An interview with Kestrels

Chad Peck talks about how a beaten up, old pedal helped him record the new Kestrels LP, teaching English to high schoolers who love MBV, being Ash's biggest fan, and why guitar solos are a must.

Chad Peck is the only person I know who is a bigger Ash fan than I am. Like me, he discovered the Northern Irish rock band as a teenager, with their hook-filled power pop quickly becoming an obsession that would stay with him throughout his adulthood. Unlike me, Peck decided to use his love for Ash as motivation to start a band of his own, one that would similarly use strong melodies and loud guitars, combined with the wall of dissonant noise he would discover through other bands he loved, like My Bloody Valentine and Dinosaur Jr.

Since the mid-2000s, Peck has fronted Kestrels, a Halifax-based band in which he has remained the nucleus and only full-time member. While both Halifax and even Canada aren’t exactly known for fostering a shoegaze scene, Kestrels have continued to represent, putting out now five albums that consistently show Peck’s gift for composing pop songs disguised as ear-bleeding shoegaze(ish) rock. For his fifth album, Better Wonder, Peck brought back bassist Jim MacAlpine and drummer Michael Catano - both former members of East Coast post-hardcore champs North of America - to help him record it. Super producer/engineer John Agnello, who mixed some of the record himself, describes it as “pretty epic.” Agnello has worked on classic albums by Dinosaur Jr., Redd Kross, Sonic Youth, and one of my all-time favourite albums, The Amps’ Pacer, so dude certainly knows his shit!

One important note about Peck: his day job is teaching English to grade 11 and 12 students at Cobequid Educational Centre in Truro, Nova Scotia. Not only does he help shape the minds of his students, he also helps shape their tastes in music by sharing his favourites and playing in a school band with them. It’s a shame FX already has a show called English Teacher because I would totally watch a show about a shoegazing teacher who plays MBV covers in a band with his students!

You’re a high school teacher. Have you noticed any students at school expressing an interest in music you like? Do you ever chat with students about music?

Oh yeah, big time. When I was their age, there were about seven bands you could listen to, it was very rigid, like Nirvana and bands like Nirvana. But kids today are wide open. They have no sense of irony or guilty pleasures; they like everything. I’ve got a Loveless poster in my classroom and kids come in and know what that is and get really excited about it. Eric's Trip is big too. Some of my kids are obsessed with Eric's Trip and Elevator To Hell, which is cool. And they like my band a little bit too. So yeah, kids are definitely tuned into the sort of the music I like to draw from as well. I mean, there's also some of the hyperpop stuff, like the really terminally online stuff that I don't understand. At school I'll put together a band with students just for events like The Relay For Life, which is a cancer fundraiser thing we do. It's a big 24-hour thing at our school, and we put a band together. Last year our songs were “Only Shallow” by My Bloody Valentine and “Listen” by Eric's Trip, stuff I would have been listening to 30 years ago.

I've been producing some young bands from my area and it gets really heartening to hear them say, “We record our own songs the way we like them to sound.” Brooklyn Vegan called us a veteran band recently, which is very odd to see, but it's weird being on the other side of that, stewarding some of that stuff too.

You mentioned that some of them like My Bloody Valentine. So many younger people are crazy for shoegaze and they’re discovering these bands on TikTok that we discovered in magazines and on MuchMusic. Do your students talk to you about finding this music via TikTok?

Yeah, definitely. I mean it’s not shoegaze, but I remember when “Harness Your Hopes” by Pavement became this big TikTok thing, and kids were asking me to hear it at lunch. I just have kids in my classroom who want to listen to music most lunch hours. But it was like, how is this Pavement B-side a thing that all these kids know about? But I think it's exciting that there are these avenues for kids. Because like you said, we were raised on finding new music from magazines or MuchMusic. Message boards and forums were a big deal for me when I was like really getting to music, after I left home and went to university.

I don't know TikTok as a sort of cultural force. I don't really try to make TikToks, but my students will sometimes say I did a good job or something was a good attempt or whatever, but I know I didn't quite get it right. But I love the idea that music can be rediscovered the way it is on TikTok. When you're in a band like ours, like you said, in our third decade, and we’ve had some peaks of success along the way, it does give you hope that maybe someone will stumble across a video of ours at some point. That's a nice thing about this new era that we're in.

I’ve noticed there is quite a supportive shoegaze community both online and between bands. Has Kestrels explored that at all?

Not really. I mean there was a time when we were on Sonic Unyon with Ringo Deathstarr, so we were kind of in that world. We toured with them a couple times, like these weekend warrior-type tours and played some shows with them. It was awesome.

I'm sure you're familiar with Canada's history of shoegaze, which includes earlier bands like SIANspheric, Mean Red Spiders, southpacific, A Northern Chorus, Readymade, Beliefs, No Joy, and more recently, Bodywash, Zoon, The Neverminds, Otsyuda and Bliss Fields. Any theories as to why it's so overlooked despite there being some great music made in this country?

One of modern life's great mysteries, to be sure. It feels like there's an assumed provincial nature to Canadian music that can serve to delegitimize it in critical circles, resulting in a "pretty good for Canada!" attitude that kind of hangs over everything. It's a real drag and it's only getting worse as touring becomes more challenging and outlets keep dying off. I suppose there's an inherent romanticism around geography, too - any band from Seattle or Brooklyn or London has the benefit of their location's collective history, whether it's advancing a tradition or responding to it. Ahh well! Think of how much those first pressings are going to be worth when people wise up.

Better Wonder is the fifth Kestrels album. Would you say it’s getting any easier or is it still as hard as ever to put out a new record?

I don't know. it's a good question. In terms of infrastructure we have a super supportive label in Darla, who's been doing this for a long time and has that baseline level of support. They are not super concerned about things like SEO or like conversion rates on clicks on advertisements or that kind of shit. That stuff is like chasing something you never really can beat. They have realistic expectations, which is helpful for us, but they also offer that infrastructure.

Our publicist Laurie [Kearney] is awesome. She's got some cool stuff for us but it's hard to quantify any of it anymore. The goal for me every time is to make a better record than the last time and try to always work with better people. I found that's been easier. I’m more confident in songwriting and happy to reach out to John Agnello or Greg Calbi or whoever and work with my heroes in terms of the marketplace. Maybe it's just the veteran part of me but I'm just so thrilled that I still get to make records and it still feels vital.

You’re the biggest Ash fan I know. Is it fair to say that “Nightlife” is the most Ash-sounding Kestrels song?

Ha, I'm wearing my Ash T-shirt now for this interview. I love those early Ash records, and one of the sounds that I felt they really mastered was combining white noise fuzz with melody and putting it on top of a rhythm track that feels like it's barreling forward, out of control. Both 1977 and Nu-Clear Sounds aren't wildly removed from shoegaze in places, particularly in the guitars and the washiness of the mix. "Nightlife" was me channeling that sound. But Tim [Wheeler] gave me this huge, old ‘70s filter pedal that he used on 1977 and I guess on Nu-Clear Sounds too. It has this big washy sound that you probably hear on a song like “Innocent Smile.” It’s a big triangle looking thing that you kind of move up and down; you slide this roller thing back and forth. It has such a unique and amazing sound. Tim was using that a lot on the tour and you can hear it on the “Does Your Mother Know” from the BBC session. We were at the same wedding years ago, and Tim was like, “You can just have this pedal.” I was so psyched, but I had to take it to a bunch of techs and no one could figure out what was wrong with it. It was a Bob Moog design and needed parts. But I worked with my new engineer buddy just outside of Halifax and he got it working somehow, so it's on almost every song on the record because it's has such a satisfying sound. Kurt [Heasley] from Lilys used it too and it has a real Swervedriver sound.

The Ash stuff is so deep. I went to see them for their 30^th anniversary in Belfast a couple years ago, around the time I had been writing this record. Maybe it was already done, but I had been listening to a lot of Ash because they’re my favourite band of all time, obviously. “Nightlife” is one of those songs where there are some notes out of key in the verses of that song because it's a pretty heavy song with a pretty heavy subject matter, honestly. The chorus is still super melodic and turbo-charged with the guitar all the way up, kind of like on 1977. It's just a sound I never, ever got tired of. It was also used by Rush!

The press release for Better Wonder says you scrapped a solo album. I had a chat with Carl Newman a few years ago, and he said he could easily put out a new AC Newman album if he wanted to. But he wouldn’t sell as many copies of a solo album than he would a New Pornographers album. What stopped you?

So I made a solo record [2014’s Melancholy and the Archive] and it came out on a cool, little indie label called Saint Marie Records, and they do a lot of shoegaze and dream pop stuff. I had emailed every shoegaze label I could find saying I have this record that was mixed by Elliott [Frazier] from Ringo Deathstarr and mastered by Bob Weston. It was a good record and I enjoyed making it, so I was going to do a second record and try to have two bands at the same time. We actually finished tracking it completely, so it was like me kind of writing everything and producing everything, and I had a couple guys that played on the record for me. But then we got to the mixing stage and it just sort of fell apart, and there was some weird shit that happened with people I was working with. So it just had a bad vibe. But also Kestrels stuff continued to build and build and build, so it definitely made sense to take the best songs from that record and re-record them with with my new band, to give them the best shot to be heard. Stephen Malkmus said in some interview that everyone's a brand or whatever, so it’s just branding I guess. I hate to say it but it's true.

One thing I like about Kestrels that I find not a lot of shoegaze bands do is throw out a ripping guitar solo. I know guys like Tim Wheeler, J. Mascis and Billy Corgan are guitar heroes of yours. How important is the guitar solo to Kestrels?

Yeah, I mean that's a good question. It is kind of weird for the genre. The third record, the self-titled record, is a bit more like classic shoegaze in parts and there's like way less guitar shred on that record. There was more of an attempt made to keep things a bit cleaner and tidier and contained, I guess for lack of a better phrase on that record. I find the conventions of genres kind of frustrating. We talked about Ash, and that kind of white noise that’s also super melodic side, which is up tempo a lot of times. A lot of shoegaze, as you know, is mid-tempo or all of it has this vibe, and so I guess with the guitar solo, I have found those to be such powerful moments in my own listening history. It just feels so natural to incorporate those into my own songs.

Sometimes I get a little conscious of it, where it's like, “Oh fuck, here's another guitar solo.” I remember on our last record we did with John Agnello, he mixed two verses of the song “It's a Secret,” and for one of the main guitar solos I said, “No, I don't want it. There are too many guitar solos. Let’s turn it off, let’s mute the one on that song.” And in his New York accent he's like, “Dude, you're fucking crazy!” So yeah, I don't know, I just think solos are cool and I have to please myself, you know? We've played with Dinosaur Jr once and with Ash a couple times, and those are standout moments because they do them too. Honestly, nothing is usually planned, I just improvise a bunch of them and then cut them together.

Darla is releasing your new album. I used to buy a lot of records from that label. They have a pretty impressive history of releasing shoegaze and dream pop (Should, Rumskib, Secret Shine, Sciflyer, Sway). How did you connect with them?

So, as you know I have a label called Noyes Records and I was trying to get distribution in the States, working with this like shoestring style with a guy who owned a Discogs store basically. They actually sold quite a few records, but I had signed with Saint Marie for that solo record, so I got in touch with James [Agren] at Darla and they just distributed some stuff for me for my label. Then when we finished Dream or Don't Dream it was weird because I didn't really have a band anymore. But I was like, “I'll just send it to him and maybe he'll like it.” Because it'd be cool to have someone else's credit card maxed out for a change. James emailed me and said, “I actually enjoyed listening to this.” I imagine he gets like hundreds of submissions because he worked for DGC in the early ‘90s. He’s an interesting guy to talk to and so supportive and very California in his way.

You did the lord’s work and reissued SIANspheric’s second album, There's Always Someplace You'd Rather Be, a couple of years ago. How do you decide on what to release through Noyes? reissues?

I was really busy in the 2000s and the 2010, I was putting out a lot the Halifax stuff, because there was more of a scene happening here at that time, and it seemed like vinyl was palatable as sort of a medium at that time. But I did a North of America reissue and it sold like hotcakes and I did a Holy Shroud reissue, and that record also sold. It's easier to market reissues, honestly, especially for stuff that's never been on vinyl. Sonic Unyon used to distribute my label way back in the day, and Ryan Ferguson, who I know you know too, gave me a copy of that SIANspheric record while I was just on a road trip by myself driving to Philly maybe, to pick up my girlfriend at the time. So I put that record on, and it was just fucking amazing. I think it's the best record of theirs, honestly. Just putting it on in my shitty like Honda Civic, and that opening two minutes of just screeching, it was just so cool.

That band is full of such good guys and they have been so supportive. But Sean [Ramsay] talked to me about putting up that record like ten years ago. That was the first conversation we had about it. It just didn't make sense until recently, but I've had some few emails about putting up some of their other records, like The Sound of the Colour of the Sun and I'm definitely interested. But I don't have anything lined up right now because I'm releasing our record in Canada, just for the distribution part of things. I put out a couple cool records last year, and put out my girlfriend's records. Whenever something cool comes along it's nice to have the resources make it happen.

Finally, who are the cute pups in your press photos? And are they good doggies?

Nattie and Stella - two INCREDIBLY GOOD GIRLS!