It's 2013, Listen Up: Fist City, Church Outrage And Killer Tunes

The road less travelled is often that way for a reason, but from time to time a trip along it proves to be the making of a band. Fist City have been through some stuff in the last few years and as a result their glorious, hook-laden record 'It's 1983, Grow Up!' is shot through with elements of an exciting, chaotic time.

It's a hell of a racket and one that marks them out as that rare thing: a rock 'n' roll band with something to say and the musical chops to deliver the message in style.

In the last 10 years, guitarist Evan van Reekum has spent time in rehab after jumping from a fourth floor window at a party and singer Kier Griffiths has undergone gender reassignment surgery. All the while, the band continued to forge a powerful live show and an arresting set of songs, many of which make up the backbone of their second full-length.

“We were all kind of in a weird flux during the writing of that record, we were all in weird places,” Griffiths said. “The record reflects a lot of our personal issues at times. There are some deep songs on there, some weird emotional relationship songs on there and then there are just some weird songs on there. We had some time to write that record, which was pretty nice.”

Hailing from Lethbridge, Alberta – two hours south of Calgary – Fist City revel in their “weird” songs and pitch black style, both of which are informed by their surroundings.

“We're from small town Canada, where there's really nothing else to do,” Griffiths said. “You find your freak friends pretty quickly and out of necessity. We're a tight group of friends in a small town, everyone in bands for the most part, making weird music and feeding off of each other. We grew up in a weird, religious, Bible belt town so we were romanced by these ideas of crazy cults, the occult and Satanism. I think some of that imagery gets mixed up in there too.”

Since their first steps into the wide world, Fist City have been at odds with conservative society. It's something that they enjoy and given the reaction to their video for Debbie Get YR Boa, a Technicolor nightmare created by film-maker Colin Askey, it's easy to see why.

“We were on this religious forum of sorts, one where they try to hunt down the Satanists in the media,” Griffiths said. “We were called reptilian hermaphrodites. They tried to find all these secret codes and the devil in our music video, which was made by Colin Askey. He did a good job, it was really rad.”

Drummer Ryan Grieve particularly enjoyed their moment of church-baiting infamy, especially given the religious right's habit of searching out serious meaning in pisstakes.

“There was a funny part on the thread,” he said. “There's this thing where Michael Jackson like throws up blood into Willie Nelson's mouth on a totem pole. They were trying to depict this as though it had some cryptic, horrible meaning. But really, it was just, like, a goof. The whole thing was beyond funny to me. There's a dude puking out Pegasus too, so I think they were picking and choosing the imagery.”

'It's 1983, Grow Up!' has been doing the rounds in Canada for a year, but will only see a UK release on July 8 through Black Tent Press. Griffiths is still pleased with the collection and he has good reason to be. Beneath the weight of its influences it has remained strong and has a grubby voice all of its own.

“I'm pretty happy with it still,” he said. “We want to do more songwriting and stuff, because we have been playing those songs for a while, but it's still a lot of fun to play. I'm really into over-the-top throwback pop, Evan is really into surf. I like surf and garage too. We're all over the place with what we like. We've got very diverse music collections and you can kind of hear a bit of a disparate sound there, but it comes together pretty easily in the end.”

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