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Martha and the Muffins


Martha and the Muffins - This Is the Ice Age

This Is the Ice Age
Dindisc - 1981


Michael Panontin
Martha and the Muffins were formed around Toronto's Ontario College of Art and the nearby Queen West neighbourhood in what would become the proverbial punk cliche of the late seventies. It was there that bored art students Mark Gane and David Millar, along with Martha Johnson and Carl Finkle, toyed with instruments they could barely play. In a scramble to find a name for their first gig at the annual OCA Halloween party, they settled on the Muffins, ostensibly to counter the violent monikers of most punk groups at the time. The name Martha was added to it almost as an afterthought.

By early 1978, the first incarnation of Martha and the Muffins was beginning to take shape, with Mark's brother Tim added at the drum kit and fellow OCA student Andy Haas on saxophone. But perhaps the most important change was the replacement of Millar on guitar with keyboardist and singer Martha Ladly (with Millar sticking around to work the board at their live gigs). The six would spend the better part of the year honing their chops at bars like the Beverley on the aforementioned Queen Street.

The first shafts of limelight began to peek through in June of that year when a demo tape sent to Interview magazine scribe Glenn O'Brien landed them a slot at the venerable Hurrah club in New York. By March 1979, Martha and the Muffins had inked an offer with Virgin subsidiary Dindisc and their second seven-incher, the buoyant ode to white-collar angst, 'Echo Beach', garnered international acclaim the following year.

After struggling with major label meddling and a sophomore slump with 1980's Trance and Dance, the band went through a bit of a line-up shuffle. Finkle and Ladly left to be replaced by new bassist Jocelyne Lanois. And as luck would have it, she had a prodigious sibling, the budding producer Daniel Lanois, who was fleshing out his own career down the QEW highway in Hamilton. The band pressed Virgin to use the unknown producer, with the label finally acquiescing and giving them free reign creatively, though with a substantial budget cut. The resultant wax, the shimmering This Is the Ice Age, would prove to be their high-water mark.

At once lush and minimal, This Is the Ice Age tackles the banalities and emptiness of the 1980s at a time when Reagan-era capitalism was just starting to rev up. Witness the cover photo that coolly captures the two Torontos, one of towering erections of glass and steel and the other of creaky late Victorian humility. The opener 'Swimming', with its tense, angular guitar and weighty percussion, dovetails into the infectious single 'Women Around the World at Work', which sort of picks up where 'Echo Beach' left off. The quirky antics on 'You Sold the Cottage' poke fun at the futile pursuits of the middle classes up in cottage country north of Toronto (though allusions to horseflies and bloodsuckers will no doubt be lost on those unfamiliar with the annoying pestilence up in the wilds of Canada). Lanois' production is flawless throughout, beefing up pop tracks like 'Women..' with almost strident guitar, while leaving the quieter ones, like the vaguely Eno-esque textures on 'Boy Without Filters', clean and spacious.

After a successful 1983 tour that saw the band play to 10,000 fans at Toronto's Ontario Place, Gane and Johnson pared down Martha and the Muffins to go it alone as the abridged M + M. The two would go on to fill dancefloors on both sides of the border with the topical 'Black Stations / White Stations'. Posterity, though, would ultimately forget that track, reserving a place instead for the timeless 'Echo Beach' and the chilly new wave of This Is the Ice Age.

         


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