is often described as producing “cinematic” and “wildly eclectic” music.

The four-man band’s first album,Close to Paradise, released in September 2006, went gold in Canada and won numerous awards, including the Polaris Prize. Its international release the next year sold 100,000 copies and introduced Patrick Watson to a wider audience. Live shows followed in New York, London, Paris and Reykjavik, Amsterdam. The group has also created film scores and contributed to Cinematic Orchestra’s 2007 album, Ma Fleur.

The band’s 30-year-old singer, composer, songwrter and producer, from whom the group was named, made his first foray into music with a ska band in high school. In 2001, he released his debut solo album Waterproof9.

Guitarist Simon Angell, a fellow Quebecois whom Watson met when they were teenagers, complements Watson’s melodic compositions and gut-wrenching falsetto. Ukraine-born Mishka Stein and Swiss-Canadian Robbie Kuster, who met Watson in college, provide the band’s whoopingrhythms.

The band started when the four musicians were asked to create some music to accompany a book of photography. Having made a CD to go with all these images, they thought it would be fun to perform them live and it worked really well and people were stunned by the music.

Watson also says that they did not really think they were going be a band at that point but over a period of five or six years, they got to a point where it became very difficult to change the band’s name. “It was not easy to find a name that suited us especially as we had such an eclectic style,” he says.

More over, the band is also known for using unusual objects to create music. The artists incorporated a bicycle’s whirring sound in the song “Beijing” and used two spoons on an acoustic guitar to produce a tremolo picking effect for “Man Like You.”

Beijing fans will finally see the group live after having a free taste of its music online.

Patrick Watson Beijing Concert
Where: Yugongyishan, 3-2 Zhangzizhong Lu, Dongcheng District
When: January 17, 8 pm
Admission: 80 yuan (advance), 100 yuan (at the door)
Tel: 6404 2711