VIA PRESS RELEASE | Blow The Fuse release the first three albums from Montreal ’90s rock band Tricky Woo, available digitally and on vinyl due in October. From 1997 to 1999 Tricky Woo released three albums featuring Rock and Roll Part One, The Enemy is Real and Sometimes I Cry, which earned them a JUNO nomination. Described by NME as “a new hope for rock and roll,” the latter would become their defining masterpiece. A documentary about the band is set to be released later this year.
Formed in the mid-90s, Tricky Woo was conceived as part tribute to the pantheon of rock, part conceptual art. Influenced by early rock and roll, British punk, and seminal independent record labels such as Crypt and Estrus Records (on which they ended up releasing a 7” single in 2000), the band were relative lone wolves within Montreal’s tiny garage-rock scene. During that time, Tricky Woo earned a reputation for playing particularly wild shows in unusual locations such as a pizza parlour or Montreal’s legendary porno theatre Cinéma L’amour.
In 1999 with their album Sometimes I Cry, they became college radio darlings hitting the number one position on the Canadian campus and community radio charts that year. Their music was also featured on classic television shows of that decade, such as Dawson’s Creek and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Thanks to their distinctive sound and unique approach to rock and roll, the four piece band led by vocalist-guitarist Andrew Dickson, changed the face of the Canadian rock scene forever and left their mark on a generation of significant bands. DFA1979, Elephant Stone, and Priestess cite them as an influence among others.
Initially released on SSG (the first Vice magazine-affiliated label), the band’s debut LP Rock & Roll Music Part One (1997) is a collection of breathless, rock and roll nuggets, chock full of ear-worm hooks and as close to a pure garage-rock record as the band would ever make. Drawing on inspirations like Chuck Berry, Duane Eddy, The Damned, Buzzcocks, and a pinch of glam via Alice Cooper for good measure, it was a perfect snapshot of Tricky Woo’s early sonic M.O. Back in 1997, the album was available on CD for only a few months, before both the distribution company and label folded, leaving it in limbo. Rock and Roll Music Part One is finally given a proper release, with Andrew Dickson’s (Tricky Woo bandleader/singer) original concept cover art – deemed too “weird” at the time – restored to its rightful place.
Indebted to the MC5, Rocket From The Crypt, The Nazz, Blue Cheer, and Am-Rep’s Lollipop, The Enemy is Real (1998) is a mixture of shattered glass guitar tone and acid tongued sonnets, exuberantly invoking the vision of what Tricky Woo imagined as “future rock and roll.” “We were obsessed with the sonic power of the MC5 and Rocket From The Crypt,” says Adrian Popovich, Tricky Woo’s guitarist. “You can hear us trying to do that but not quite having the skill. Kind of charming and arrogant at the same time.”
Sometimes I Cry remains Tricky Woo’s most influential album to this day. Yielding a “should’ve been a crossover hit” with single “Fly The Orient,” the album marries eyeball-bursting technicolor artwork by frontman Andrew Dickson, with riffs borrowed from Funhouse-era Stooges and the MC5, to far less likely inspirations such as Uriah Heep, AC/DC, and even Aerosmith. Embracing massive riffs, fuzzed-out space echo guitar, bad-vibe lyrics about electric orchards, fields of fire, falling from clouds, this was clearly no longer garage rock or garage punk, but a kind of weird, maximum energy “acid punk” something like Blue Cheer’s Vincebus Eruptum played at 45rpm.
