Michael Rault sits in a basement bedroom/studio in Old Strathcona, eating leftover rice out of a plastic container. His cousin/producer, Renny Wilson, putters around the room — moving vintage synths, folding sheets, chatting on Facebook with friends, scrolling through his iTunes.
The two are listening to some of the songs from Rault’s next album, Living Daylight, due later this year. They’re only rough mixes — but they sound bigger, juicier and trippier than Rault’s previous lo-fi soul-punk output, including 2010’s Ma-Me-O.
The first tune, Real Love, is a fuzzed-out ‘70s blues-rock stroller with a Beatles-on-acid interlude — or what Wilson calls the soundtrack for a Budweiser beer commercial. “We have marketing applications for each song,” jokes Rault.
The “pop hit” — All Alone — is a hazy, feel-good psychedelic-pop number, dripping in reverb, falsettos and synthesized sitars. Transcendental? To the point of tears.
“I tried to push him into doing some weirdo stuff — stuff that I’m into,” says Wilson, who just released a soft-disco album, Sugarglider, on Mint Records.
“Michael’s style is: ‘If a song sounds good enough, leave it.’ Whereas I’m like: ‘Let’s put a lot of things on it and see what sounds best.’ He decides he’s done way earlier than me.”
Despite their differences, the two are longtime collaborators. The cousins used to play together in Michael Rault and The Mixed Signals when they were teens. “We were hanging out at Christmas and I said: ‘Do a record with ME!’,” says Wilson.
“Rene and I have never worked on a record together, we’ve only done one song,” adds Rault, who moved to Toronto last year.
Over a span of three weeks in February, the two made occasional forays to Wunderbar, lazed around Wilson’s home, and survived late-night sessions at Riverdale Recorders. “We’d order pizza and beer, then do five minutes of work,” says Rault. “Then, we’d pass out for three hours and talk about music endlessly — and try to draw up rules for what makes some music cool.”
As slackerific as it sounds, this recording method might be the best for Rault, based on the rough mixes for Living Daylight. These songs are shaping up to be his best yet — you might just hear them in beer commercials and on radio stations across Canada once the album sees the light of day. He’s aiming for a summer release, but expect to hear a few singles this spring.
Here’s a draft of some of Living Daylight‘s song titles, written on the back of a Pizza 73 receipt:
