No Problem Have an Issue with Edmonton's Music Scene

Photos By Alex Kress

Five years is a long time to be a band—at least when it comes to punk. But Edmonton’s No Problem aren’t used to doing what’s typical or expected of them and they attribute that characteristic to the isolation of their hometown. The band has released a wealth of material, most notably on Deranged Records, a small one man operation out of Victoria, B.C. that has become a punk stamp of approval internationally. No Problem’s discography, from 2010’s Your Eyes onward, charts the refinement of their tense post-punk sound. 2015 saw the release of their latest EP, Kid Killer, a short, cynical burst that finds them tighter as a unit, creating sharper, urgent songs with no sign of wearing out. Maybe there’s something to this longevity thing. We spoke with vocalist/guitarist Graeme MacKinnon and bassist Matt Bouchard of the band during some downtime before their performance at this year’s Not Dead Yet fest to talk about being the “dad-rock” of punk, learning to record their material themselves, and how their city’s music scene has changed since they started.

Noisey: Kid Killer is your fourth EP. It seems like the band really favours that format. What is it about EPs that you find so appealing?
Graeme MacKinnon: Actually I favour LPs because I like the idea of how records used to be made, especially classic punk records that I listen to. I love the pacing, it’s so important. With some hardcore records, they blow their load right away, and the rest of the record is the same thing through. That’s the method that works the best for a seven-inch.
Matt Bouchard: Yeah you want more of an emotional rollercoaster on an LP.

So is that how did the EP come about?
MacKinnon: Kid Killer came about because we got offered this tour in Europe, and we agreed it’d be cool to go there with something new.
Matt Bouchard: I think it was the first time ever that we put out something before going on a big tour instead of it coming out the day we get home [laughs]
MacKinnon: The only song we had going into those sessions was “The Killing Game” although the lyrics for that song were the last to be written. The B-side, “Never See The Sun” was one of the most collaborative we’ve done. For me, at the time, I was listening to a lot of angular punk like Gang Of Four or Proletariat and I was really liking those rigid rhythms.
Bouchard: That song was kind of a compromise because Graeme’ been pushing us to do a dub song for a long time.
MacKinnon: That’s right. Like the next mustard plug record [laughs]. It was fun. That song just came together. I thought the kids were going to chase us with torches when they heard that one, but so far everyone seems to like it. Although, every single review that I’ve read has been like “this is for the adults! this is old timer music.” I’m like “what the fuck?” I mean, we still live like kids. I’m the only one in my 30s.

Over time, the band has started to record and produce your own stuff. Could you talk about the motivation to start that process on your own, the challenges of learning to do that, and how you feel about the end result?
MacKinnon: For us it was definitely a necessity. I played in an older band, and I got to the point where I didn’t see the point in paying a ton of money for something that wasn't actually sounding like we wanted it to. With no problem, we definitely like a grimy, lo-fi sound. So for And Now This, Jonah Falco, who's a good friend and whose work in Fucked Up and Career Suicide we really enjoy, offered to record us if we came out to Toronto. So we flew out there, all set with these new songs, and we get to his jam space and took one look at his busted cymbals and this one mic dangling over the drum set. I was just like “oh fuck, I think we made a huge mistake.” He had sort of prepped us by saying “okay, this might be a little weird at first” but he knew what he was doing, and more importantly, he knew aesthetically what we were going for. That was the first time that I realized that that was what we wanted to sound like. I asked him a lot of questions and just watched the whole process. Even after that record he and I would swap stuff, I'd ask for help or ideas here and there, but the band got to the point eventually where we decided that we could do our own stuff. It’s dark music and I feel like that style of recording lends itself perfectly. Like the first Viletones single. You listen to “Screaming Fist” and it’s just so simple. You can hear the shittiness and the rawness of the playing, the spitting into the microphone. That’s exactly how I want the records I leave behind to sound.
Bouchard: When you’re doing it on these home recording devices, Graeme has gotten really good at using them, but you can’t really photoshop the material that you’ve recorded using devices like those. Sometimes you’re stuck with what you’ve got, for better or for worse. With just the one mic, you can play it back in your headphones right away, and you know it’s there or not. There’s an ease with that method of recording, and now that Graeme has taken most of the recording responsibilities on himself, it also eases any kind of rushed feeling we’d have in a studio because we’re just doing it on our own in a basement. It’s a really liberating way to record.

Photo By Alex Kress

From Your Eyes to your work now, you’ve been refining the band’s sound but lyrically, you’ve been singing about a lot of dark, troubling shit since day one. How have you been able to maintain that consistency to that sense of discontent?
MacKinnon: Lyrics are a big part of this band and definitely something we wanted to challenge people with. I find with this band, as opposed to any other band I’ve been with before, it’s really cathartic. For us, it’s a chance to let out our deepest thoughts no matter what, even if it’s just a fleeting thing. Writing lyrics for me is the ultimate outlet. The song “Never See The Sun” was written about a friend of ours who killed himself last year. It wasn't that I wanted to write a song about suicide, it was more like wanting to write a song about being in a city like ours, and a young person, because he was like twenty-one when he did it, and it’s just like fuck man, you haven’t experienced anything. You’ve never seen anything other than Edmonton, really. I wanted to address how a lot of these guys are partying till six or seven in the morning, then hit the sack, wake up around three, and there’s maybe an hour of sun left, and repeat it all over again. Especially in the middle of winter, when it gets dark all the time, I feel like that creates this rhythm of perpetual darkness. When you’re left in the dark for too long you turn into this weird creature type thing. So instead of me going out and saying “oh, suicide’s bad” or “this is not the way,” that’s not how I want to talk about things. I’m more interested in what’s going on in someone’s head when they’re not able to see the light.
Bouchard: Not to support some of the dad-rock reviews, but we are all from other bands and now we're getting a little bit older, and I know for myself at least when you’re young you’re kind of excited about having angry music or something. That excitement fades as you get older and you get depressed about it. It’s a little more rooted in real life. That’s not to say it’s not genuine when you’re younger, but you might be seeking stuff like that out maybe when you’re younger, and when you’re older you’re kind of stuck with it. I think that’s where some of those layers happen. You’re not necessarily thinking “OK, I’m going to write a song about this” it just sort of comes out.

How does Edmonton factor into that discontent in your lyrics?
MacKinnon: Because we’ve had so many days of bad leadership, the city has fallen by the wayside. Now we’re so far behind and just trying to keep up with things. We have all this disjointed shit and piles of dirt and things that will hopefully come together at some point but everything is stuck in this middle zone… and you’re always being reminded of that. That’s we’re not quite there yet.

Earlier in the year Noisey reported on the closing of The Artery, a longstanding venue in Edmonton. Was that a big deal for you?
Bouchard: It is, but it also isn’t that significant. Every scene deals with it. I would never want to slight the people who put all that effort into running it and say that it isn’t a big deal. It is a big deal for the people who were fighting for it. At the same time I think it’s silly for people in Edmonton to think that we’re the only city where venues are closing down. Every place we’ve ever played in Vancouver is now closed. Not by our hand, at least only half of them are by our hand [laughs]. Sometimes I feel like telling people to get over it, but like, not get over it, still fight for these things but let’s not throw our towels in because we think it’s over. There’s nowhere else in the world where the same thing is happening. That’s what irritates me the most. “If this shit keeps happening I’m going to move elsewhere!” Well, what do you think you’re going to find somewhere else?
MacKinnon: For Edmonton to lose a place like that it’s not so much about losing a place for music, I’m just getting tired of cool, older looking buildings being torn down in our city. There’s this weird group of yellow tie-dyed jet ski riding people who were running the city at the time who tear great buildings down and put up crap. Now I feel like people are looking at things slightly differently. These are parts of our history that shouldn’t be erased. Talking about the aesthetic of the city, at the moment it’s all these half-projects. Why would you want to tear this place down and get rid of it when you have no idea what you want to put up in its place? And you’re going to use it for storage? Fuck off. We’re losing the city’s character and putting up these boxes.
Bouchard: There is a positive in the sense that there’s a lot more awareness that this is happening. When this happened to the Artery, a lot more people started taking notice, and that’s a really important first step. I didn’t see that when the same thing was happening to other places in Edmonton. There’s actually a venue that’s right beside the Artery, and the guys that were operating it really took a big stand. They took the issue to city council, and it was taken seriously. But there are these very powerful construction firms pushing their own agenda. At least it’s starting to be dealt with in a more productive way, and I think that that’s something people shouldn’t take for granted.
MacKinnon: It’s the first time the city has taken culture seriously. That venue defined that area, and they recognized that. Hopefully in the future that’ll help rein in some of these developers.

Photo By Alex Kress

There seems to be this tension between the fact that Edmonton is the fifth largest city in Canada, a major urban centre, and starting to shift more and more left along with Calgary as far as politics are concerned.
Bouchard: Edmonton itself has been a beacon for the left for a long time. It’s hard to recognize… I think a lot of people in Edmonton have definitely felt that way, and now it’s starting to actually be acknowledged outside out province.
MacKinnon: We do have these pockets of artists trying to work with what they’ve been given. When we were young kids we’d constantly be called “fag” by people or they'd throw shit at you just for looking weird. So for punks, that creates a kind of disassociation with the city and maybe makes you resent some of the older generation that let this place go a certain way. We’re sick of this shit and want to upset the apple cart.

No Problem has been a band for more than five years, which in punk time is pretty old. How has youth culture in Edmonton changed in that time? What does the future of Edmonton’s scene look like?
MacKinnon: I think the only way you stay around is if you make natural changes, you don’t force anything. I’m not going to try and tell some kid what I think is cool. I hope he’s telling me. I hope he’s doing something that’s just going to blow my mind. Youth culture in Edmonton is slow. The scene used to be a very young scene. In the early 2000s, you’d have like hundreds of kids between 16 and 25 at local shows. It was such a force to be reckoned with.
Bouchard: The punk scene is super cyclical, and having such easy access to everything online, the cycles go a lot faster. Edmonton, because of its isolation, even though there’s an electronic connection, there still seems to be a lag to keep up with those kinds of cycles. If that’s what your M.O. is in Edmonton, then you’re constantly fighting yourself because you’re always behind. It’s important to disregard, or be wary of those cycles, no matter where you are, but I think it’s even more important in a place like Edmonton because you constantly get defeated by the fact that things have changed by the time you’ve caught on. It’s important to do what you like. Part of what made the best-known bands from our region so good was the fact that they were so isolated from everything else. Look back to SNFU in the early days, they don’t really sound like anybody. You can tell they were listening to certain bands and styles, and definitely into skater culture.

Every city has its time in the sun. When I think about Toronto, the early stuff from the seventies comes to mind, but from the late eighties to the nineties, there wasn’t a lot of great stuff. Fast forward to the early 2000s, so many good bands came along. Brutal Knights, Career Suicide, Fucked Up. That’s just an example of how a city might feel passed over and how all these great people getting together and grouping up because of it. That’s how I feel about Edmonton right now. There are a lot of irons in the fire. Now I’m just waiting for something hot to strike.

Michael Rancic is a writer living in Toronto. Follow him on Twitter.