Local music lovers, listen up: female rock duo The Pack A.D. is coming back to Ottawa, and they’re bringing a more pop, still punk, strapping new sound.
The Vancouver-based pair, Becky Black and Maya Miller, is headed to the capital city as they tour their fifth studio album Do Not Engage, released Jan. 28 with Nettwerk Records.
Black, the duo’s guitarist and lead singer, sat down for a phone interview in the tour van en route to Toronto via Michigan. Now a month into the most recent addition to a long series of tours in their eight-year career, Black said their sound has moved away from their “blues rock” origins.
“We still sound like the same band, but we’ve had a bit of an evolution,” she said. “I guess we just kind of got bored doing the same thing . . . We’ve still got, like, garage and a little psychedelic too—a little different, but in keeping with us.”
Black said it only makes sense, historically speaking.
“In a way, it seems like the natural progression,” she said. “That’s what rock music came from.”
With five albums in eight years, The Pack A.D. seems remarkably prolific for a band with only two members. But Black said the two-woman-band gig “works.”
“It’s limiting, but it’s challenging,” she said. “You can write a lot of music—and not all of it’s good—but you can write a lot of music really quickly.”
Both Black and Miller write lyrics.
“All of mine are sort of stories about characters,” said Black. “I like that part of music is being able to tell a story. It’s personal, but it’s not literally personal.”
The two also pull from reading material for inspiration.
“I can’t even count how many songs, lyrically, are based on books either Maya or I have read, like science fiction or whatnot,” Black said.
“‘Airborne’ is based on [science fiction novel] 2001: A Space Odyssey. ‘The Flight,’ I think, is based on a Stephen King novel. Maya wrote that one.”
But the freedom offered by being a duo doesn’t mean the band wouldn’t collaborate with a few select artists. Asked who she would most love to play with, Black only paused for a moment before giving a definitive answer.
“Prince. Yes, totally. He’s amazing,” she said.
Despite eight years together, the band remembers their humble roots. Black said her interest in playing music started out “casually,” playing her mother’s acoustic guitar in her teens. Eventually, she got together with Miller.
“Neither of us are trained musicians,” she said. “Maya didn’t play the drums before, but we didn’t have a drummer so she was elected to be the drummer.”
They’ve come a long way. Already recipients of a Juno nomination for their 2011 album Unpersons, The Pack A.D. is garnering more attention daily. They even opened for indie-rockers Vampire Weekend at the 2013 Ottawa Folk Festival. While Black admits they may have lost some of their original fan base, she’s willing to let them go.
“If [listeners] don’t enjoy [the album] they should burn it, and if they do, then they should play it all the time,” she said.
The band is playing Zaphod Beeblebrox March 25.
Look out for “The Water,” Black’s current favourite song to perform, and rest up first for what promises to be Black’s preferred type of performance—“a sweaty, good-energy rock show.”
