Looking back upon 2010, it has been quite a year for Metro Moncton The Motorleague. Since the start of the year alone, the high-octane group has landed high-profile concert slots alongside Alexisonfire as well as a national tour opening for Texan blues-rock band Grady. This past Spring, The Motorleague brought home the East Coast Music Awards for Loud Recording Of The Year (for their debut full-length debut Black Noise) in addition to the coveted award for Fan’s Choice Video of the Year. While it might be a tough year to top for some, anyone who has seen the band could vouch for the fact that they will probably be more than capable of outdoing themselves in the New Year.
The Motorleague next’s Moncton show will be as a part of the Cut Throat Pizza Christmas Extravaganza on Thursday December 23. The show is taking place at the venues comprising the Oxygen Complex in Downtown Moncton.
The band’s recently completed Canadian tour in support Grady marked the first time that the group had ventured west of Ontario and much to their pleasant surprise, had people playing air guitar along to their songs in Calgary in addition to logging numerous other show highlights in places like Red Deer, Lethbridge, Banff and Vancouver.
“We were well received by the crowd a good 90% of the time,” Motorleague’s Don Levandier concludes on the subject of the band’s inaugural Canadian jaunt. “There was definitely people that weren’t feeling it when we were on stage at some of the dates but of course we understand that what we do isn’t necessarily for everyone.
“But we also heard a lot of positive from those shows too, which is encouraging. We definitely made our fair share of friends on the tour and moved a lot of records. All in all, the reception we were given turned out to be a lot better than what we had hoped for. We were really lucky to be on tour with Grady though – their fans like loud rock and roll so we were typically in good hands every night.”
Now that promotional efforts behind Black Noise have essentially wrapped, Don reports that The Motorleague’s next studio record, which the band hopes to have released in Spring 2011, is finally nearing the finish line. Recording on the effort began this past February in Toronto with producer and engineer Steve Rizun, noted for his work with The Flatliners as well as The Creepshow. Don maintains that there are only a few vocal parts requiring a little further finesse before the record finally sees the light of day.
Asked what fan can expect from the next batch of material from The Motorleague, he says that the group, which also includes Shawn Chiasson, Ryan MacDonald and Nathan Jones, opted for a little more of a refined sound this time around.
“The new album still has a dirty rock and roll sound to it,” Levandier says. “The dirtiness is just not quite to the extent that Black Noise was.”
“These new songs sound bigger in the sense of how they were recorded. Black Noise was 10 tracks that never really slowed down to take a breather but these new songs have a lot more in the way of variety to them: faster parts, slower parts and a lot more in the way of instrumentation. We have piano and baritone guitars on virtually all of these new songs so the sound of the songs end up being much more vast.”
Although he is tight-lipped about who might be releasing the band’s next record, Levandier says the group currently has some “solid” options that have been presented to them, all of which make sense in their opinion.
“We have a lot of people doing their best to help us out and we want to be sure that we weight our options really carefully and do it right. We definitely do not want to be in a position of having to make a hasty decision.”
With the first single from the band’s next record slated to be filmed in January here in the Moncton area, Levandier is looking forward to some down time over the Christmas holidays.
“We are really looking forward to just being home for the holidays. We have some regional shows throughout the Maritimes between now and February before we head back to Toronto for Canadian Music Week in March. Then the East Coast Music Awards are on the Island in April and by then the record should be out so more touring will basically be inevitable.”
Article published in December 17, 2010 edition of the Times & Transcript