Ought throws a curve ball with Room Inside the World

    1 of 1 2 of 1

      Stepping away from something that’s working comes with significant risks—a reality that’s not lost on Ought singer and songwriter Tim Darcy. After earning voluminous praise for its first two full-lengths, the Montreal quartet decided to mix things up for its third outing, Room Inside the World.

      Ought first surfaced with a frenetic, buzz-building reimagining of first-wave postpunk. This time out, the songs are all about emotion-drenched, unapologetically theatrical vocals, and they swing majestically from hymnal goth (“Take Everything”) to languid college rock (“Disgraced in America”).

      “All I can say is that I completely agree with us taking a risk,” Darcy says, on his cell from a tour van making its way to Detroit. “But I would much rather go down doing something that’s true to what we really want to do. This record was about making the kind of music we wanted to make. That might mean not getting the kind of acclaim you’re hoping for in the moment. But think about how many things you like that weren’t valued at the time. Some new people like it, and some old people don’t like it, but that’s the way it goes.”

      Consider Room Inside the World part of a lineage, then, that includes records like Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music and the Beastie Boys’ infamous curve ball Paul’s Boutique.

      Dramatically, Ought files down the abrasive edges that earned Darcy and his bandmates—Ben Stidworthy (bass), Matt May (keyboards), and Tim Keen (drums)—favourable comparisons to agitating legends like Wire and the Fall. The American-born Montrealer, quite rightly, suggests instead that reference points like Nick Cave and early New York City punks such as Television and Patti Smith make more sense.

      “I think that people are slowly beginning to form their words around the word romantic with the record,” Darcy says. “The cross into a heightened sort of romanticism has been an interesting one for us. I don’t exactly know how to put my finger on what we’ve done except to say that I feel like we’re in a fairly romantic period of music right now.”

      And what Darcy likes about that is that what often comes out of romantic periods is change—sometimes social, sometimes artistic, and sometimes both. Think hippies in the ’60s, punks in the ’70s, or rap revolutionaries in the ’80s.

      Having first come together during the Montreal student protests of 2012, the band’s members remain very much convinced that all is not lost in the world, despite things sometimes seeming that way.

      If that’s a romantic notion, then Darcy will take it.

      “I’m very much on the side of hope,” he says. “Not in a naive sense in terms of empty promises, but more hope in sort of concrete things like values and community-building and service work and dialogue. Things we can weave into our daily lives. Taking action and doing something.”

      Ought plays the Cobalt on Saturday (March 24).

      Comments