Johnny de Courcy's rock ’n’ roll reanimation

As his wildly varied music and his death-and-resurrection videos demonstrate, Johnny de Courcy has a flair for drama

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      On any given day at Neptoon Records, you’ll find the Main Street shop filled with thousands of vinyl items. In that sense, it’s business as usual when the Straight stops in on a chilly Wednesday evening to interview rock ’n’ roller Johnny de Courcy, but the towering shipment of boxes stacked at the front of the store isn’t an everyday order. Rather, it’s the recently arrived pressing of the solo artist’s sophomore LP, Alien Lake, which is being distributed through Neptoon’s own boutique imprint. Down in the basement, de Courcy is sitting cross-legged on a couch and marvelling at the bright crimson slab emblazoned with his name and songs.

      Flanked by video director and visual collaborator Owen Ellis, manager Andrew Pitchko, and what are best described as werewolf mannequins crossed with the Gimp from Pulp Fiction, the wide-eyed and mystified musician holds up the record and exclaims, “Isn’t it weird? This is what my music looks like on vinyl.”

      Over the next couple of hours and a half-case of Coors Banquet, the New West–bred de Courcy passionately talks up Alien Lake, touching on everything from crafting ballads about loved ones, to staging a cover photo of himself posed in front of the family piano, to how he still has to hand-screen thousands of inserts ahead of the album’s late-November release.

      “I’m doing posters and lyric sheets,” he notes proudly. “My hands will have touched every part of every record. In the basement of my house, I have a studio; I’ll be working around the clock.”

      While last-minute touches are being made to the packaging, the recording sessions for Alien Lake wrapped up back in April at Kelowna’s Alien Lake Studios with producers Malcolm Biddle and Matt Krysko. De Courcy and his backup band’s positive experience at the facility led to the album’s title, but the songwriter theorizes that the eclectic mix of classic rock, baroque pop, and shred-metal solos also makes each song “alien” from the others.

      “Stylistically, I feel they are,” de Courcy says. “Some are really soft and about my mother. Some are really heavy, subject-matter-wise and sonically. Some are freaky, some are melancholy, some are triumphant, some are angry. It’s the feelings that go into the songs, the feelings that are expressed through the songs.”

      The leadoff track, “I Can’t Be That Man”, details romantic incongruence (“It’s such a chore to be with someone that can’t understand your pas”) atop a power-pop jangle before tipping its hat to Heart’s galloping “Barracuda”. “Southern Plain”, meanwhile, uses spaghetti-western six-stringing and rattlesnake vibraslap as the backdrop to scenes of his mom making coffee and his artist father prepping paintings. “Amélie” takes the familial theme even further, with the campfire-lit country number sending praise his mother’s way.

      The album highlight, “Wind Chimes”, is significantly less joyful, though, chronicling the death of a relationship. The mournful verses have the dejected de Courcy alluding to a love no longer in full bloom as he sings of a “blurry place where cherry blossoms fell”. But over a Weezer-leaning crush of stompbox six-string, the singer uses a tortured lion’s roar to drive home the idea that everything will be okay.

      “I was going through a very long breakup,” de Courcy says of the tune’s genesis. “The song is like, yeah, we’re breaking up… I gotta go and we’ve got to be apart, but through this time that we’ve been together you’ve become a lot stronger. You can deal with this kind of thing. Instead of a bitter, ‘this is done’ kind of thing, it’s trying to put in a positive bit as well. Whenever you are breaking up with someone, some of it is good and some of it is bad. I don’t want to ever portray an experience, or a relationship, in just one light if there are multiple feelings about it.”

      Just as impressive as “Wind Chimes” is its accompanying music video. Directed by Ellis, it’s part of a two-chapter saga along with Alien Lake’s instrumental title track. The piano-based “Alien Lake” features Super 8 footage of de Courcy and his darling skipping through alleyways and enjoying tender embraces. The story subsequently takes a turn for the supernatural in “Wind Chimes”, which begins after the two lovers have apparently died of unknown causes. While de Courcy is jolted back to life by a group of mad doctors to spend more time with his likewise reanimated love interest, their love has apparently gone cold. In a bittersweet finale, a funeral pyre on a beach takes the pair out of the physical world together.

      All this drama comes naturally to de Courcy, who explains he’s been using elements of theatre since his teenage days in the thrash band Onslaught, which incorporated burning crosses, fog machines, and fake blood into its performances.

      He and Ellis, meanwhile, are currently dreaming up a stage show based on their video work together. They first teamed up in 2013 to present de Courcy messily giving birth to himself in the video for early single “Cherry Lane”, and more clips supporting Alien Lake are on the way.

      “I can write the songs and make the records, but Owen comes up with the ideas for the videos,” the singer says. “That’s what a true collaboration is: each fills in the spaces that the other can’t do. You complement each other.”

      With an expected spring unveiling, we’re still months away from finding out whether the show will have de Courcy shooting out of a stage-mounted birth canal, or delivering the melodramatic Bride of Frankenstein–meets–Rocky Horror narrative of the “Wind Chimes” video in the flesh. Though secretive, Ellis smiles wickedly at the thought of what’s to come.

      “It’s going to be intense,” he says simply.

      Johnny de Courcy plays a record-release party for Alien Lake at Neptoon Records on Saturday (November 22).

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