Arrivals and Departures

Equipped with a killer moniker, Graham Van Pelt made a name for himself in Montreal with the danceable riot act Think About Life. When it’s suggested that the sunshine-dappled pop of his Miracle Fortress project is a marked departure from his other band, Van Pelt readily concurs. “I’m all departures,” he states. In charting the course to the debut album Five Roses, he recounts, “At the very beginning, I was doing noise instrumentals. Then I started doing really washy synth pop. Then it gradually transformed into ‘60s- and ‘70s-informed indie rock.”

Last winter, multi-instrumentalist Van Pelt holed himself up in his Friendship Cove studio/home and undertook two months of experimental mining for “engineering accidents.” “I messed around with sounds, plugging things into different effects, feeding things back and generally working in a very improvisational way,” he recalls. “The songs kind of happened at the same time. I’d randomly land on sounds, turn them into chords and then turn those into structures.”

Rarely more than a few feet away from his recording equipment, the songwriter’s self-imposed house arrest resulted in almost 30 completed songs and a score of abandoned ideas. The 12 tracks included on Five Roses supply the kind of palpitating pop that sends serotonin levels surging. “Maybe Lately” suggests what could have been if Brian Wilson had kept it together long enough to work with Brian Eno. “Next Train” might just be the most wistful song to ever mention Wisconsin. The romantic psychedelia of “Hold Your Secrets to Your Heart” and “This Thing About You” evidence a surreal sentimentality that saturates the record.

Van Pelt seems bemused by the music press’ persistent efforts to label Five Roses a “summer album.” “It’s weird,” he says. “When I think of summer music now, I don’t really think of The Beach Boys. I think of dance music and R&B and R. Kelly.”

However, he does concede shelving his “contemporary music” and revisiting his “sunshine pop” records during recording. “I was really trying to get in the frame of mind of an engineer from 1972,” he says. “You know, rather than having it turn into a more modern sounding production with big drums.” That said, he’s recently drafted Jesse Stein, Jordan Robson-Cramer and Adam Waito to fill out the live Miracle Fortress sound. The result? “A modern sounding band with big drums,” he laughs.

Having previously cited Think About Life’s “duty to the dance floor,” Van Pelt is quick to reply when asked where Miracle Fortress’s allegiances lie. “Duty free,” he offers. “With Miracle Fortress, I feel like it can be a catch-all.” Having already guided this undertaking through various incarnations, he now sees little point in tethering it to a single ideal or methodology. “Projects I really admire allow for a very free-form atmosphere,” he continues. “Like Jim O’Rourke or Brian Eno or John Cale… They put the same name on everything but, in the end, you can’t really count on getting any specific kind of album out of them at any given time. I’d really like to do things that way without alienating every single fan I’ve earned.”

Miracle Fortress appears with Montag at Pat’s Pub on Friday, June 29.