Purveyors of: Gritty garage rock, art-rock, singer/songwriter and everything in between — all with a pinch of country soul.
File Next To: Pavement, Big Star, Sonic Youth, Velvet Underground, Bob Dylan
Playing: WL 611 a.k.a. “Wavelength’s Endless Summer,” Saturday, August 16 at the Vintage & Flea Market (1251 Dundas St. W)

Steve Shiffman & The Land Of No is a NYC-based band fronted by Canadian-born Shiffman, and featuring Dave Hollinghurst as well as ex-members of New York's Holy Ghost and the Figgs. While they have been recording material since 2003 and already have one full length album to their name, their self-recorded second album Mon Dieu has been causing a buzz. Featuring twangy guitars and heartfelt vocals, the band has painted all sorts of scenes of melancholy and heart-break, with every song skillfully crafted and unique in its own right.

Your new album was recorded independently, how was that process compared recording your previous album?

We've always had a large input into the recording process — we've always produced ourselves. For our first record, we recorded all the overdubs ourselves, and did a lot of work on getting things ready for mixing. For this record we were even more involved, recording and mixing the record ourselves. Our guitar player Dave is an engineer, and we basically have a studio now in our rehearsal space. The only thing we outsourced was the mastering. It was a lengthy and exhausting process, but a cool and ultimately very rewarding one. At some point we'll want to get outside collaborator/opinions again, but I'm not sure if we're there yet.

It seems that press coverage of your material tends to compare your music to basically every alternative band out there, is there any particular similarities to bands you see yourself?

To be honest, I don't think we sound too much like any other band out there right now, which is probably a good thing, although we certainly have our touchstones like anyone else.

You originally started out in the Toronto scene in 4-Star Movie. Do you notice a lot of difference between the two scenes?

Lately it's been a rare thing that I get out to shows or whatever. One big difference would be the real estate in NYC, which keeps going up and up, so a lot of places to play have either gone away or moved. So you get these pockets of things in Brooklyn or Jersey — outside of Manhattan. As far as I know, Toronto really hasn't had to deal with that to the same degree, but I could be completely wrong about that.

How do your songs start? Do you tend to come up with some lyrical ideas and then try to work riffs around it, or do you do it another way?

Sometimes a song title will inspire something, sometimes it's a musical phrase that will inspire a title or lyrical idea. I like to think of our songs as little pop songs with some little thing having gone wrong, sometimes very wrong. But at their heart, they're pop songs.

I saw PAWS play in Toronto the other month and their live show was far more punk than their past studio efforts (not that that’s ever a bad thing). Do you find that your live shows differ from your studio recordings much?

Probably, but from my perspective they seem similar — you play the song and it's usually the way you played it when you recorded it. But often you come up with some neat stuff that you throw on the record. But that's OK — I never understood the mentality that you couldn't play something live if you couldn't recreate it exactly how it is on the record. That's the fun part of it, you know?

Your group recorded this LP as a 4 different EP instalments. Did you like recording this way, and do you think you would like to approach future albums like this?

Because we were recording as we were going, we thought it would be fun to finish 3-4 songs in a batch, whip 'em into shape, and then have these parties to celebrate. It was basically an excuse to have parties. But I think we're done with that concept — too much work! Everyone says you shouldn't release albums nowadays, but we all seem to have
our heads screwed on that way.

Steve Shiffman & The Land Of No play “Wavelength’s Endless Summer” on Saturday, August 16 at the Vintage & Flea Market (1251 Dundas Street West at Dovercourt).

— Interview by Kristian Johnson

Photo credit Chris Lee