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It could, after all, slot in comfortably alongside By Divine Right. We to break the songs into parts.”Įven if The Bones of Things is a new adventure-it veers into spastic post-punk (as on “Morning Owls”) or sugary garage (as on “Don’t Wanna Say Goodbye” or the excellent “Tortaruga”)-to our ears, it still feels like a perfect Torontonian power-pop record. It helped us relax a bit-I had two and half days to play the bass on it. “FACTOR always says no, but this time, to the surprise of our life, they sent us a bit of money. “We just wanted a new adventure, so we tried to separate everything ,” says Small. For the first time ever, says Small, the band actually took their time in the studio-while the band often used live takes in previous recording sessions, a FACTOR grant allowed them to actually take time to polish The Bones of Things. Like, a whistling solo followed by a rap beat followed by a bass solo? I remember Jose just laughing when he heard it.”īut the mandolin isn’t the only thing that’s changed on the LP. “Even a lot of the stuff on Planets Conspire sounded like a terrible idea. “It’s pretty goofy,” he adds, saying the band’s always been a collection of left-field ideas. The mandolin became part of the LP’s sonic signature, defining tracks like “Disappointed Mothers,” “Sunrise Old” and the “Bones of Things.” Yet their choice to build songs around Rego’s new instrument, Small says, is characteristic of the haphazard approach the Meligrove Band takes to songwriting. “OK, that’s the worst thing I’ve said in hours.” They’re our accidental babies, so to speak,” he says with a laugh. “We like to make recordings and play music together, and records just start forming out of that. We ended up begging him to play mandolin instead of guitars.” He just started playing power chords on it, and recording demos on it. “For a while, Darcy didn’t even have a guitar, but he had a mandolin. “But we’d just email each other with demos, being like, ‘Check out this track I wrote,'” says Small. It’s been four years between releases, and after being marooned in Florida on their last tour due to a busted tour van, they weren’t even positive the band would continue. Because the band-Jason Nunes, drummer Darcy Rego, guitarist Brian O’Reilly and bassist Michael Small-is also prepping another collection of razor-sharp pop tracks, The Bones of Things, which is slated to drop via We Are Busy Bodies. Of course, we don’t mean to wax poetic about Planets Conspire. If there’s a single band that’s emblematic of the last decade of Toronto power pop, it’s likely the Meligrove Band. The band’s wiry power pop, after all, has certain timelessness to it, which is partially why they’re woven into plenty of Toronto’s past-and-present institutions: They’ve been slotted on Wavelength bills, are certified Friends in Bellwoods, and in their earliest days, came up via the all-ages scene around Ductape Fanzine. It’s hard to believe that the Meligrove Band has been around since the late ’90s.