It's a well-known fact that we here at Exclaim! have heaped so much praise onto the 2022 Alvvays album Blue Rev that it feels borderline suspicious (except if you've also heard it, in which case, you know we're genuinely being as normal as we can about how incredibly good it is) — and the folks at Pitchfork stand in agreement, having recently put the band's third LP at No. 15 on their 100 best albums of the 2020s so far list.
In honour of the occasion, Molly Rankin has shared an enlightening video about how Alvvays recorded most of the album in a shed, and had an unexpected creature feature when they tried to expand Blue Rev's horizons with a session at the Tragically Hip's Bathouse Recording Studio in Bath, ON.
After ruminating on free-styling the Smiths-reminiscent "Pressed" (one of the record's many "loud strummers") over one of guitarist Alec O'Hanley's looped instrumentals and having to wring a narrative out of the beer-soaked "gibberish" behind what became "Pomeranian Spinster," the frontwoman remembered an early trip in the process up to the Lennox & Addington County studio used by the revered Kingston band — who Rankin likened to "the Canadian R.E.M. or something."
"We drove out there and wanted to do some recording there to see what it was like and how the songs were shaping up," she recalled, adding, "We're all hanging out — hanging out for the first time in a while, so everything's pretty loose," of their first night there after load-in.
"Out of the corner of my eye, I see something flapping in the ceiling, and I think that it's just a fan hitting a piece of fabric or paper, so I just ignore it," Ranking continued. "And then, I look over again, and I ask [keyboardist] Kerri [MacLellan] and Alec if there's a mechanical snake in the ceiling, because there's no way a real snake could be slithering out of the ceiling of a studio towards these huge speakers that are blasting demos. And that's actually what happened, it was this gigantic snake. No one knew what to do, even the engineer that was working with us that lived there; it's not like, part of his job to remove a snake."
She concluded, "It was a really shambolic situation to be in, and that pretty much set the tone for the recording of this record: it was just like, chaos and hilarity and pain and fun." Check out the full video below and revisit our interview with Rankin about the album.