PS I Love You
The hottest indie act Canada’s got on offer right now
Photo by exclaim.ca
Among other things, Kingston, Ontario is famous for HNIC blowhard Don Cherry, Maple Leafs legend (and one-time Hab) Doug Gilmour, the Tragically Hip and Queen’s University.
Oh, and prisons; they’ve got lots and lots of prisons.
Maybe that last fact is why K-town’s PS I Love You is so criminally good (sorry). The noisy duo of Paul Saulnier and Benjamin Nelson are arguably the hottest indie act Canada’s got on offer right now, and right now they’re offering it up to a ton of audiences. Currently, Saulnier and Nelson are making their way back to Canada supporting Diamond Rings. Previous to that, they were down at SXSW in Austin, Texas, where they played about 183 shows in four days.
(I was there; seeing Saulnier shuffling around Austin became such a regular part of my day, in my first week post-Austin it didn’t immediately make sense that I wasn’t bumping in to him everywhere.)
So, what’s the reason for all the fuss? Meet Me At The Muster Station, the band’s debut full-length release for Paper Bag Records. Reviewed favourably by the smarmy tastemakers at Pitchfork and pretty much every other publication worth its salt, …Muster Station is an astonishingly complete debut that’s fuzzy, funny, fun, raucous and personal. It makes grungy garage rock sound, well, brilliant.
Vocalist/guitarist Saulnier is happy the album’s been received the way it has. “So far, things feel great,” he says. “I honestly did not know what to expect when the record came out. We're really grateful for our good reviews so far, [they inspire] us to keep going, you know?”
When Saulnier’s not making record critics—as a group of individuals, we’re already full to the gills with self-importance—feel good about themselves, he’s a decent interview. Like a good Canadian boy, he knows how to talk about himself without sounding like an egomaniac.
Case in point: in the aforementioned Pitchfork review—written by esteemed critic/author Stuart Berman—there’s a snatch of text I found interesting. It reads:
“In Saulnier, we see a cross-breed of two outsider archetypes that rarely figure in contemporary indie. He's a Black Francis-like barker who'll happily break out into nonsensical, throat-shredding hysterics in order to scare away the normals, but he's also a J Mascis-ian introvert who finds it easier to express his true feelings through his fretboard.”
Saulnier’s response to this description?
“[It’s] weirdly accurate and also a bit ridiculous. I think maybe, well, what I want to believe is that he was trying to say that I'm a little more complicated than other rock singers. Maybe?
Throughout my life, guitar playing has been my main creative outlet and I got kind of addicted to performing because it’s the best way I can communicate my deep dark inner feelings.”
PS I Love You plays @Case Del Popolo on April 8th
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