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Movieland
Then & Now
604 - 2024
Michael Panontin
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Jonathan Simkin, the founder of Vancouver's 604 label, has of late been getting "weirdly sentimental" about the fertile music scene there back in the 90s and 00s. "It's when I first started working in the music business," he writes. "I was just a lawyer then; I didn't even have the label - that wasn’t even something I thought of doing! I just worked with a lot of bands, and a lot of them were really fucking great."
One of those groups was the little-known shoegaze band Movieland, a group that only released a couple of demo cassettes in their time and who are curiously not even listed on Discogs as of this writing. They were founded by singer-guitarist Alan D. Boyd, an Edmontonian who arrived in Vancouver in 1991 by way of Montreal, where he briefly plucked bass strings for those garage-rock legends, the Gruesomes. It didn't take him long to hook up with bassist John Ounpuu and drummer Justin Leigh, with the trio forming Movieland partly out of a collective love of British groups like the Stone Roses and Slowdive.
The guys went into a long-vanished arts hub/recording studio called Downtown Sound and recorded their first four-song cassette. "We were doing long songs, and they were noisy," Boyd recently recalled. "There were a lot of drugs in Vancouver at that time," he admits. "I never really liked weed, but everybody seemed to smoke it; and there was an interest in psychedelics amongst the people that we were all friends with. It definitely informed what we were doing, that cannot be denied."
That lysergic influence is pretty obvious in those early tracks, especially in the languorous opener 'Hello', with Boyd's guitar deftly wending its way in and out of the song, and the energized rumblings of 'Rant', an homage of sorts to the Stooges' more reckless takes on distortion-heavy psychedelia back in the day. Equally interesting is the closing 'Everything', a nine-minute-plus guitarfest that wouldn't seem so out of place on a Spaceman 3 disc.
The three moved into a crumbling house in the city's swanky Shaughnessy neighborhood that they dubbed The Mansion. "The neighbors called the police the day we moved in because they thought we were breaking into the house," Boyd laughed. It was there that the band, with a borrowed Tascam eight-track at their disposal, recorded a second set of tracks for another demo. Here, songs like 'I Relate' and 'Cake' betray a more mature sound - terser, more textured and perfectly suited to a seven-inch single, something that Movieland sadly never got around to issuing.
All the aforementioned tracks have now been made available again on the swell demos-and-rarities retrospective, Then & Now, the first release in 604's recently announced archival series, 604 Decades. Simkin's enthusiasm is obvious - "I love that there's all these hidden scenes and stories in this city" - and, luckily for us, he plans to unearth many more lost West Coast nuggets. Stay tuned.
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