Thus:Owls on their travel inspired experimental indie pop

by Rhiannon M. Kirkland

Erika Angell makes up half of the dynamic duo that are at the forefront of Thus:Owls and their experimental folk pop sound, alongside her husband Simon Angell. I spoke with her by phone on a warm day from her apartment in Montreal.

Thus:Owls have dramatic and vivid lyrics. All their songs are based around the pairing of interesting and unique sounds with storytelling. Her lyrics are about things that have happened to her or people she knows. “It’s a story that I’ve experienced or someone around me has experienced so that has been important to me, to be able to feel truthful in my way of singing,” she tells me.

Erika grew up in Sweden in a small coastal town. She sings with a slight Scandinavian accent. When asked what she misses most about her home country she says the ocean.

Her mother was a choir teacher, so growing up she sang in several choirs. She considers herself to be primarily a vocalist. “I see myself mainly as a singer, that’s kind of what I like onstage to focus on that I find that to do that well I really enjoy to be able to focus on it completely,” she tells me.

Aside from vocals, Erika plays several instruments and is drawn to experimenting with just about anything that makes a sound she finds interesting, a quality that is obvious in the variety of Thus:Owls music. She told me that she loves to visit sites like Equipboard to read and stay on top with the new attachments she can add to her guitar, thus letting her experiment with new tunes during her free time. She tells me, “I’ve written songs on guitars or piano, organs or whatever there’s been around. I think I’m fascinated with sounds more than anything so if find a cool tone in any instrument that’s what makes me write a tune more than anything.”

The band coalesced when Erika met Simon Angell while on tour. He was a guitarist for Patrick Watson, and she was touring and playing with her ensemble at the time. To say the least, they hit it off. He joined the band, and they started dating and have since married. “He played guitar exactly the way I liked to sing,” Erika remarks. “It was the last little piece that had been missing for me.”

After Simon joined Thus:Owls they began writing and recording material in Gothenburg, Sweden that would make up their first record Cardiac Malformations. Erika’s favourite thing about the studio was a collection of old guitars and instruments that made for a songwriter’s playground.

The couple spent the next four years living in Sweden before making the move to Montreal, which is near Simon’s hometown. “We’re both travellers and for us it was natural to get to know each other’s home countries and cities,” Erika says.

Simon speaks both French and English, and picked up Swedish relatively quickly. Erika admires this skill. She has been taking French lessons sporadically since they moved and has learned some French. Their touring schedule has made it difficult for her to consistently attend language classes. “I understand more and more what people say and sometimes I understand full conversations and sometimes I don’t understand anything,” she says. “I still need to learn how to actually speak it better and not just talk about cats and colours and stuff.”

In 2012 Thus:Owls release their second record Harbours, which they recorded at a French castle near the banks of the Seine that is home to a studio owned by Simon’s friends.

It was inspired by years of travelling and touring, and the stories that she had collected along the way. “I went to a lot of different places, met people all over the world and it kind of felt like everything was different but at the same time the same you know that we’re still human beings,” Erika reflects. “I see all of those nine songs on Harbours as nine different paintings that tell their own little stories and they’re also pretty different sounding songs and I guess the red thread between them is the story that they share.”

Thus:Owls are in the process of recording and writing their third record in Montreal. They spent the last couple of weeks recording and plan to return to finish the record later this summer. The songs are about Erika’s family home and the stories that have unfolded there. It is an old home on the west coast of Sweden that has been in her family for over a hundred years. She tells me, “It’s about people living there and what happened to them like a hundred years ago or my grandma, or her parents, or her aunt, different stories around that area.”

The other major influence on the album is her love for the ’50s and ’60s records her father listened to while she was growing up. “That was what there was in my house to listen to,” she reminisces. “Looking back I kind of realized that all those guitar sounds from the ’50s and ’60s, the bass and drums, all those sounds are still something that I like a lot and that you can find in our music.”

She says this record will be different from the ones that came before it. This should come as no surprise to those who have listened to their two current albums. As a musician Erika likes to experiment and change. However, judging by their previous releases Thus:Owls will always have a coherent overarching sound in Erika’s lofty dramatic vocals, their innovative and simplistic use of instruments and their fondness of experimentation.

Thus:Owls recently played the 2013 Calgary Folk Music Festival.

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