Twin Rains take the sounds of pop to extreme places on their debut album, Automatic Hands. But not extreme in a loud or heavy way; instead, they go the other direction. They’ve been called “dream pop,” if that’s any indication as to what their sound is like.
And it makes sense that they want to push boundaries at this point: both members of the band—vocalist/keyboardist Christine Stoesser and guitarist Jay Merrow—have been playing music since they were kids.
“I’ve been singing my entire life, and I started playing piano when I was eight,” says Stoesser. “Jay was a bit older when he started playing guitar; I think he was 12. We met in Toronto, through a mutual friend, and we became roommates.”
Stoesser and Merrow shared a passion for music, and they had both wanted to start a band for a while. Once they met, it didn’t take long for that to happen.
“Our prior band, which was called Make Me Young, was formed after we met in Toronto and had much more of a gritty sound,” says Stoesser. “We just kind of decided with everyone we were living with at the time that we would start a band; we just fell into it, really. Our first couple of songs were written very easily, with almost no thought involved, and it was really fun.”
However, their old band—and their residence in Toronto—didn’t last long. Stoesser and Merrow decided to move out west to Vancouver, where they worked as music teachers and spent what little free time they had trying to produce their own melodies.
“We moved to Vancouver about four years ago, and almost immediately we started to notice a shift in our sound,” says Stoesser. “Our music became a little more dreamy and experimental, as opposed to harder hitting and loud, which was more of the style we had been doing in Toronto. It wasn’t a conscious decision to switch up our style; it just sort of happened.”
Going even further back, Stoesser says that when it came time to name the band, the process had a lot to do with avoiding band names that had already been taken.
“We had a lot of other names that we were considering,” she says, “but then we’d do a Google search and find out it’s a band somewhere. I liked the way Twin Rains sounded; the rains kind of reminded me of the west coast, but that’s not why that was picked. I ran it by a few people and I said, ‘What do you picture, what do you visualize, when I say “twin rains”?’ Everyone had something different to say, which I like. Personally, I always thought to myself that it was a neat way to describe tears.”’
Twin Rains (with Noble Wolves)
Thursday, November 3
$10, Copper Owl
copperowl.ca