Forgotten Pasts, Uncertain Futures: PUP's 'The Dream is Over'
Friday, 20 May 2016
Written by Huw Baines
Stefan Babcock first met Norman on the day his friend Mabu died. They became pretty close. Afterwards, in the right light, he saw something of Mabu still burning in Norman’s tiny chest. Stefan plays guitar and sings in the Toronto punk band PUP. Norman was a chameleon. Mabu was a ‘97 Toyota Camry.
On ‘The Dream Is Over’, their second album, PUP round out what their drummer, Zack Mykula, loosely sees as the Mabu trilogy. Its New Hope is the original song, one of the highlights of the band’s wonderful self-titled debut, which detailed Babcock and his sister’s life on the road with the family car. The video is its Empire Strikes Back; a darker second chapter that found Mabu going out in a blaze of glory at a demolition derby in Fergus, Ontario. Now, we have Sleep in the Heat. It’s better than Return of the Jedi, but its ending is harder to take.
Plucked from the car’s glove box before it made its final journey, Norman moved in with a lonely, broke Babcock at a time of sadness and no little uncertainty. Amid guitars that directly recall the stop-start power of Mabu, he yells: “I’m sick and tired of blacking out on my carpet and waking up all on my own, so I brought you home.” Six months later, Norman’s health started to fail, leaving Babcock in a suburb of square one. “I want you to know that I’d spend every bit of my pitiful Savings and Loan just to see you again,” he screams as the song ends. “But I know I won’t.”
"So many important memories to my development are tied to that car that saying goodbye to it was actually really, really hard."
“It sounds so stupid, but there are so many adolescent memories tied to that car: making out with my first girlfriend for the first time. Driving across Canada for the first time,” he said. “So many important memories to my development are tied to that car that saying goodbye to it was actually really, really hard. The day that we gave Mabu a funeral I got this chameleon. It felt to me, it sounds so stupid, that the spirit of Mabu was absorbed by this chameleon. This chameleon filled this car-sized hole in my heart.”
Mabu was part of a debut record that had nostalgia on its mind. Its follow up isn’t immune to looking back, but it’s also hard-headed and set on walking into an uncertain future. Its title is a fuck you to the doctor who told Babcock he’d have to shelve the band after developing a vocal cord cyst that later hemorrhaged. He didn't. For him, every minute on stage is a chance taken.
If This Tour Doesn’t Kill You, I Will, is a (mostly) tongue-in-cheek look at what it’s like to play over 200 shows a year with the same three people. The record surges with anger on Old Wounds and wades through adolescent stupidity on DVP. Each twist, each emotion, each dead end, though, is rendered vibrant, alive and defiant by melodies that just won’t fucking stop. If you can turn disillusionment into a four-part harmony, then you are on to something.
“I don’t know if there’s a secret,” Mykula said. “We thrive in turmoil, almost. Not to be over-dramatic. The friction feeds into creativity. It gets pent up and it has to come out at some point. With this record it was a concentrated burst, months between tours, that we were allowed to work on it. That’s how we gathered momentum.”
As their first album was, ‘The Dream Is Over’ was recorded in Toronto with David Schiffman. The producer was there to poke and prod the band when they got too comfortable. Album two is heavier, darker and harder to strike up a rapport with on first listen than its predecessor, but once it clicks it’ll light up a smile on your face.
The choruses are still there, so is the plucky spirit and wry realism. PUP are Laurel and Hardy sticking the landing after riding a piano down a flight of stairs: high-wire stuff that results in something warm rather than alienating.
"It does feel like everything is always about to collapse, which is kinda how we feel about everything in life."
“All the guys embrace weirdness in music,” Babcock said. “Zack is always talking about trying to make weird music without it sounding weird, which I think is important in our sound. I don’t know anything about music theory or anything like that. I tend to write atypical stuff. The melodies I come up with aren’t in 4/4 or 3/4, which I don’t realise because I don’t really know what that means.
“The other guys are such good musicians that they, rather than try to sort me out, embrace it. One of the greatest strengths of the three of them, collectively, is that they can embrace the weirdness and make it not isolating for most listeners. As soon as we start feeling like a song or section is too safe we throw it out the window, or push ourselves further. It does feel like everything is always about to collapse, which is kinda how we feel about everything in life. We’re just barely keeping our heads above water, which is exciting.”
‘The Dream Is Over’ is framed by touring, but it’s not a record about touring. At some stage, being an adult happens to all of us. Responsibilities sidle up to you unannounced, debts are hung around your shoulders and you lose your balance on the shifting sands of expectation. Babcock went through it while on the road, sleeping in a van and waking up every day somewhere new and, sometimes, depressing.
Despite that, and the dire warnings of his doctor, they aren’t about to stop either. Their recent UK run included sets opening for Modern Baseball, a headline show at the Lexington in London and two nights with the Movielife, not to mention a quick dash to Belgium for Groezrock. “Typical PUP,” Babcock laughed when reminded of their schedule. “Let’s fuckin’ see how many shows we can do.” They’ll never learn and the future, it seems, will have to fit in with their schedule.
“I guess the life that we’ve decided to live is unorthodox,” he continued. “There’s a lot of strange, conflicting emotions that come with it. You miss people a lot. A lot more when you’re away all the time. It’s hard. I try not to be whiny. Ultimately, we’re doing it because we love it and we’re having fun. If it wasn’t fun we wouldn’t do it.
"On tour, there are amazing days and there are terrible days. There’s really nothing inbetween. I think I was writing about a lot of themes that people my age deal with in general, but you have to write about what you know. What I’ve known for the past two years is touring. That’s the setting. The actual issues and emotions, I like to think of them as more universal than that.”
"What I’ve known for the past two years is touring. That’s the setting. The actual issues and emotions, I like to think of them as more universal than that.”
At the very end of the record, PUP bridge the gap between the thematic concerns of albums one and two. Babcock describes Pine Point as a non sequitur in the overarching context of ‘The Dream Is Over’, but it has a peculiar, sad energy to it that’s hard to shake. If this is a record about moving forward in the face of adversity, then its closing statement is about the often intangible nature of time and the physical markers we use to understand it. When Babcock and his sister were driving home from the adventure that inspired Yukon, from PUP’s first album, they stumbled across Pine Point, a town nestled on the south shore of Great Slave Lake in Canada’s Northwest Territories.
Abandoned following the closure of the adjacent mine in ‘88, it has since been wiped from the earth. Where once there were homes, schools and the accompanying childhoods, now there’s just a cemetery. After getting home, Babcock looked Pine Point up. He stumbled across an interactive documentary on the town and with it the stories of people who still hold it close to their hearts. To them it’s the place where they took their first tentative steps in the world, where they fell in and out of love, collected regrets and lost family members. It’s Mabu on a much, much bigger scale. And it’s gone.
“A lot of it is this idea that if any of us go back to the place we were born, it would probably unlock a bunch of memories from your childhood that you would never have thought of unless you were in that place,” Babcock said. “For these people, they don’t have any place to go back to. If they go back to Pine Point there’s literally nothing there. Your memories and your past can be erased so easily. There are themes of disillusionment that come to a head with Pine Point and this idea of an uncertain future. The whole record lyrically is summed up in the last line: ‘I hope you know what you’re doing.’”
'The Dream Is Over' is out on May 27 through SideOneDummy.
NOTE FROM THE EDITOR
We don't run any advertising! Our editorial content is solely funded by lovely people like yourself using Stereoboard's listings when buying tickets for live events. To keep supporting us, next time you're looking for concert, festival, sport or theatre tickets, please search for "Stereoboard". It costs you nothing, you may find a better price than the usual outlets, and save yourself from waiting in an endless queue on Friday mornings as we list ALL available sellers!
