Hey Brother

Big win for Hey Brother
Lauren Baron
BRANT NEWS
Brantford band Hey Brother is the last band standing.
The local rockers recently won the Hamilton Spring Music Festival’s Last Band Standing competition, presented by Y108 radio station in Hamilton.
“At first we entered as a joke,” said the band’s vocalist, Julian Hache.
“We weren’t going there to win,” added bassist Josh Levesque. “We were just thinking we would have a good time and play our best and hopefully we would get some fans out of it. When they called us up and said we won, it was awesome.”
Hey Brother competed against seven local bands to win the qualifying competition in Brantford back in March and went on to battle it out against 13 bands from southern Ontario.
They were crowned winners after being judged on crowd interaction, tightness of sound, originality and musicianship.
“After all our hard work (over the last five years as a band), this just shows we deserve it,” Hache said.
With their win comes more than $20,000 worth of prizes, including $500 in cash, a $1,000 shopping spree at Long and McQuade in Burlington, a recording package at an internationally acclaimed studio, 500 pressed CDs with full-colour inserts, a gig at the Corktown Pub in Hamilton and a free consultation with music industry executives and artist managers.
The band, which also includes drummer Sean Boyle and guitarist Cory Robin, will have its songs shopped around to Ontario radio stations and were featured on Y108’s Indie Show with Barry Taylor.
Winning the competition was a big deal for the band, but hearing its music on the radio for the first time was an experience like no other, Levesque said.
“We’ve listened to the songs so many times, but there is something about hearing it on the radio,” Levesque said. “It was like hearing it for the first time. Hearing how good it was coming over the radio was surreal.”
Hey Brother was set to release its second EP in July, but with the new recording package, the band is hoping to record and release its first full-length album.
“The win is a big kick in the ass for us,” Levesque said. “Over the last year we have really buckled down and taken it seriously and tried harder and it shows. Regardless of whether or not we won, we would be pressing on, but this gives us a boost.”
The band hopes that boost will help them break into the music business full-time and get them on the road touring and sharing their music with the masses.
“We haven’t played outside of Ontario before,” Levesque said. “This is going to open doors for us.” - Brant News

Brantford’s Hey Brother has big plans for 2014 - Brant news

The first thing that grabs you is the CD cover, a stark long-lashed green-tinted eye, with a superimposed image of a Romannumeral clockface on the eyeball.

The second thing that grabs you is the sound. Circadian Rhythm, the debut EP by Brantford- Hamilton five-man indie outfit Hey Brother, is current in its approach, but also impressively retro in a grungy post-punk way.

The Brantford-Hamilton five-man outfit is typical of modern alt-rock bands in that it grabs bits and pieces of every kind of music since the British invasion and combines them in its own unique melting pot. With Hey Brother, the dominant sound is the guitar of Brantford's Julian Hache, very reminiscent of the fuzz of early Neil Young -- right from the opening cut, Strawberry, all the way through to the last of six, Too Late (Again). There are similarities to some Green Day, Our Lady Peace and even the Tragically Hip and Arcade Fire to be found in this band, which comprises Hache, vocalist Josh Levesque, guitar-keys- vocalist Ryan Hartley, bassist Russell Cook and drummer Sean Boyle. Younger listeners than this reviewer can undoubtedly add a few more recent, and probably more apt, comparisons.

"We've been trying lately to get our sound turned more to one area (traditional alt-rock, or 'dancing rock'), but Circadian Rhythm is a bit of everything, different musical genres pulled together," he said.

Hache expressed surprise at the Young reference during a recent phone conversation, but it pleased him -"Hey, cool, we like Neil Young."

He acknowledged that self-description is a difficult thing for musicians to do, and so it is for Hey Brother. What he will say is that they have their own favourite types of music, and it influences what they put out there -drummer Boyle likes metal, for instance, and he listens to bands such as Traffic and Drake, "anything, really."

Though Hache's sound sets this band of young-20s performers apart, the other members are solid contributors, too. Levesque brings a nuanced, tuneful mournfulness to his vocals, while Cook provides confident bass lines and Boyle backs the whole thing up with some very crisp percussion work. Hartley's sound is harder to pick out, but that would be asking a lot of a supporting player. Suffice to say he plays up to his bandmates' high level.

Hartley, the most recent member to join the three-year-old band, is also a bit of an artistic talent -it's his arresting image that graces the CD cover.

"It started as a two-piece," Hache said, "me and the vocalist, Joshua. There was a music scene happening in Brantford and we thought, 'We can excel in this area.' "

Other members joined as time passed -first Cook, then Boyle, then Hartley.

"We then thought we should do one song all together and put a stamp on it, and that's called Liam Neeson."

Recording efforts started about a year ago at Tyneside Studios in Hamilton. Their first EP wasn't released but the subsequent one, which features Liam Neeson among its tracks, was made available May 15 for download at iTunes, and CD Baby, with best-buy.cacoming soon.

Writing credits for the songs go to the band as one unit, Hache said.

"I'll come up with a few riffs, throw out a few ideas and show them to the band... and we'll go from there."

They're appearing twice locally over the next couple of months, on July 24 at Two Doors Down and on Aug. 22 at Harmony Square as part of the Find Your Spirit Festival.

"We also got invited to play Central Park (in Manhattan), but we'd have to get our passports for that."

In the meantime, they're flogging their EP and getting together two or three times a week to jam. - Richard Beales - The Brantford Expositor