Music, musings and miscellanea

This feature originally appeared at Chartattack.com

Hot on the heels of their recently released, critically acclaimed and Polaris Muse Prize long listed Mount Benson album, Vancouver trio Apollo Ghosts are set to drop a new split cassette via Scotch Tapes on Thursday. Their contribution to the split, dubbed The Cedar Streets EP, includes four new tracks and three covers.

“We recorded some of the songs down in Washington at a studio where our friend works,” explains drummer Amanda Panda, calling from a cell phone while the trio made their way from New Brunswick to Quebec. “He gets a day a month, and he invited us down to record.”

The four new songs were all written within a few weeks of the actual recording session, which is a quick turnaround time considering how long some of Mount Benson’s tracks spent gestating.

“When you put out a record, you actually are working on those songs for quite a long time,” says Panda. “We had been working on some of those songs since the summer prior.”

The covers — tracks by The Monks, Minutemen and The Vaselines — were recorded by frontman Adrian Teacher in the group’s jam space on his four-track. All three members are fans of Minutemen and The Monks (“The Minutemen are Jay [Oliver, bassist]‘s favourite band”) As for The Vaselines, whose “Molly’s Lips” gets the Apollo Ghosts treatment, Panda says, “it was a good choice to round it out.”

“It’s just a fun song. It’s a fun song to sing and it’s easy to play.”

As well as seven of their own tunes, Apollo Ghosts share tape with fellow Vancouverites Thee AHs as well as ECCW wrestler and friend of the group, The Divine Prophet.

“He’s a great storyteller,” she says. “He came over to our house and we gave him a cassette player. He sat down and spun 10 or 12 yarns and then Adrian edited them down and picked the ones we liked the best.”

Apollo Ghosts haven’t made any concrete plans following their tour of eastern Canada this summer.

“Touring is always a bit tiring,” says Panda. “There’s definitely a bit of a rest after this.”

The band are interested in starting work on new songs that would form the basis of Mount Benson‘s follow up she says, but again, there’s no timeline just yet.

“We might do it in a different way,” she says. “We might work on it a bit more slowly, or work on the songs a bit more slowly, and get a big pool of songs and whittle them down from there.

While the songs for Mount Benson seemed like aged cheddar next to the one on the band’s new cassette, they were actually written much quicker than the ones on the band’s Hastings Sunrise debut, some of which Teacher had been working on for several years.

“It’s nice to switch it up and try a different method,” she says. “That might change, but that’s kind of the idea for now.”

“Angel Acres” (ft. the Divine Prophet)