HOT PANDA: Feeling hot, hot, hot

Hot Panda branches out into new directions

by Christine Leonard

Published December 9, 2010  

Hot Panda's dynamics include lo-fi indie rock, Brit-pop, garage, country and even sprinkles of electronica.

It’s hard to imagine what was going through the mind of Vancouver’s chief coroner, Glen McDonald, when he heard the news that the Second Narrows Bridge had collapsed, taking 19 steelworkers to their watery grave. From the window of a restaurant — where he happened to be eating lunch at the time — he witnessed the destruction firsthand, a ghastly and lethal scene he would later describe in his 1985 memoirs How Come I’m Dead? And, who would have guessed that, 50 years after the disaster, Edmonton’s Hot Panda would stumble across McDonald’s autobiography in a secondhand bookstore, and be inspired to weave a new musical workaround its lugubrious sentiment?

“I think the name really fits with the mood of the songs on the album,” says lead guitarist-vocalist Chris Connelly. “A lot of those lines were written while we were on the road touring Europe and North America. (It’s) the result of not being in one place for any reasonable length of time. The central theme is very much about being forcibly disconnected from places and relationships. That experience of immediate homelessness and just floating between quick encounters is kind of like being a living ghost.”

Recorded, produced and sent to press at breakneck speed, Hot Panda’s spirited offering, How Come I'm Dead?, released in October via Mint Records, came together at JC/DC Studios amidst the jubilant chaos of the Vancouver 2010 Olympics. An evolutionary leap forward from its 2007 debut EP, Whale Headed Girl, and the subsequent full-length Volcano... Bloody Volcano (Mint), its latest offering abandons the group’s geographically imprinted garage rock lineage for more expressive lo-fi indie and Brit-pop branches.

Conferring with fellow members — keyboardist-accordionist Heath Parsons, bassist Catherine Hiltz and glockenspiel player-drummer Maghan Campbell — Connelly and co. spice its Big Top major-key romps, rocking solos and country jaunts with a dash of profanity-studded urban electronica, thrown in to enhance and heighten the other elements. Call it the audio equivalent of MSG.

“I’m a sucker for the cohesive, storytelling, full-length albums I grew up with as a child. But it’s tough to gauge how an audience is going to respond to that in this age of shortened attention spans. Bands who go two years without putting something out might as well have fallen off the face of the Earth,” surmises Connelly. “We were a bit hurried in putting the flesh on the skeletons of these songs, and we decided to intentionally leave in the mistakes we made along the way. Not too rehearsed, not too polished, because we wanted it to sound like we were all in the same room at the same time during recording.”

With the majority of its cuts coming live off the floor, complete with all the zits and whiskers, the band’s sophomore effort celebrates Hot Panda’s reclamation of the simple joys of creativity. Emerging from a period of melancholic inertia, Connelly and company agree that Hot Panda’s positive new outlook came along just in time, thanks to the addition of bassist Hiltz.

“The idea was to capture the good energy we have going on these days,” says Connelly. “Since Catherine’s joined the band, things have become a lot more interesting. She’s such a versatile multi-instrumentalist — she’s like a Swiss Army knife! If I say ‘We need a cello here,’ she plays the cello, and so on. It’s great! She keeps it fresh. There’s a real spark to our collaborations now that she’s on board, and I make sure to thank her every day for bringing the fun back into our work.”

Indeed, the foursome enjoys incorporating unexpected turns to its musical voyage, making forays into the country-western landscape to pogo-punk, with plenty of swelling tides of keyboard melody to keep things flowing. Able to boast an unusual skill-set that allows it to pulverise contemporary styles in restless smash-ups, this drone-pop outfit (with a Chinese takeout joint’s name) aims to amuse and provoke in competing increments.

Add to this a zany cover-art photo of a woman riding a camel in stunning Kodachrome-pink and aqua hues, and you have the making of a sleeper hit capable of building suspension bridges between eras and ears.

“That picture was taken of my mom during a trip to Greece in the ’70s,” he says. “She has a copy of the album on vinyl and, my brother tells me that she brings it out to brag to her friends all the time! I don’t know if she’s read much into the meaning behind the title, but she’s thrilled to have that photograph of herself on the cover of an album, because, as she puts it, ‘I look good!’”