At Home With Psycho Mad Sally
Written by Jason Daniel Baker
Sunday, 27 February 2011 05:00
Andrei Sin is one of the nicer guys I’ve met on the Toronto indie rock scene. There are plenty of great people on the scene but out of all of them he’s a prince. I wouldn’t mention it in an article for this zine if he didn’t rock and rock he does. I can safely say I’ve heard few electric guitar licks that sound more deceptively natural and capture the kind of raw power of an ubridled punk-metal-alternative fusion.
Whether he was playing in C.J. Sleez’s band or Cyanide For Cindy or his new outfit – the deliciously avant garde Psycho Mad Sally – he has always made himself available to chat about his efforts with his characteristic Carpathian nobility and modesty.
The Romanian-born axeman has himself a smoldering sound matched with vocalist Sasha Nevskaya. If they’re going for something unique I’d say they found it though with these two it is hard to imagine them doing anything that might sound derivative or readily definable.
I could tell you that I never had an easier interview but no band ever invited me to where they live and work before. There is a kind of international feel to the experience which makes some sense. Though I’m Canadian I’m writing for a Welsh rock zine and interviewing a Romanian guitar-player and a Russian singer.
Winding my way through a part of Toronto noted for its exotic restaurants yet also notorious for its crime and strip clubs I find a secret haven upstairs from a musty thrift shop. You might guess that there isn’t much to see upstairs from what the ground floor looks like but appearances are deceiving. I guess what I expected was a dirty matress on the floor, stacked milk crates as a
shelving unit and old barstools as chairs.
Andrei had invited me over to talk about what he has been up to lately and we sit down at a coffee table with a couple of brews around four o’clock one afternoon in their kitchen. This guy is so laid back it is never too late or too early for anything. I’ve met him exactly twice yet he is okay with having me over there, an invitation few other musicians have extended I suspect because their respective living arrangements are not merely less cozy but are in fact more obviously near the poverty line if not beneath it.
Sasha Nevskaya, the band’s charismatic vocalist, ambles into the kitchen barefoot, in tights and a halter top. It is -10 Celsius outside but the tastefully decorated loft apartment they share together is much better heated than some places downtown because they picked up two ancient space-heaters from the street. They aren’t wealthy but have been smart with what little money they and have their own rehearsal space there which doubles as a home studio. It has seen a lot of action as they have continually had to try out drummers and bassists.
Though they have been gigging constantly for the past few months there have been line-up changes due to unforeseen circumstances. “We’ve had four bass players and four drummers since July (2010), and we’re on our third violinist.”
Sasha talks nonchalantly while setting out food for their two cats. I learn that she is a published poet in her native Russia. She settles in comfortably on a bench nearby and lights up a cigarette having left the playful cats to chow down. “The first time I tried to sing I had to get Andrei to go in another room” confesses the vocalist now known for her confident and flamboyant stage
manner. Sasha nibbles on her lower lip pensively while flicking her cigarette before she and Andrei go over mentioning the names of each musician.
Having befriended Andrei following one of her spoken word performances at the Drake Hotel, it was Sasha’s idea to work with Andrei in hopes that he might take her well-known spoken word performances and formulate a rock repertoire around her verse. But she had only intitially wanted to do spoken word set against the music they were writing and Andrei insisted she learn to sing her words instead.
“I don’t really care for names or titles. I’m just in a band and I play guitar” muses Andrei when I ask if he considers himself the musical director of the project. He is not big on comparisons to other acts either. But it is incumbent on him to translate the bands vision for the musicians that play with them.
In the end I stayed longer than I had intended and the conversation went off in a lot of different directions. They made sure I got a copy of their CD and a folio of some of Ms. Nevskaya’s raunchy poetry. I’ll admit to reading the folio before I listened to the CD.
Their sound, which at first listen struck me as a kind of Siouxsie Sioux meets Motorhead melange, is one wherein the recordings reflect the live show rather than being a live show which reflects the recordings. Their independently produced and released EP features some real revolutionary work including stand outs like ‘Anarchia’ and ‘Mama’s Teachings’ which are the showstoppers in their live show.
It is a sound which never completley fits in with any broad genre. There may be some aspects of a nebulous classification like alternative or even old school hard rock but blended together the result is something so far out there as to go out on the fringe and then several steps beyond it.
http://www.psychomadsally.com/