No. 36 - 20 years of Make Up the Breakdown edition
Celebrating two decades of Hot Hot Heat's seminal (to me at least) debut album
The first thing you noticed about Hot Hot Heat was the voice. It was a yelp really, as if singer and keyboardist Steve Bays was singing at the top of his range and then somehow pushing past those physical limitations. “Le-le-le-le-le-Laoooooow, le-le-le-le-lo-ow-ow.” For the uninitiated, it was a barrier to entry. But if you could get past it — embrace it even — there was much to love about this Victoria, BC quartet. Hot Hot Heat married a burgeoning agitated underground noise, that would later be streamlined as dance-punk, with pop hooks and melodies. With their 2002 debut, Make Up the Breakdown, which turns 20 this week and is receiving the commensurate reissue treatment, they helped usher in indie rock’s (relative) cultural dominance in the mid-to-late 2000s.
Of course, that wasn’t the original intent. Hot Hot Heat formed in 1999 with Bays playing a Juno 6 keyboard — super weird instrument choice at the time — Dustin Hawthorne on bass, Paul Hawley on drums and Matty Marnik handling vocals. This was the lineup I first encountered when I picked up their debut seven-inch and split LP with The Red Light Sting. My interest in the band was due to their connection to d.b.s., a legendary-to-about-a-dozen-people punk band from my hometown, North Vancouver. Hot Hot Heat’s single, and a subsequent split 12-inch with The Red Light Sting, were among the first releases on Ache Records, a label run by d.b.s. guitarist Andy Dixon. Ache would later release the first Death From Above 1979 EP, Heads Up, back when they were still just Death From Above. Similarly The Red Light Sting was Dixon’s new band with d.b.s. drummer Paul Patko after d.b.s. disbanded in 2001.
Hot Hot Heat Mk 1 was a far noisier beast than the band most people came to know. After being verboeten for the entire 90s, underground artists were starting to fuck around with keyboards again, generally using them to make a lot of cacophonous noise. Hot Hot Heat fit in with a growing scene of electrorock bands like Le Shock, the Sick Lipstick and Black Cat #13 who were building their sound around rhythm and keyboards in place of guitars.
“For a long time, nobody had a keyboard in a band,” Wolf Parade’s Arlen Thompson told author Michael Barclay in his book Hearts on Fire: Six Years that Changed Canadian Music 2000-2005. Members of Wolf Parade, the Unicorns and experimental solo artist Sarah Neufeld (who also plays with Arcade Fire) all left Vancouver Island around this time for the cheap rent and lack of geographic isolation in Montreal. “You might as well have a flute or something.” Indeed Hawley had bought Bays’ Juno for $300 at a local pawnshop before ceding it to the future frontman. “I thought keyboards were so lame,” says Bays told Barclay. “I was more into Don Cabellero and Tortoise, bands where the drummer was the star.”
The band started building steam, touring through Alberta and down the West Coast to California, a far more common route for Victoria/Vancouver-area bands than heading across the prairies to Ontario. But Marnik lacked his bandmates’ drive. When Hawley and Ache Records’ Dixon heard some more pop-minded demos Bays had made, they heard a new way forward for the band. Soon enough, Marnik was out, Bays added lead vocals to his workload and guitarist Dante DeCaro, whose playing style mirrored Blur’s Graham Coxon and XTC’s Andy Partridge, was in.
This is around this time that I first saw Hot Hot Heat. I was going to school in Victoria at the time and Hot Hot Heat had a habity of opening for a lot of bands who came through. They opened for the Dears at Lucky Bar in the fall of 2001 — two of my roommates snuck backstage and bought uppers from someone in Hot Hot Heat. Not being the type who usually take such things they were up, wired, all night long. While I liked the reworked versions of the noisier material they’d originally made with Marnik, you could tell that something bigger was brewing. Newer songs like “5 Times Out of 100” and “Have A Good Sleep,” immediately stood out for their a) hooks and b) melody.
The band quickly landed a deal with Sub Pop and made the five track Knock Knock Knock EP with Death Cab For Cutie (well established at the time, but as of yet not supercharged by the Seth Cohen Bump) drummer Chris Walla producing. Make Up the Breakdown followed soon after, recorded in six days in Vancouver with producer Jack Endino, who had produced Nirvana’s Bleach among countless other records for Sub Pop, for $7000. Bays wrote many of the lyrics on ferry rides between Victoria and Vancouver, a process that rears its head on the line “The cost of living is a one way fare” on “Get In or Get Out”.
A friend gave me a burned copy a couple months before its October 8, 2002 release date — he knew somebody that knew somebody — which was a big deal to non-music-journo me at the time. Hot Hot Heat had become my favoutite local band (Victoria and Vancouver inclusive) and one of my favourite shows ever was seeing them headline a gig that August at Mesa Luna in Vancouver, a salsa club that hosted DIY punk shows on the side (I saw both the Locust and Blood Brothers there on separate occassions). The four local openers were Mint Records’ Operation Makeout, who former d.b.s. singer and future Japandroids and White Lung producer Jesse Gander had joined; New Town Animals, also signed to Mint and riding local success from MuchMusic playing the clip for their song “Three Steps Backward;” Three Inches of Blood, a soon to be internationally big (with an almost totally different line-up) thrash metal band co-fronted by Cam Pipes, who once played in a band with Bays; and the afrorementioned Red Light Sting. All the bands were great. More importantly, it really felt like something big was building, both in Vancouver and in the underground as a whole.
Flyer screenshot from the flexyourhistory Instgram account
Make Up the Breakdown came out in October. It did well but didn’t blow up overnight. Hot Hot Heat hit the road, touring with Franz Ferdinand, who had one single to their name (you might have heard it) and having a still unsigned Killers open for them in Vegas. When Sire Records picked up the band for their next record, radio followed suit, and started playing the shit out of “Bandages.” The band did incredibly well in the UK where they at one point knocked the White Stripes off the top of some chart with “Talk To Me, Dance With Me.” But, according to Barclay’s book, the success essentially broke the band. DeCaro wasn’t into the hectic pace of life in a successful major label rock band (it should be said this is a natural reaction to life in a successful major label rock band. Anyone who is able to adapt is definitely a bit off) and refused to fly to England to play Later… with Jools Holland, which would have been a major career milestone. DeCaro stuck around to write the band’s Sire debut Elevator, but he left before it hit the streets, later joining Wolf Parade.
Elevator gave the band an even bigger hit with “Middle of Nowhere” (you’ve probably heard it in your local grocery store) but the record as a whole felt like more of the same, but not as good. Hot Hot Heat released one more major label record, the middling Happiness LTD. in 2007. Hawthorne left before the release of Future Breeds in 2010 and between it and the band’s 2016 quite good self-titled swan song, Bays became a producer and started a pretty good supergroup Mounties with Hawksley Workman and Limblifter/Age of Electric’s Ryan Dahle, with whom he often works on the production side of things.
To some folks, Hot Hot Heat were nothing but a yowly voice and mop of curly hair, just one of the tsunami of bands who briefly held the title of Hot Young Thang in the early 2000s. But I think their legacy is more than that. “In the early 2000s, it felt like melody was finally cool again,” Bays told Barclay. “There was a new brand of punk that wasn’t called indie rock yet - a nice period where everything felt undefined.”
Hot Hot Heat embodied this exciting period better than almost any other artist. Make Up the Breakdown came out between The Shins Oh, Inverted World and Iron & Wine’s Our Endless Numbered Days, helping to usher in Sub Pop mid-2000s ressurgence. Though it only peaked at 146 on the Billboard 200, almost a full year after it was released. It was a steady seller, briefly Sub Pop’s second most popular record after Bleach. And all this happened before the O.C. and Garden State, “Float On,” the Cobrasnake, and the whole indie rock aesthetic becoming a mainstream lifestyle. But none of that could have happened, at least in part, without Hot Hot Heat and Make Up the Breakdown.
As he told me when I interviewed him for Exclaim! for their final album, Bays noted liked “hearing from peers, like the Killers' Brandon Flowers, that Hot Hot Heat's music was an early inspiration. He also notes that when the band started in 1999, the term ‘indie rock’ — a genre into which they were regularly slotted — meant a lot of different things to a lot of different people. ‘Now there's a recipe,’ he says. ‘I'm grateful to have come out at the beginning of that and maybe played a role in shaping in. Possibly. Without sounding like a dick.’
Kool Kids Self Promotion Club
I was lucky enough to be sent on a work trip and when you’re a professional-ish music journalist that means music festivals. Specifically, I was able to attend this year’s Pop Montreal, a NXNE/CWM-ish gathering of local, Canadian and international artists in clubs across the city, minus the heavy music-industry vibes.
Catching 18 bands in four days, I wrote up my favourites in a piece for Exclaim!
Kool Kids Music Recommendation Club
I saw a lot of cool artists in Montreal, including a few I wasn’t familiar with previously. Toronto singer and guitarist Deanna Petcoff ticks both of those boxes. Like everyone I spoke with after the fact, I was floored by her performance at Casa del Popol. Petcoff cut her teeth in Pins & Needles, a garage rock quartet formed at a Girls Rock camp. She went solo after that band split-up and finally released her debut album, To Hell With You, I Love You, on Royal Mountain earlier this year. Seriously, I don’t know how she totally went over my head, this shit is right in my wheelhouse.
I didn’t get to see Poolblood in Montreal, though I heard through the grapevine that Toronto’s Maryam Said played a nice solo set. She’s been making music for a while now, dropping a short EP in 2019 that had a rough indie-rock/pop-punk sound. “twinkie,” her first new music since signing with Next Door Records (home of Ada Lea, Patrick Holland and Bells Larsen among many others), keeps the buzzy guitars but let’s things get a little looser. It was produced by Shamir, an artists who’s gone through their own reinvention since first gaining prominence with “On the Regular” back in 2014, and promises big things to come.
Someone told me Piss for Pumpkin are the hottest new band in Montreal, to which I replied, “sure, but that’s a terrible name,” and then proceeded to listen to their song “Conditioner” on repeat for the next two days. While I have no idea what the trio’s actual stature in their local scene might be, I very much dig their scuzzy bass and drums and vocals vibe. “Conditioner,” one of their three currently available songs, is a slow burn that explodes into a massive sing along of “Turnnnnnnnnnn It! Down!” It also discusses pee. Maybe it’s a theme? IDK. But I really do love this song.
If you’re reading this Substack, you’re probably already fleetingly familiar with Alvvays (no judgement if you’re not - this is a safe musical space!), the Toronto-based dream-pop band made waves with a pair of albums in the mid 2010s. It’s been a while since we heard from the group, and I was not prepared for the heft of“Pharmacist,” their pseudo-comeback single, and the whole of Blue Rev frankly. Their last album was a little too airy for me — heavy on the dream, light on the pop. But this, this is right in my shoegaze-loving wheel house.
From Tacoma, WA but named after an small town forty-five minutes away, Enumclaw ooze Pacific Northwest cool. Featuring big, ringing guitars, hooks for miles and a laconic singer, Aramis Johnson, who sounds like he’s doing you a favour by, you know, singing, the quartet only released their first single last year. Its members have deep roots in Seattle’s hip hop and hardcore scenes, yet somehow Oasis are one of the first influences they mention in interviews. You can hear it in their swagger, and the way Johnson can turn everyday conversations into grist for the lyrical mill, like on “Cowboy Bepop,” one of several highlights from both the band’s recently released Park Lodge EP and forthcoming fulllength Save the Baby on Luminelle.
Ian Gormely is a freelance music journalist based in Toronto.
Hit up koolkidsmusicclub@gmail.com for questions, criticisms and submissions.