LUCIDMEDIA

Krupke is a Snap

Written by Rachel Rain Packota Thursday, 12 November 2009 17:02

“Zombies are overdone.”

Mike Walter has opinions.

“Knowing my parents, you’d think they would have named me Wheelbarrow. Or Turkey-Baster.”

Lots of opinions.

“We booked the venue for a release party… so we decided to release Snap Bracelets.”



Now they are set to showcase their talents at their Snap Bracelet Release Show (they weren’t happy enough with any recordings to release them, but felt obliged to release something), and took a few minutes off an all-night rehearsal to hang out with me.

“Any [real] rock band revolves around clarinet,” Walter, keyboardist and xylophonist, states around a swallow of chocolate milk as we sit at Tim Horton’s on Front St. “It’s the backbone,” concurs Verkuyl, resident guitarist. “Especially with no bass.” They, along with Ryan and Pat Sirianni, their new drummer, are attempting to explain how they initially found their musical cohesion. But keeping a conversation on-track with Krupke is extremely difficult.

“Krupke”? As in “Officer Krupke” from West Side Story?

“We figured it’d be great to be named after [a guy who knows] these juvenile delinquent, bad-ass gangsters who sing and dance.” Walter is probably only partially joking. “We’re not named after a Curb Your Enthusiasm episode.” Shortly thereafter, there is a discussion about “selfish [black] squirrels” and Boston accents.

What does a band named after an uptight killjoy actually sound like?

Actually, as Walter mentions, this may be his first band where the writing is more of a collective process, so sometimes songs turn out as eclectic experiments. Think of it as “warped pop”. With xylophone and clarinet in the standard roster, it only stands to reason that the Krupke members continue expanding on their songwriting methods to better showcase their unique sound potential.

“We’re kind of getting into a formula about writing songs,” admits Verkuyl, “[but we’d like to] break it a little bit... [Originally], Mike and I will start coming up with an idea, and pretty much just sit there and hammer it out, and write pretty much the whole song except two or three parts.”

“Is it fair to say that anything that any of us had written in the last week just got lumped into one song sometimes?” Mike proposes, glancing over at Fiona. She nods, and then expands on another technique: “[Someone] would come up with a basis but then everybody else would develop their own parts around [it]. Some of the more recent ones, I feel like there’s been more interaction regarding the structure…[starting from] short fragments of songs…Sometimes it’s making it transition into something else.”

“[It’s like] ‘We’ve written this part we like, we’ve written [another] part we like. How do we get them to go together?’” explains Mike. “It’s been more organic and less forced, I guess. It just happens,” notes Sirianni, who has been with Krupke a mere three months.

It has required some practice to figure out how three songwriters can work together without any feelings getting hurt. They have had to learn how to give and take when it comes to group decision-making.

“Fiona gets mad [sometimes]”, Walter cracks, glancing over at Ryan who is presently nothing but smiles. “There’s a lot of massaging away the tension,” agrees Verkuyl. “We’ve given plenty of group hugs.”

“There hasn’t been any of the storming out in a while,” notes Walter.

“Broken bottles,” quips Sirianni.

Walter nods seriously and grins at his companions. “Strangely, we actually like each other… we take solace in each other.”

The group leaves Tim Horton’s, Sirianni heading home for the night, and treks to their rented studio space at The Rehearsal Factory just off Lower Sherbourne Street. It’s a small room, approximately 10’ x 15’, and barely holds the following: Basic drumkit, keyboard, xylophone, clarinet, violin, two guitars, a PA stack, and an assortment of cobbled-together, homemade instruments. Walter lifts one and shows it to me.

“It’s a key-bourine,” he explains, displaying its construction of two halves of a computer keyboard strung together nunchuck-style via tied-up packing tape. “I don’t like how tambourines have that double-bounce [shake]… with this you can get one.” He demonstrates, flipping the strange looking panels back and forth in the air. Indeed, the falling of the keys creates a racket quite similar to that of a tambourine or maraca, but with a definite silence when his hands stop moving.

This is not to be the end of the innovation. The rubber paneling from beneath the keyboard is now wrapped around his xylophone mallet for “easy access” when he needs to lift it from a dropped position quickly. They play through “Poppies,” a Tom Waits-esque, distorted pop song that features the succinct and sarcastic line, “If fashion shows compassion/ it’s the quickest form of action”.

Even without a drummer tonight, Krupke is bizarrely mesmerizing. If their lyrics and creative instrumentation is any indication, they are certainly one of the more inventive pop bands Toronto has currently to offer.

Krupke plays their Snap Bracelet Release Show this Friday, November 13th at Bread & Circus in Toronto at 229 Augusta Ave.