Junior Boys' Jeremy Greenspan celebrates the uncool

    1 of 1 2 of 1

      As contrarians go, Jeremy Greenspan is a pretty agreeable chap.

      “Whatever gets white indie-rock fans uncomfortable is what I want to be doing,” says the Junior Boys' frontman, reached at his studio in Hamilton, Ontario. “I want to be the person to piss off all the hip young people, but not because I want the music to be deliberately difficult or confrontational.”

      What Greenspan wants, in fact, is to flesh out his innate melodic gifts with rhythmic and textural features that may strike his contemporaries as garish and inappropriate. Take, for example, “Bits and Pieces” from his band's new album, Begone Dull Care. The track is a pastiche of deeply unhip sounds, tracing its backbeat to the mechanical style of Toto drummer Jeff Porcaro, its woozy keyboard runs to '80s-era Nuyorican boogie tunes, and its smooth sax solo to the synthetic-soul of one Luther Vandross. In reclaiming all those ostensibly tacky sounds, “Bits and Pieces” speaks to the messed-up brilliance of Greenspan himself—a rumpled white guy with a waif's singing voice and a profound admiration for expressive music of any stripe.

      “I've always wanted to tap into that energy and joy I felt in dance music when I first started going out in the 1990s,” he says of his approach to songwriting. “What I always loved about that scene was that people would go to listen to music very intensely for hours and hours. It wasn't about fashion at all. People wore ridiculously stupid outfits. It wasn't about being cool.”

      Begone Dull Care guards its treasures jealously, burying them in the folds of songs that stretch luxuriously for six or more minutes. It's the band's least immediate and most nourishing album to date, one that rewards the listener willing to exercise that rarest of modern-day virtues, patience. After rising to prominence when their early singles circulated on hip music blogs, the Junior Boys have become a post-Internet band of sorts, adopting the album-oriented model of their '70s-era predecessors.

      “I wanted to make an album that isn't reducible to sound bites, that doesn't necessarily make sense if it's listened to in a blog stream,” Greenspan says. “I liked this concept of putting a lot of ideas into every song and letting them unfold in a very deliberate fashion.”

      Begone Dull Care borrows its title and aesthetic sensibility from a delightful 1949 handmade film by Norman McLaren, a mid-century craftsman who scans like Canada's humble answer to Walt Disney. The link between McLaren's gently surrealist animation and the Junior Boys' sprightly synthesizer-pop may seem tenuous, but Greenspan feels a kinship.

      “McLaren had these interests in surrealism and futurism and wanted to be doing cutting-edge stuff, but doing it in a way that was relatable,” he says. “I see that as our challenge, too—to take this form of electronic music that can be very time-consuming and meticulous but to make something that has a real sense of immediacy to it. If you look at the film, it's not really about anything other than the joy of experimentation and about wanting to nurture and bring out the soul in the machine he was working on. In a way, that's what we aim for.”

      Junior Boys play an early show at the Biltmore on Saturday (April 11).

      Comments