We Got Our Hair Cut By Beliefs

The basics, then: Beliefs, who recently signed to No Pain in Pop (home of Doldrums, Grimes and Echo Lake no less), are a calorific shoegaze duo that throw around words like “cassingle” without being dickheads about it. As with most music heads in Toronto, their self-sustaining, borderline-punk lifestyle comes not from some authenticity crisis or wanky desire to be zeitgeist, but a genuine belief in the power of DIY as a way of life.

The last few years saw now-roommates Jesse Crowe and Josh Korody both move to Toronto, because Canada is mostly totally fucking depressing, unless you live in Toronto or Montreal or Vancouver. The press release for their eponymous debut LP reckons they “bonded on a love of Jesus and Mary Chain, Slowdive and My Bloody Valentine,” but if you’re imagining hippies with an obsessive interest in their shoelaces, forget about it: Beliefs bash pedals and groan ethereally because it sounds amazing, not to keep a handle on their indie cred-ometer. Anyway, I took to the barber chair to ask the big questions about the band’s status as hot T.Dot property, while pro-hairdresser/singer-guitarist Jesse gave me the snip (shut up, not that kind of snip).

Noisey: Hello Jesse. Are you nervous about this?

Jesse: Er… doing two things at once is what I’m used to, but people don’t usually ask super specific questions. So a little bit.

I don’t want you to feel nervous.

Jesse: No, cutting hair is the one thing I never get nervous about.

I mean, I hope the interview goes well. But I also have to live with this haircut for the next few months. Would you say the priority is the hair or the interview?

Jesse: Haircut. Josh is here for the interview, totally. Josh is the interview buffer if I become silent.

[Josh, staring at the floor, nods]

So, before this studio, Lebel & Crowe, you worked at a hair studio called Grateful Head. Was it tough leaving somewhere with such a great name for a place that sounds so disappointingly sophisticated?

Jesse: Well, when we came up with Lebel & Crowe, we wanted it to be a little bit ambiguous. I was coming here with, like, quite an established clientele. I wasn’t really looking for something flashy or catchy.

Josh, your studio is for bands. Tell us about that.

Josh: Basically when I moved to Toronto, I made a deal with this guy, Leon [Taheny, also of the band Dusted], that if I brought in all my gear, I would use his space when I needed to. When he lost that, he found a unit and was gonna start a studio with Owen Pallett, the Final Fantasy guy. But Owen backed out, so Leon called and asked if I wanted to do it. Literally the next day, we were ripping up the floorboards. We built the space in two months, seventeen hours a day. We took three days off for Christmas. Then we threw a party, everyone saw the space, and now I’m working with bands I never would’ve worked with before - Moon King, Cousins, Elsa…

Obviously you're recording tons of great homegrown Toronto bands, but the people you meet and interact with in the city, do they generally come from elsewhere?

Josh: Yeah, a lot of my friends from Niagara and outside of Toronto have moved here. It’s like a hub. In Niagara, everyone crapped on each other if you weren’t doing the same kind of music they were. Whereas here, I’m recording people in alternative bands, and then heavier bands, and then like, country bands.

Someone told me that in Oslo, the people making lush Scandanavian soundscapes are also pretty obssessed with playing disgusting rock music in black metal bands. Toronto’s similar, but London isn’t - I think, probably unfairly, that bands moving to London have this sinister air of trying to "make it"…

Josh: It’s kind of similar here.

Jesse: Toronto’s not as internationally cool.

Josh: Yeah, you move to Toronto 'cos there’s more people you could be involved with creatively. Some of the best musicians in the city have at least four or five bands. It’s pretty wild.

Jesse: But there’s definitely still an underdog stigma around Canada.

How’s the hair going?

Jesse: Oh, this haircut’s going places.

You work here every Wednesday to Saturday, right Jesse? But Josh, you’re busy with recording and stuff. Don’t you worry you’ll wake up one morning and be sick of music?

Josh: Almost every other day. It won’t happen though. I definitely know that I’ll be making music for the rest of my life. My ultimate goal is to be doing just studio projects that I’m super excited about. Right now, I’m still in that grind where I’m engineering drum tracks all day for a band I’ve never heard of. But that’s fine - I’m sure other people would rather do that than work in like, a convenience store or something.

Who writes the lyrics?

Josh: Jesse writes all the lyrics.

I think it was Brian Eno that said My Bloody Valentine made the vaguest music ever to be a hit. Do the words really matter here, or are you tempted to write about dreams and clouds and flips-flops?

Jesse: I mean, sometimes I write about dreams and clouds. But there’s always a certain level of importance. No matter whether or not people can understand what we’re saying, there’s always something you’re trying to express.

Josh: Most of the songs were written unplugged. Which is something we had to do 'cos we were in an apartment we couldn’t be loud in. But also, it was a benefit, because we could write songs that were actually songs, not these effect pieces or something.

It’s a bit different, but Metz told me that they would never play their songs unplugged, because it would sound dreadful and be an affront to the ethics of rock or something.

Jesse: Oh sure, but they’re a strictly heavy band. They’re not writing to have melodic vocals.

Still, it’d be easy to think of shoegaze bands as similarly aesthetic-driven. But for the genre’s worthwhile artists, that’s not really the case, is it?

Josh: There’s definitely an element of soundscaping that happens. I mean, I don’t know what we sound like live, but Leon, my studio partner, saw us live and said he could never watch to us again. We were too loud for him, he could never handle it again. And I’m not trying to sound like we’re this God-like…thing of loudness. It doesn’t need to be a gimmick or something. I would hate that, actually.

Jesse: It worked for My Bloody Valentine.

Josh: Oh yeah. But if I saw them play quietly, it would definitely sound amazing. Let’s just say that if they played at a reasonable volume, I would maybe even like them more.

Jesse: [To me] Do you wear anything in your hair?

Never.

Jesse: Never?! Not even when you blow dry?

Should I?

Jesse: Well, I’m gonna put something in while I blow dry it, because you have a lot of hair. I don’t wanna make it too puffy when I blow dry.

Josh: I don’t put stuff in my hair either. But sometimes if I really care about what my hair looks like, Jesse showed me this spray called Beach Spray. It’s like when you just came from the beach and it’s kind of ratty.

Ratty?

Jesse: Yep, this is the cream version of that.

Wonderful. Are we done now then? I quite like this, actually…Mark Corrigan chic. Anyway, nice to meet you, Beliefs!

Jesse: Thanks!

ANNNND, the finished product!