Harvee
Another Canadian band emailed me last year - Harvee. The sextet are from Montreal area and I haven to admit total ignorance of the pop music scene there. Harvee are really all over the map with the 3 songs they offer for download. Although most, if not all, of the band are Francophones, the songs I've heard are sung in English. "Magical Mind" is New Wavey and also reminded me of Madness at points. Philip Guerin sings lead but everyone in the band contributes their voices. "Hiding Julia" is the Beach Boys done north of the border. The ending of the song is quite reminiscent of "Sloop John B". I love the harmonies here. A total 60s pastiche and great stuff. "Father Was a Gambler" is but a 40 second snippet, unfortunately. A pretty straight ahead power pop tune, from what I can gather.
Being ignorant of Montreal's music scene, I have to wonder just how Harvee fit into it. They speak French but sing in English and I wonder how having two languages to choose from affects the band and how this situation shapes the music scene there as a whole. Any Quebecians reading this?
posted by Palmer at 9:02 AM
1 Comments:
hey, philip here from Harvee.
The reason why we sent you an email is because I personnally venture on your blog in the middle of the night.
Thank you for the feature by the way!!!
To answer your question, it is strange being born francophones and sing in english. Even though I'd like to say most people don't care, it's in fact not exactly the truth. I think there is definetly some kind of rejection made by some people as soon as they know we're not anglophones. Fortunately, it's not always the case. We are now "friends" with anglo bands and I do believe they don't care about the language but do only care about the music, wich is in fact, the only important thing to us. The next question to pop in your head must be : why choose to sing in english ?
The answer is both simple and complicated. First, we didn't choose to sing in english. More than 4 years ago when we first played together it wasn't really serious and was much more about exploration and having a good time(well...this is still the case but you know...it's different)So for us, having only listened to anglo music from all around the world, the only references we could relate to were in english.
So it was in fact more an artistic driven "decision" or impulse you will.
I hope it answers your question.
philip
harvee
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