Hot Panda

If it wasn’t for the billboard for an Asian restaurant, the band Hot Panda might not exist. Okay, maybe that’s alittle bit of a stretch, but there’s no doubt that if it wasn’t for Panda Hut Express (whose online menu includes szechuan beef and chow mein with oyster sauce), the Edmonton pop quartet would certainly not have their story-provoking band name. As the band’s singer and guitarist Chris Connelly explains, “We had a show booked and we didn’t have a name. We were driving to the gig and we saw a billboard for Panda Hut Express – a really shitty Chinese, fast-food place. We started joking around that they had the pandas in the back, and when you ordered, they’d herd them out.” Eventually they jokingly agreed on the name Hot Panda, Connelly adding that the name has several different connotations, including a “sexy panda or a panda on fire”. “It was either that or Starving Panda,” laughs the singer. The band – who consists of Connelly, Heath Parsons on guitar, keyboards and accordion, bassist Keith Olsen and drummer Maghan Campbell – have only been together for three years, but in that time they’ve managed to get signed to Canada-based independent label Mint Records (home to the likes of The New Pornographers and Immaculate Machine), record a solid debut album entitled Volcano…Bloody Volcano, and play countless shows across Canada, the United States and open up for Detroit’s Von Bondies on the band’s European tour. Not bad for a group who Connelly says, “never really sat around and talked about what kind of band we were going to be.” Recently I got the chance to speak to Connelly on the phone about the band’s whirlwind past year and a half, the day after Hot Panda played an opening night party for Edmonton arts festival NEXT. He was kind enough to speak to me on everything from the difficulties of being a band from Alberta to life on the road to.

“We’ve been back for three weeks. It’s good to be home and working on new material,” says Connelly, with an un-missable sense of relief in his voice. He tells me that now that the band is finally home, they are relishing the chance to take a breather (albeit a quick one) from their extensive past few months of touring, visit friends and family, and digest the recent attention that they’ve received. Following the release of their 2007 EP, Whale Headed Girl, Hot Panda took their show on the road. Since then they’ve toured Canada from coast to coast, visited the Hoover Dam and the UFO museum in Roswell while on tour in the States, which also included a chance meeting with a certain band’s publicist while playing the massive South By Southwest Music Festival in Austin, Texas. “We met the Von Bondies publicist, who said she was a big fan of ours,” says Connelly. A week or two later, Hot Panda got a call from the Von Bondies asking them if the wanted to be openers on the band’s European tour. Despite “not being similar” to the raucous Detroit garage rock headliners, Connelly said that they were generally well-received. “Audiences in Europe are in general more accepting than North Americans,” says Connelly.

So how did a band all the way from “Stabmonton”, also known as Edmonton, Alberta (Connelly, on the city’s dangerous reputation: “I’ve never really had any problems. But we did beat out Winnipeg as “Murder Capital of Canada” and certainly the oil rigs in northern Alberta have attracted a lot of unsavory people, people without a lot of family.”) get signed to British Columbia-based Mint Records? Connelly says a lot of the decision to sign with Mint was based on the label’s longevity and do-it-yourself ethic, from how they distributed their artists’ records, to promoting the bands through diverse means, such as the quarterly-produced Fresh Breath Of Mint free ‘zine (Alas, I forgot to ask the band about their signature hot sauce, which is made by Denzel’s Gourmet Foods in Enderby, B.C. According to the summer edition of the ‘zine, for a mere seven dollars you can get yourself Volcano…Bloody Volcano Habanero & Pineapple Hot Sauce, which is made from “A complex blend of smoked and fresh habaneros, and an absolutely obscene amount of roasted garlic with pineapple to round out the flavour!” – how’s that for cross-marketing?). “They are a really good label, and have been doing this since 1991. You see all these young Canadian labels that have been around for five years…” The singer hesitates before continuing, “How long before they decide that there’s no money in this business and fold.” As for the mostly off-the-map Albertan music scene (though the recent national success of Edmonton bands such as Shout Out Out Out Out, Corb Lund, Faunts, etc. have made great strides in making a strong case a regional scene that rivals Montreal and Toronto), Connelly admits without a trace of irony or sarcasm, “Edmonton’s kind of isolated. Its tough to be a touring band.” He goes on to explain that unlike Toronto’s smaller music scenes-within-the larger music scene – citing artists such as The Bicycles, The Meligrove Band and Laura Barrett – bands in Edmonton have to “hang out with whoever is making music”. “We group together because that’s all we’ve got,” says Connelly.

Hot Panda’s sound is one that defies an easy categorization, but that doesn’t mean people haven’t tried. The quartet has drawn comparisons to everyone from Daniel Johnson to the Talking Heads (featuring uber-producer Brian Eno and David Byrne, the latter who has recently played shows with Grizzly Bear), and critics trying to pin their sound on the genre dartboard have landed on everything from “Brit-pop” to “gypsy folk”. When pressed to describe the band’s music, Connelly tells me, “I think its creative music, art-pop. We’re the type of band that says, ‘Hey, let’s try an opera solo in there” Some of the themes that their latest album’s songs touch on include politics (“It’s Worth Eight Dollars”, with the album’s best lyric: “You don’t care about politics, no NDP, no Tories or the Grits”), facing your fears (“Afraid Of The Weather”) and sexual frustration (the aptly-titled “Sexual Frustration”). The band’s lead single, “Cold Hands/Chapped Lips” – which has been featured on CBC Radio 3 – is an exuberant, infectious number, complete with gang vocals, a call-and-response chorus, and a honest-to-goodness harmonica intro. On the song, Connelly sings, “Saw a girl I used to know, she’s got a job, that’s so adult”, and after listening to Volcano…Bloody Volcano several times, you’ll begin to see that the album is more like the singer’s own collection of portraits of “people that I hardly recognize now”. “A lot of the album was personal,” he says, “About being in your twenties and seeing people growing up and heading off into different lives. It’s about trying to age without following a conventional route.” Like being in a band? “Exactly. Its about trying to find your own track or path. Its weird to be talking to someone that just graduated law school and we’ll be in Thunder Bay sleeping on a stranger’s couch.”

About two weeks later after speaking to Connelly, I finally meet up with the band in-person. Its about three or is that four in the morning on the last day of NXNE, and my friend and I are in someone’s tiny cramped basement with about fifty complete strangers (mostly members of local bands, publicists and promoters). All of those in attendance are in varying levels of sobriety, thanks to free-flowing $3 Steamwhistles, provided from a fridge by our gracious hostess (who introduces herself as Juliann). On the more intoxicated end of the spectrum are the band themselves, who by the time they take to the “stage” (which consists of walls and a ceiling lined with blankets, a lamp and a random assortment of junk pushed into the far corner, and a tangle of instruments, amps and wires, which takes the quartet a good fifteen minutes to find the proper outlets for), are more like Soused Panda than Hot Panda. “This might be the first and last time you’ll see us play this drunk,” jokes keyboardist Parsons. But nevertheless, the band launch into a four song set with aplomb, including a stellar (all conditions considered) rendition of “Cold Hands/Chapped Lips”. For those fortunate enough to be in the know about this secret house after-party, this is the perfect ending to this year’s NXNE. After four straight days and nights of planning shows, attending shows, covering shows and playing shows (Hot Panda came here straight from playing a CBC Radio 3 showcase at The Horseshoe Tavern with Broken Social Scene’s Jason Collett and Montreal’s The Lovely Feathers several hours earlier), everyone is dog-tired, but for a few hours, all that is forgotten. Connelly, casually dressed in a grey hoodie and a black tee with a picture of a Canadian goose in red, looks far younger than the maturity in his lyrics might suggest. When he sings, his face breaks out into a smile – its the smile of a man who has found what he loves doing and is enjoying every minute of the ride. And just for that brief half hour, that dimly lit basement sure feels a whole lot brighter.

For more Hot Panda,
MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/hotttpanda