Hailing from Canada’s rugged Maritimes, Alvvays layer bright melodies with dark undercurrents. Tim Hughes finds out more

It is all too easy to get taken in by Alvvay’s light, breezy indie-pop.

Singer Molly Rankin delivers honey-coated melodies with more hooks than a pirate convention. But beyond the jangling guitars lies something altogether darker – for this is music about heartache, sadness... and death.

“I agree with that!” says Molly, “There’s despair and longing in there, and loneliness too. But the instrumentation counteracts that, which is good. I don’t think anyone wants a record of nine whiny songs.”

Hailing from windswept Cape Breton, in Nova Scotia, Molly knows about life on the edge. Her home island is a place of wild seas, rocky headlands jutting into the Atlantic,and a rich Scottish heritage which still manifests itself in the form of soaring fiddle music and lively ceilidhs.

Molly has a strong musical pedigree of her own, her father and siblings being acclaimed Celtic folk artists The Rankin Family. They lived out in the sticks, far from the big city, and with little exposure to anything but traditional music.

“Maybe that kind of childhood spawned the need to create,” she said.

If anything set her heart on new music it was her discovery of Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill, which she heard via a friend, followed by Oasis – which captivated the 12-year-old Molly.

“I became obsessed,” she says. “I loved their pop structures. My songs always have to be laced with hooks – I have to be able to remember a song without recording it first. That’s why I loved Celine Dion too!”

A move to Nova Scotia’s capital Halifax to study theatre design, opened the door to more music from beyond Canada’s Eastern shores – particularly The Smiths, The Replacements and Teenage Fanclub. “They were all life-changing moments,” she says.

It was in Halifax she came across guitarist Alec O’Hanley, then playing with a band visiting from the city of Charlottetown on neighbouring Prince Edward Island, featuring guitarist Alec O’Hanley. “The scene in Charlottetown was crazy,” she recalls. “I went to visit and knew I had to live there.”

Staying close to her folk roots, in 2010 she recorded a six-track EP under her own name. But, travelling to Charlottetown and working with Alec (a fan of such bands as The Buzzcocks), her scope widened. “Alec’s also strict about his pop hooks and lyrical content,” she says.

They recruited Prince Edward Islanders Brian Murphy on bass and Phil MacIsaac on drums, along with keys player and backing vocalist Kerry Maclellan.

Then came the name. They settled on Always “It had to be one word,” says Molly, “To escape links to anything roots or singer-songwriter-related. ‘Always’ was a blank slate, and had the right sentiment.”

Unfortunately, the name had been taken some years earlier by an 80s art-pop band, so the spelling was subtly altered to Alvvays – though many fans still pronounce it the original way.

While the band are now based in the metropolis of Toronto, Molly remains a Cape Breton girl at heart – with the sense of isolation that comes from feeling like an outsider coupled with the pain of tragedy, a result of the death of her father John, who fronted The Rankin Family, and who was killed in a car accident in 2000. Molly admits she’s susceptible to depression, exacerbated by her loss.

“It may have made me a little darker,” she says. “But I think me and my songs are more defined by his life than his death, by how he shaped me from a young age, by his ambition and encouragement.”

Their self-titled debut album was hailed a triumph of bittersweet punky-pop – it’s euphoric uplifting melodies belying something darker lying just beneath the surface.

It begins with a virtual stalker anthem (“How do I get close to you, Even if you don’t notice”) and contains songs of varying degrees of sadness and unease, including the haunting Next Of Kin, which tells the tale of a drowning.

Oxford Mail:

“It’s a random idea fuelled by real-life frustrations,” says Molly.

The album’s biggest tune, Marry Me, Archie, is a deceptively chirpy plea for matrimony with a disinterested lover.

Molly admits: “A lot of the album is about growing pains and pursuing adulthood, like everyone getting married around me.”

Next week they begin a UK tour which, on January 30, reaches Oxford for a show at the O2 Academy, before moving on to mainland Europe.

It promises to be a date to remember. For Alvvays...

CHECK IT OUT
Alvvays play the O2 Academy Oxford on Friday, January 30. 
Tickets from ticketweb.co.uk

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