(Indie Rock) Mounties - Thrash Rock Legacy - 2014, MP3, 320 kbps

By Alex Hudson
The debut album from the most Canadian-sounding band imaginable is here. Mounties features Hawksley Workman, Hot Hot Heat's Steve Bays and Limblifter's Ryan Dahle, and their album Thrash Rock Legacy arrives on March 4 through Light Organ Records. Ahead of time, though, it's available to stream in full on Exclaim.ca.
With 14 tracks a running time of an hour, the album is stuffed with ideas. There is a huge range of sounds, from dreamy synth twinkles of "Tokyo Summer" to the brash rock riffs of "If This Dance Catches On" and the quirky reggae of "The Twig & the Tree."
In an Exclaim! interview, Mounties explain that the songs were born from extended jam sessions at Vancouver's Greenhouse Studios.
"Within a day, we'll have probably about seven 40-minute jams," Dahle says. "And within those 40-minute jams, sometimes we have probably five songs — or one song that's lots of parts."
Workman adds, "When there's a hook that starts to materialize, everybody's mind goes into emphasizing that hook. So when we're listening back to an hour's worth of playing, it's not about guitar solos and drum solos and extravagance. It's really about mining those moments that are hooky enough to become a song."