The Love Machine bring good vibes to Moncton

Ottawa power pop band The Love Machine has mired themselves in a flurry of activity since forming in the nation’s capital more than a half decade ago. Dropping their self-titled five-song EP in 2005, they followed that up with the If You’re A Bird, I’m A Bird EP two years later. 2010 heralds the arrival of the group’s first full-length record, Sweater Weather, released on the 45 Records label.

The group is currently in the midst of their fourth tour of the Maritime provinces in the past five years, a tour that will see them performing at Moncton’s Paramount Lounge on Main Street on Thursday night. Show time is 10:00 pm.

Though their sound is undeniably rooted in pop-music, Love Machine vocalist-guitarist-keyboardist Allan Gauthier says the group enjoys many genres of music and does their best to incorporate these diverse influences into their songs.

“I feel that our love for different kinds of music comes out when we are writing songs,” Gauthier says. “I think we’ve made a pretty diverse sounding record with Sweater Weather.”

Together with his band mates Sean Prescott, Jordan David and Mike Laing, Gauthier admits that the group is taking full advantage of bands being able to write and perform songs that color a little outside of power pop lines, something that would have been virtually unheard of as recently as last decade.

“Some people seem to be afraid of diversity within the context of one record but then you’ve got some bands that have one or two really great songs and the rest of their album just doesn’t measure up,” he says. “I love the fact that our record can go from high energy pop song to a creepy kind of blues song all within that one album.

“We ultimately feel it is who we are and how we write.”

While three years between releases is equal to a virtual eternity these days, Gauthier says the extra time spent making Sweater Weather was time well invested. With their previous releases, the group had been told that the energy of their live show wasn’t necessarily translated when it came to their recordings so with the making of Sweater Weather, the group set out to remedy that, making sure their live energy was captured on disc this time around.

“We knew that our recordings didn’t necessarily represent what the band was like in concert so between our last EP and Sweater Weather, we spent a fair amount of time touring, traveling and just growing up a little bit. We became a better band in both the playing and learning sense.”

With a total of seven tour dates throughout New Brunswick and Nova Scotia this time around, The Love Machine are working to spread the gospel of their music the old-fashioned way: touring the living heck out of their band.

“The first show we played on this tour was in Bathurst which was somewhere that we hadn’t played before. A couple of the guys from Hungry Hearts, who we are touring with, are originally from there so the crowd was sizeable and just insane. We covered the costs of driving from Ottawa to Bathurst with that one show. It was a crazy success.

“We’ve actually found that playing smaller towns is awesome. We would much rather have 30 or 40 people going nuts at a show like a house show that we just played in Fredericton than have 300 people in the room that could care less about us.”