The Stanfields see themselves like if Neil Young and Crazy Horse were playing Irish music

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON OCT. 17, 2012

By Steve Newton

On its new album Death & Taxes, Nova Scotia rock band the Stanfields wastes no time getting its point across. The opening track, “Jack of All Trades”, kicks off with feedback and the grinding of picks against strings before morphing into a Celtic-punk barn burner that’s equal parts Ramones and Pogues.

“We just sealed ourselves in a tiny room not much bigger than this van and started whacking away on guitars to see what kind of noise we could make,” recalls Stanfields singer-guitarist Jon Landry, calling from the band’s ride as it rolled towards Ottawa. “That’s one of our In Utero moments, I guess.”

Death & Taxes—the follow-up to the Stanfields’ 2010 debut, Vanguard of the Young & Reckless—was produced by Langley’s own Mike Fraser, who’s best known for his work with the world’s top hard rock and metal acts. But the fact that Fraser had links to Black Sabbath, Metallica, and AC/DC was nothing but good news to Landry and his Maritime crew.

“One of the collective favourite bands of ours is AC/DC, of course,” he says, “and they’ve had a big impact on our music. He also mixed a few tracks for people on the East Coast like Matt Mays, so it just kinda made sense to us.

“I was pretty nervous about getting ahold of him, though,” Landry continues. “You know, here’s the guy that engineered ‘Thunderstruck’, and here’s stupid old me in my little apartment, sitting in my underwear, saying ‘Oh man, I gotta call this guy.’ But after five seconds of conversation it was like, ‘Oh, he puts his pants on one leg at a time like everybody else.’ He’s a really down-to-earth guy, so he fit right in with us.”

Not surprisingly, the feedback-heavy approach the Stanfields take on tunes like “Jack of All Trades” went over well with the raunch-ready Fraser.

“He was pretty into it,” recalls Landry, whose band plays Venue on Wednesday (October 24). “He said, ‘Go in there and burn that place down.’ He’s right into being obnoxious. We kind of brought it out in each other, I think.”

Turns out Fraser was the ideal choice to helm the Stanfields’ new 10-track platter, which melds the Celtic sounds its members heard as kids with the punk and rock bands they worshipped as teens.

“We grew up in Nova Scotia, where there’s a lot of fiddle music and things like that,” Landry explains, “but it’s not necessarily something that any of us were into as kids. It was just like, ‘Uh, that’s the old people’s music,’ or ‘Oh boy, another Barra MacNeils track. Whatever.’

“But as we were playing together, my cousin Jason Wright brought the bouzouki in,” he adds, “and it just kinda started off in this direction. Out came the music that was instilled in us as children. It was never once that we went, ‘Oh, we want to do a Pogues thing’ or ‘We want to do a Flogging Molly thing’ or whatever—we don’t even see ourselves in that kind of vein.

“We see ourselves more like if [Neil Young &] Crazy Horse was playing Irish music. We’re not that fast and we’re not that tight and we’re not that good—we’re just good together, ya know.

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