Not interested in nostalgia, the Pointed Sticks have made their first album of new material since 1980

Waiting to find out if the recently resurrected Pointed Sticks are the Real Thing? Then proceed straight to Track 3 of Three Lefts Make a Right, the band’s first album of new material since 1980.

“Scrambled Eggs” is three minutes of carbonated power-pop perfection as bracing and instantly memorable as anything you’d care to pick from the outfit’s amazing Perfect Youth album, up until a chorus that plunges the song into a reflective and bittersweet minor key. To put it another way, it’s what you’d expect from a bunch of guys who’ve lost none of their songwriting mojo but gained a lifetime of seasoning.

“That seems to be everyone’s favourite,” Nick Jones tells the Straight, on the line from his home in Comox. The vocalist wrangled “Scrambled Eggs” from a song sketch handed to him by keyboardist Gord Nicholl. “After I showed Gord what I’d done with it, that was the one where we were sitting there in his basement going, ”˜Oh, yeah!’ ”

The other 12 tracks on Three Lefts are no less polished, and not as monomaniacally upbeat as the stuff the band was gobbing out in the late ’70s and early ’80s. “Leave Me Alone” is ponderous and eerie like early Blue Oyster Cult, and Bill Napier-Hemy furnishes the temperate heartsickness of “All Night” with a searing, heroic guitar solo that probably would have gotten him bottled at the Smilin’ Buddha.

On the other hand, this is Pointed Sticks we’re talking about, and right off the top, Nicholl’s exclamatory Farfisa part in “She’s Not Alone Anymore” dumps the listener into the great roller rink of the mind. Along with roughly two-thirds of Three Lefts—like the Iggy Pop–esque “Wireless”, or the sharp new-wave redux of Napier-Hemy’s “Start Something New”—it would sit real nice in a mix between “Let’s Dance” by Chris Montez and Nick Lowe’s “So It Goes”.

And, as it happens, Nick Lowe is precisely the guy the band wanted to produce their debut album for Stiff Records, when Pointed Sticks charged out of Vancouver’s legendary punk scene and across the Atlantic to new-wave-crazy Britain in 1979. Instead, they ended up with Nigel Gray, the official knob twiddler on the first couple of Police albums.

Sitting in a rowdy East Van pub with drummer Ian Tiles, bassist Tony Bardach literally winces at the memory. “He kept me in the studio for two weeks, by myself pretty much,” he says with a frown, “and then he’d invent these bass parts and get me to play them. It really was kind of sadistic.”

The rest is history. Nobody liked the results, which were canned just as quickly as the band was dropped by the ailing label. Back in Vancouver, the Sticks managed to squeeze out Perfect Youth for Quintessence, and then finally dissolved under a black cloud only three years after introducing themselves with the art-school punk of “What Do You Want Me to Do?”. Almost 30 years later, drummer Tiles can confidently assert that recent developments are no mere nostalgia trip.

“We’ve done this whole resurgence thing correctly, I think,” he says, “with there being a fan demand behind it all. And we want to say to people that it’s a bit overwhelming. Because it is, pardon the pun, out of the blue. Which is what spawned it, funny enough.”

The drummer is referring to the punk-era Dennis Hopper film Out of the Blue, a cult-favourite incest drama shot in Vancouver by the crazed filmmaker and featuring the Sticks in an unforgettable scene at the Viking Hall on Hastings Street. Jones calls it “a great snapshot of Vancouver in ’79 or ’80”. Bardach, meanwhile, remembers the director being “pretty cooked” when the band met at his production office in Kitsilano. “Nick asked him for a script,” he says, chuckling, “and Hopper says, ”˜There’s no script, man, it’s all in my noggin,’ and he tapped his head.”