Calgary Bands: Key To The City

They’re not “anti-pop,” per se, but the indie Calgary quartet Key To The City does have a certain love-like relationship with modern pop music.

Front-guy Chris Vail — who recently changed the band’s name from Vailhalen — bowed out of The Dudes and Dojo Workhorse (but can be heard on both band’s new albums) to focus strictly on Key To The City and its new independently released album.

Several years in the morphing, Owls of Getchü manifests this month as a whimscal quasi-pop album of Halloween-themed songs, each about a fictional creature or monster — like “Proud Tradition,” which is loosely based upon Frankenstein and is about “fatherhood and generational influence.”

With song titles like “Back in Black Lagoon,” Vail insists the CD isn’t jokey. “There’s a lot of emotional content,” he says.
Vail was similarly serious about making a pop album. Citing the formulaic use of a 15-second rule of repetition/variation to produce hooks that keep the listener engaged, Vail says the band inadvertently — but fortuitously — broke the rules. “We kind of made it a one-second rule,” he says.

And inspired by The Dudes’ unpretentious rock ’n’ roll acumen, Key To The City is “not taking ourselves too seriously,” for now sticking to smaller clubs in western Canada.

Although they’ve been wont to play covers like “Little Red Corvette” at the kind of hole-in-the-wall that has a dartboard on stage, expect to hear some weird and wonderful tales from Getchü.

Call them pop, call them anti-pop. At least the boys are in unison about the strange magic of soda pop.

Key To The City’s official CD release party is Aug. 21 at The Gateway (SAIT Campus Centre); tickets at Ticketmaster.

The Band Members: From left ot right in the photos above

Brent Gough (keyboards/vocals)
“I wish more people would use, and accept the use of, the word ‘cola.’ A few years back, I started using the term consciously in an effort to be non-discriminatory. It just seems silly to order a Pepsi and have the server ask if Coke would be okay instead. The problem is, you get a funny look when you ask for a ‘cola’ — often they’ll reply, ‘Cola? … Is a Coke okay?’ Why can’t we all just face the same direction on this one?”

Chris Vail (vocals/guitar)
“When I was a kid, I had a number of get-rich-quick schemes that often involved food. I would combine two or three foods together, and try to convince myself they were good and that the discovery would make me rich. I was most committed to Orange Crush mixed with Hires Root Beer, which I had planned to market as ‘Vail Juice.’ I never figured out how to change the colour into something palatable, so the project was dropped.”

Pablo Puentes (bass/vocals)
“Some people might remember the ‘adding cream to cola’ fad of the early-’90s. I remember feeling some serious segregation on the issue. It was as though my generation had finally found a tangible symbol of our rebellion against those who would not accept our radical ways of drinking. Ironically, I tried adding cream to cola recently and it’s gross.”

 Joel Nye (drums)
“My only foray into beverage mixology was a few years in the late ’90s when I would mix various rums with any and all bargain-chain ‘No-Name’ brand sodas. My absolute favourite was a mix of one part Captain Morgan’s rum, one part Cabot Tower rum (a lovely beverage brought from the shores of
Newfoundland), one part ‘whatever rum you have in the cupboard’ and one part Dr. Skipper [a knock-off of Dr. Pepper]. I titled this masterpiece ‘The Stubing’ after the beloved captain from The Love Boat.
It was the Dr. Skipper that made all the difference. I still get physically sick thinking about it.”