RHEOSTATICS ANNOUNCE HERE COME THE WOLVES, FIRST NEW ALBUM IN 15 YEARS

OUT 9/6/19 VIA SIX SHOOTER RECORDS.

SEE ALBUM COVER TAKE SHAPE IN TIMELAPSE VIDEO FOR TITLE TRACK.

Ever bound for ragged glory, Rheostatics occupy a unique place in the Canadian music landscape, pulled together and apart for nearly forty years. Finding grace in the reality of endurance, Rheostatics show us a special type of longevity, through upheaval, personal (and personnel) change, and a basic refusal to play the game in any way, shape or form, stretched over decades. Now, Rheostatics return with Here Come The Wolves, their first new album in 15 years.

On Here Come The Wolves, you’ll find Rheostatics trusting their complicated formula, a signature multiplicity of songwriters, artistic instincts and concerns. Produced by Chris Stringer with mixing contributions by Chris Walla, Michael Phillip Wojewoda and Gus Van Go, over twelve songs Here Come The Wolves unfurls like a cross-section of the band’s cumulative experience, individual and collective.

The title track, a “gear shifting, vocal stacking, wild riffing, sh*t kicking,” testament to finding balance in discord, exemplifies this spirit literally (everybody gets a solo) and figuratively (it’s a complex but catchy tune). This ‘single,’ a funny term for a song of three distinct parts, is a metonymic microdose of stacking wholes: the album, the band in 2019, the Rheostatics’ very way of being since 1980.

Today, Six Shooter Records fires “Here Come The Wolves,” with a Martin Tielli arrow, a thesis on time and its abstractions via a revelatory glimpse into the making of the album art. Come for the behind-the-scenes snoop into Tielli’s painting studio, stay for the free tutorial on the Renaissance technique of egg tempera grassa (“cannot vouch for reptilian egg”). The video, a rollercoaster ride through a painstaking and deliberate process, does with video what Here Come The Wolves does with music: it leaves its trace.

With Tim Vesely’s canola yellow pop melodies, Dave Clark’s galloping beats and Bidini’s rousing stories and frontline provocations, the exquisite triangulation of Hugh Marsh on violin, Kevin Hearn on keys, and Tielli’s ventriloquism on guitar come into high relief. From the opening feathered flutter of “Vancouver,” to the sparkle and shimmer throughout “Music Is The Message,” Here Come The Wolves contains powerful, panoramic beauty. With protest and panache, the yelps and squalls and klangs and riffs on songs like “AC/DC on the Stereo,” and “It’s the Super Controller!” also make space for the strange, the obtuse, the earnest and the wild.

Here Come The Wolves will be released by Six Shooter Records on September 6, 2019.

TRACK LISTING
Vancouver
AC/DC on the Stereo
Rearview
Here Come the Wolves
It’s the Super Controller!
Music is the Message
Diamonds on Our Toes
I Wanna Be Your Robot
The Beautiful Night
Goodbye Sister Butterfly
Albatross
Mountains and the Sea

TOUR DATES
CALGARY, AB: Calgary Folk Festival, July 26
EDMONTON, AB: Interstellar Rodeo, July 27

A BRIEF HISTORY

Etobicoke, 1980. Four punk kids string together their first chords on guitars like laces on shoes bound for overhead wires. A marker: I was there.

Toronto, 1993. With three albums up on the wire —Greatest Hits (1987), Melville (1991) and Whale Music (1992) — Rheostatics hold a special place in the city’s heart. The music is fresh, urgent, alive. At an impressive pace, Rheostatics explore ideas that would become the soundtrack to the film Whale Music and the band’s fourth studio album, major label debut, Introducing Happiness (1994).

Somewhere in Ontario, 1996. From the National Gallery of Canada (Music Inspired by The Group of 7) to a national tour of Canada’s legions, bars and concert halls, a newly configured Rheostatics set out with The Tragically Hip, unleashing anthems like “Bad Time To Be Poor” (Blue Hysteria, 1996).

From 2001 to 2067: Rheostatics cross Canada with ten albums over 20 years, searching for new ways to grow. They release Night of the Shooting Stars in 2001. Tight knit and insatiable, the band plays 12 nights in a row in Toronto. They tunnel down into the new sound of 2067 before they fan out, each on their own odyssey.

2007-2016: RIP? Rheostatics say goodbye with a sold out “Good. Gone. Dead.” performance at Massey Hall in 2007. Band vital signs flatline for nearly a decade. Rheostatics reemerge in 2015 to play three nights at the Art Gallery of Ontario, and later make their reunion official with a return to Massey Hall in 2016.

Here Come the Wolves, 2019. After fifteen years, The Rheostatics return as their original 1980 four, Dave Bidini, Dave Clark, Martin Tielli and Tim Vesely, now also with Hugh Marsh and Kevin Hearn.