Full time show

football heroes My Dad Vs Yours' Little Symphonies
http://www.thewig.ca/node/2764
 

by Allan Wigney
 
It is the last day of January. In a cozy corner of the Black Bear Pub, three quarters of My Dad Vs Yours can be found supping pints and speculating about the coming weekend’s Super Bowl game.
 
Or, more specifically, about the likely halftime entertainment.
 
“I hope it’s some classic rock band,” lead guitarist Tom Herbert enthuses to general nodding of heads by all present. “It should be.”
 
It wasn’t. It should have been. In retrospect, producers of the Super Bowl telecast should have listened to MDVY. After all, it’s not like they haven’t listened to the Ottawa-based band before.
 
Three years ago, in fact, in the hours leading up to Super Bowl XLII. The occasion was a pre-game interview with New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady, set to a soundtrack of the instrumental band’s 2006 track Habla Paisano. Sweet. And, Herbert and fellow guitarist Jose Palacios recall, news to MDVY.
 
“Someone phoned Arturo (Brisindi, drummer),” Herbert recalls of that Super Bowl Sunday. “There were a couple of phone calls from friends.”
 
“And then all these people started emailing us,” Palacios adds, “saying, ‘I’m pretty sure we heard your song at the Super Bowl.’”
 
‘Twas true. But how? Something about a Fox employee with a passion for the band’s music, evidently. And, when contacted, Fox was quick to inform the band there would be no financial compensation in return for the favour.
 
“They said the use was legal — which was a blatant lie,” Herbert says.
 
“We kind of didn’t believe that,” Palacios qualifies. “And I think the fact that they brushed us off so quickly, that made us pursue it and be like, ‘We’re not that stupid.’”
 
Again, Fox should have listened more closely to MDVY, a band whose resulting financial windfall went some way toward paying for the group’s first vinyl release, Little Symphonies.
 
“If they’d offered us up front what they paid us,” Herbert says, shaking his head, “I’d have been like, ‘Yeah!’ But the fact that they kind of lied to us, because they figured we were just a band and didn’t have any resources to follow it up…”
 
The unfinished grievance concludes a particularly wordy exchange from a band whose decade-plus career has seen MDVY’s instruments doing the talking. Little Symphonies is the band’s third disc of densely constructed instrumental post-rock, serving up infectious, multi-layered tunes that are at times downright toe-tapping.
 
Not classic rock, perhaps, but recorded under the influence of one of music’s legendary constructors of classic pop.
 
“We were going for that Phil Spector wall of sound thing,” Palacios explains. “He used to call his songs little symphonies for the kids. We kind of went with that idea for recording these songs.”
 
And achieving a true wall of sound takes time. As long as five years, if we’re to go by the band’s release schedule.
 
“The album,” Herbert says, “took a lot longer to make than we’d planned. We started planning two years ago and we’d planned to take five months — which was very ambitious. But I think it’s worth the time; I think we put the time and effort into the recording that it deserved.”
 
Little Symphonies marks the band’s first recording with bassist Jason Redmond. And while local live shows by the current lineup have been few, the arrival of a new album should mean we’ll soon see more of MDVY in the coming months.
 
“It’s hard to be in the studio and then having someone ask you to play live,” Palacios says. “You have to remove yourself from focusing on doing the record and then practise for a show — and practising for a show takes a long time. When we do something, we like to focus on it.”
 
Unlike, say, Tom Brady, who lost Super Bowl XLII, no thanks to MDVY. Just ask the band, who remember that gameday well. And, as Herbert jokes, are up for a repeat.
 
“Hopefully,” Herbert says, “we get good news this Super Bowl.”
 
They didn’t. Not even in the form of classic rock.