Organ - A Shot Point-Blank

A brief, lightning-fast trajectory. All within a year. Or almost. In 2006 they were the quintessence of hype. Fortunate and fatal at the same time. Because while everyone, for better or worse, talked about them, memory has largely relegated them to that role alone: yet another fleeting, short-lived phenomenon of indie-rock. Or perhaps worse: yet another new new wave revival to be filed under "too late to matter". That's what many said about them. And yet — in our humble opinion — they were badly mistaken. Because the Organ phenomenon actually deserved far greater consideration. Now that time has passed and the last traces of that fleeting cloud of hype have settled, all that's left is to tell their story and their songs. And to discover that they are, perhaps, one of the most precious fruits produced by the darkwave revival in a decade as restless and neurotic as the 2000s.

Sinking Hearts

The canon of eternal femininity revised and corrected by the artifice of the new millennium. The eternal pulse of rediscovered unease. The shame of a subtle, quiet malaise crystallizes in the cold clarity of Canada. In Vancouver. Being twenty years old and noticing the shadow cast by everything, even the brightest things. Who knows who Ian Curtis would be today, had he escaped the temptation of a mythically premature farewell. Perhaps they arrived to ease the pain of a vulnerable heart sensitive to inner tension, and, with no great expectations, with disarming candor, they succeed.

After a long and stimulating musical paideia devoted to the 80s, the barely-out-of-their-teens Organ, freed from any reverential fear of their masters but grateful for every input received, threw themselves into the indie-rock scene with an EP, Sinking Hearts. It's 2002, and the new wave revival is only just beginning. Yes, "Turn On The Bright Lights" by Interpol has just come out, but it's still impossible to imagine the scale of a phenomenon that would become one of the most significant of the entire decade.

Multi-instrumentalist Katie Sketch (born Katie Richie) has played violin since the age of three and is finally trying to give shape to her favorite sounds. Which are not the ones dominating Canada at the start of the decade, caught up in new post-rock suggestions. Katie, in fact, is a nostalgic soul, obsessed with darkwave sounds she could only hear as a child, but which a friend of her stepfather, producer Ron Obviuous, allowed her to rediscover through mix-tapes of old glories like Ultravox, Roxy Music, Siouxsie & The Banshees, Kate Bush and Nina Hagen.

The most she can do, for now, is help Obviuous manage the audio connections in a studio under construction for Bryan Adams. In the meantime, though, she makes contact with Tara Nelson, the technical assistant who would later record the Organ EPs.

The first embryonic version of the group is an instrumental trio, Full Sketch, in which Katie — also active on percussion — brings in two friends: Sarah Efron (bassist and keyboardist) and Barb "Sketch" Choit (organist, guitarist and bassist). With a musical approach very close to that of the future Organ, in which Efron would remain, while organist Jenny Smyth (Genoa Smith) would replace Choit on keyboards.

After a long process of demos and auditions, the band finally takes shape. With a strong, explicit image, starting with Sketch's lesbian identity and that of other members of the band. A tour supporting the New Pornographers is the perfect occasion to introduce themselves.

The line-up that churns out the Ep Sinking Hearts features Katie Sketch (vocals), Jenny Smyth (organ), Sarah Efron on bass (who would soon leave to pursue a career in journalism, replaced by Ashley Webber), Shelby Stocks (percussion) and Deborah Cohen (guitar). It's Mint Records that puts out the first five tracks credited to Organ, built around nocturnal melodies and spartan arrangements, in which the pulsing bass-organ axis underpins dense guitar embroidery. Only two of these would be left off the tracklist of the debut album ("We've Got To Meet" and "It's Time To Go"), but the gestation of Grab That Gun would prove more complicated than expected, between line-up changes and mixing problems.

Grab That Gun is conceived in Vancouver in 2004 and produced by Kurt Dahle of New Pornographers for the Mint label, with distribution limited to Canada only. But the situation evidently didn't sit quite right with the girls, since two years later the album is re-recorded with Paul Forgues and Todd Simko, perhaps in search of a lost original spleen.

Killer Melodies

Grab That Gun (2006) is an unexpected surprise that rises above the mediocrity of that year's early déjà vu. In Canada, where Organ had already built an underground cult following, the album shoots straight to No. 1 on the indie charts, but the breakthrough also echoes in the United States and Europe, helped along by a fortunate tour.

So feel free to indulge in memories of the three boys imagined by the twisted mind of Robert Smith, the psychedelic sentimentalism of the Smiths/The Room pairing, and a few other names not worth mentioning. Or maybe not, given a few lovely organ flourishes that bring to mind the Sound of the late Adrian Borland, always far too little celebrated relative to their actual greatness.

True to wave's codebook, the target is the emotional system, and everything gets easier once the attack starts from there. "Brother" is the point-blank shot of a revolver ready to go off if wounded to the soul, yet the words, rather than shouted, are lightened by Katie's lean, nervous grace — a figure of remarkable, androgynous, fawn-like beauty, light years away from the artificial glare of certain new icons, perfectly at ease on the opening bass line's circular rises and falls in the style of Joy Division, whose evanescent spectre, Ian Curtis, drifts through, in a light breath, even the gravity of the more composed, slowed-down "There Is Nothing I Can Do". Another marvel — a marvel of dramatic organ marking a singing full of pulsing melancholic chiaroscuro — is "Steven Smith" (a tribute to Steven Patrick Morrissey-Smiths?), trembling with a malaise akin to the Interpol soul's disorientation.

The darkness thickens with "Love, Love, Love", a killer melody that shines in the dark of decadence, and "Basement Band Song", a sinuous syncopation à la Cure with a guitar that, with the dry dynamism of an autumn wind, lifts dry leaves off the pavement, sweeping everything away in the final acceleration of "Memorize The City". The spectre of the eternal Siouxsie looms amid the mists of the splendid "A Sudden Death" (what a terrible self-prophecy, given the band's fate!), marked by a haunting guitar riff and by another sumptuous performance from Katie, remarkably agile at navigating between dreamy tones and catacomb-like gloom with her deep, all-"throat" voice. Morrissey, on the other hand, could comfortably sit back, test the waters, and then give his blessing to the delicate, fragile melancholy of "I Am Not Surprised" and the new-romantic sweetness of "No One Has Ever Locked So Dead", enriched by fleeting but intense glances exchanged between guitar and organ. The closing track, like a mute gaze fixed on things after the emotional storm, ends with a slow, solemn organ touch, in a fully instrumental ghost track.

The lyrics, finally, portray restless adolescences, shut away in the cold of an oppressive, inhospitable metropolis. Stories of wounded feelings and only-imagined loves, of frustrations and illusions, in the shadow of a claustrophobic everyday life.

Hypnotic and poignant, Grab That Gun is an album that could easily find a place in the pantheon of 80s darkwave, all the more astonishing since it was written by unseasoned musicians barely in their twenties.

As happens in the best indie fairy tales, the fame of the Canadian girls spreads like wildfire, stretching the boundaries of the Canadian underground scene far beyond its usual limits: Organ become one of the musical stories of the year, filling the pages of specialist magazines on both sides of the Atlantic. The hype spills over — fuelled by curiosity about an all-female band and by the sudden coolness of a revived sound — though it risks overshadowing the band's genuine talent, which, for its part, tries to promote itself through the videos for "Brother", directed by Robert Morfitt, and for "Memorize The City", a tour through a city made of sounds, lights and colours (despite a bleak lyric right from the opening line: "Oh, darkness filled the sky as pools of water filled your eyes").

During the European leg of the Grab That Gun tour, Ashley Webber, who had just rejoined the band, leaves it again and is replaced by Katie Sketch's sister, Shmoo, who joins the line-up permanently. While Too Pure Records, with whom the band has just signed a deal, reissues Grab That Gun, on August 23, 2006 Organ post a statement on their MySpace announcing they would be cancelling the rest of their UK tour due to health problems affecting one of the group's members, reassuring fans that they were not breaking up.

But a sense of impending end hangs over the Vancouver girls. On December 7, 2006, a brief statement appears on the band's MySpace and official website: "We are sorry to announce that we are breaking up. We want to thank our friends, fans and families for all the help they've given us. Thank you. Shelby, Jenny, Katie, Debora and Shmoo". In an interview with the CBC the following day, Jenny would refuse to make the reasons for the split public, maintaining that they had little or nothing to do with geography or with Katie's career. "There were so many reasons I wouldn't even know where to start," she would conclude.

Before the End

Before the credits rolled, however, fate had it that the girls would surprisingly put together another Ep, with some tracks pulled out of the drawer and others written during work on a second album that never saw completion. Nothing earth-shattering, Thieves (2008), but the six tracks, recorded during an impromptu studio reunion, confirm the impression of a formula that, epigonal as it was, could still have had a long life ahead of it.

"Even In The Night" dusts off those quirky organ lines, framing Sketch's anguished performance, with a dreamy final coda à la Cure's "Just Like Heaven". More tense, the brief "Oh What A Feeling" blends neurotic riffs, solemn choruses and a liturgical organ, paving the way for "Let The Bells Ring", which returns to Banshees territory with a dark tangle of guitars, sustained by a pulsing bass, over which Katie's stentorian delivery stands out. No less thunderous is the drumming that drives the very brief "Fire In The Ocean" (not even two minutes long), with tension building up before dissolving into an organ coda. Organ also makes its way through the thicket of riffs in "Can You Tell Me One Thing", another showcase for the frontwoman's anguished, desperate singing, here still following in Morrissey's footsteps. Somewhat eccentric compared to their usual path, the closing "Don't Be Angry" bids farewell (perhaps forever) to Organ with a melancholy ballad, punctuated by delicate guitar arpeggios, confirming once again the band's melodic potential. A dark epitaph, though, with lyrics that offer no escape: “All that I want was here now it’s gone/ Don’t be angry/ I will die lonely”.

The names of these Canadian girls have resurfaced in new projects – Die Cowboy Die, Lovers Love Haters, Mermaids, the latter featuring Sketch as a permanent member and already boasting a song ("Say You're Alive") under its belt. While Katie has also carved out a parallel career as a model, even landing in the pages of Vogue, plenty of regrets remain and few certainties. It's hard to say whether it's truly over for Organ. What's beyond doubt is that it would be a crime if their story ended up permanently confined to the overcrowded limbo of fleeting next big things.

Contributions by Antonio Ciarletta

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