Get FB conversations with Simon Talbot, Tony, Guy Gaffney, Janie De Jeu, Victor Berger, will help with dates
My interest in playing metalcore goes back to 2004 and took a small peek in 2008 with Human Infect. But it wasn’t until I made some real contacts that I could start to focus on something serious. I had gone to a show in the late summer/early fall of 2009 to see The Zyphoid Process (later changed name to Great White North). There I met Simon Talbot, with whom I discussed right away the possibility of starting a band, or two, together. One was to be a 90’s metalcore influenced band, the other a 90’s emo influenced band. Neither materialized.
I was never too familiar with the local hardcore scene, and so it took me a long time to meet more people. Even though I was writing a blog on Canadian Hardcore, How Can They Intend To Heal?, it kept my real-life connections dry. One of the co-bloggers on HCTITH was Ian Hart, of the band Envision, and on March 28th 2010, a Sunday, Envision was playing a show in Montreal, to which I was invited. A local band was playing that evening, Look Beyond. While talking with the guitarist, Karl St-Pierre, whom I had actually ran into the metro a few months prior, he told me that their drummer was a big fan of Morning Again. That’s how I met Antoine Trudel (aka Tony Frenchman). We right away connected on early 90’s metalcore and the South Florida scene and decided we should jam some of the stuff sometime.
meanwhile french guy Arnaud and I exchanged emails about jamming. He was supposed to bring in a bassist named Eric. But that stalled and he eventually proved unreliable.
It took until mid/late-December 2010 for us to jam for the first time. He had a jam space at Cite 2000 where all the local metal bands jammed. He was splitting a jam space with a bunch of his other bands, so we had to meet at 9pm on a week day to have a free spot in the room. Our very first jam (with him on drums and me on guitar) consisted of covering Morning Again songs “Murder You Call War”, “Martyr” and “God Framed Me”. Later on we added “America On Line”, “Stun the Evolution” and “Noteworthy Instruction” to our jams. We tried to do Culture’s “Deforestation”, Canon’s “The Solution”, Earthmover’s “A Commitment to Murder” and Slugfest’s “Matron of Sedition” but they never became regulars. One day after playing “Martyr”, this guy from a nearby jam space knocked on our door to tell us that we were really fucking good and that he dug what we were playing. It was really awesome to hear.
After a month, we were down to only doing “Martyr”, “America On Line” and “Stun the Evolution”. We considered becoming a cover band playing South Florida songs only. But one day after jamming those songs a few times, I started jamming a really cool riff which would become our first song. The song took about two jams to have its basic structure. It was pretty much me coming up with cool riffs and repeating them until we found a drum rhythm that matched. Occasionally Tony would have a guitar riff in mind that he would want me to add in, but half of them I didn’t use because I thought it sounded too much like his other band Progression. I had a much more sludgy approach to my writing. I wanted us to sound like Lone Wolf, Kingdom of Sorrow or the earlier days of Morning Again when they sounded slightly more doom. I wanted to be in the category of “Sludgecore”.
Tony started bringing me out to shows and it made me realize how much I fucking hated the local hardcore scene. Everything sounded the same, and everyone was a dickhead. Everyone was always preaching their beliefs and trying to act like they knew more than the guy next to them. I wanted no part it. From then on I decided that our vocalist would have to be violent during the set and not be able to talk at all between songs. It also made sense as I was already planning to do a concept album with no breaks between the songs and I would have played it the same live. I didn’t want to be a “hardcore band”. I wanted us to be a “metal band” with hardcore influences.
Guy played in
A Second Burning (vocals)
David’s Victory (vocals)
Strengthen What Remains (bass)
Victim of Reality (vocals)
The Virgin Birth (vocals)
Zero Chill (vocals)
Last Excuse (backup vocals)
Frontflip (guest vocals)
At one of these shows, on March 20th 2011 at Death Church, Tony introduced me to Guy Gaffney who was a bass player and was meant to be the bassist in Tony’s other band Look Beyond. Guy was from Florida so we immediately hit it off on similar taste of hardcore and he KNEW exactly what I was talking about. But as he was only in Montreal since a short while, he didn’t have his own equipment and had to borrow a bass from Karl St-Pierre (of Look Beyond) and therefore didn’t actually jam with us for another month. When we finally got him to come in and check us out he humbly mentioned that he wasn’t good enough on bass to play this stuff but would love to be our vocalist. We were also looking for a vocalist so we agreed. Guy lived right by the jam space so we’d always meet up at his place and chill with his girlfriend and him before hitting up practice. Guy also knew a bassist in the south shore who was looking for a band, so everything was looking prosperous at that time.
Guy also showed us a band called Advent which he thought we sounded similar to (minus the math-metal parts). Around this time I also decided to tune my guitar differently. We initially played in Drop D for all the 90’s metalcore stuff but I wanted Drop C# because it was slightly doom-ier but not quite the Drop C sound that every band had from the 2000’s. By this time we had written two full songs that reached about ten minutes. We needed a bassist and I wanted to play some shows that summer. Tony suggested his girlfriend (they were exs by then but he had kept it a secret) Janie De Jeu could do it and that I should jam with her. She came over at my place one weekend and I showed her the songs we had written, but she also didn’t feel she could play this type of stuff. Instead we ended up becoming really close friend and she let out all her feelings about Tony dumping her. I ended up seeing more of her during that summer than the band itself. My girlfriend Laura was away the whole summer and I think she even became jealous that I hung out with Janie so often. I started also hanging out with Guy and his girlfriend quite a bit, and we all got a lot closer during the summer, but Tony always kept a distance. At times he would be unreachable, never picking up his phone and didn’t even have a voicemail. Sometimes he didn’t let us know until five minutes to nine that he wasn’t going to come to practice. Every time we got pissed off, there was something to try to keep us going, such as getting us cards to get in the jam space.
I was the only person to suggest a name for the band. The first name that I came up with was “The Last Great Torch Song”, a title that I had hoped to use for a Soufferance album, but Tony didn’t like it. I then suggested “Redpath Murder” or “The Redpath Murder”, named after my obsession with the Redpath family and it’s deeply rooted Montreal history, but Tony was offended by the word “murder” in the title. He thought that our band name should be a single word, something that appalled me because I was well-aware of the difficulty that would make it for people to find us on Google. Finally, Jeremy Roux suggested “Murder on Redpath”, as he was equally obsessed with the Redpath family, and since that was always my favourite name that we could come with, I decided to name the band that way.
During that summer we also wanted to expand to a second guitarist so I invited Simon Talbot to come check us out, and even if he really liked what we had, he didn’t have time to commit to a band because of school and work. We really had a lot of trouble finding more musicians and Guy wasn’t writing lyrics. When he finally got around to it, they were Christian lyrics, and I wanted no part of that. At one point one of the bands sharing our jam space left, and we were stuck with no double drum bass pedal and no china hat so our rhythm section sounded completely different. I hated that and I didn’t like the direction it was going. I wanted our drums to sound like Neurosis.
On one of our last jams on August 18th 2011, Guy brought along one of his friend who was visiting from Georgia. Eric Salgado took a few pictures of our jam that night, but for some reason none of me got kept. Eric had just got dumped as well and I remember us talking about it quite a bit. By this time we had a third song in development but I really didn’t like it. Half were riffs that I came up with and Tony wanted to use and the other half were riffs suggested by him. Some of the stuff sounded like A Death for Every Sin (who I fucking hate) and others like Poison the Well (which was too dissonant) so I really wanted them out and even Janie thought it wasn’t going in the right direction. It was becoming apparent that I had little motivation left in the band, and the next few jams were all put off by each of us canceling each time. In a hope to attempt to get it going again, we agreed to start paying rent and jam twice a week, once on Tuesday and once on Thursday in order for us to have eight meetings a month and still have a minimum of five if each of us canceled only once. But the very next jam, Tony canceled and it pissed me of way too much to put any effort into so Guy and I quit.
I was at Guy’s place when it all happened and Tony was not answering our phone calls that day. He finally texted us that he wasn’t going to make it.
Guy also told me that he was cancelling practices with us to play with another band; he was two-timing us. Was it Look Beyond that he was trying to regroup?
Tony attempted to call us repeatedly for the next two days but we completely ignored him.
November 14th 2011 I said this to Simon Talbot:
une fois sur 2 il cancellait la journee meme
et la derniere fois il nous a choker pour faire une repete d’un de cest ancien groupe de musique qui se regroupais la meme soiree dans notre local
quand jai apris ca jai dit cest finit
Twice in 2012 and twice in 2013 I put my pride aside and attempted to contact him again and get a jam going, but this time he ignored me. Either way, I hadn’t picked up my guitar in such a long time that I shouldn’t have even considered myself a guitarist anymore.
It was in December of 2013 that I saw an add on Kijiji from a drummer looking for a sludge metal band. I sent him the Lantern’s Awake demos I had been working on since 2010 and he liked it! Guillaume (aka Duff) and I set up a meeting to jam at this crummy spot in the southern shadows of the Bell Centre on Saturday, December 8th 2013, in late afternoon. Somehow I got his number wrong and the jam didn’t happen but we quickly rescheduled it for Sunday. After trying to play the two post-metal songs written for Lantern’s Awake and finding him more of a thrashy drummer than a technical one, I decided to try playing the Murder on Redpath stuff for him. He liked it even more and we went on to practice the first two songs with his new drumming style. It took me a lot to get used to as he didn’t have the tribal instinct that Tony had, which fitted my style so well, but we managed to make them work. We planned to play again before the end of the year but things stalled with the holidays and it didn’t happen. Then in early January he was sick and by the time he got back in touch with me to jam, I was in a depression and not in the mood to play in a band anymore. On January 18th 2014, I contacted Simon Talbot again to find out if he was available for being in a band, to possibly join Duff and I. Simon was interested in jamming with us, but by then Duff had disappeared and stopped responding to my messages.