Their other van is a Millennium Falcon. Vancouver’s Pack A.D. pack a wallop.
Blues-rock revivalists The Pack A.D. out fox the old boys’ club
Sight unseen The Pack A.D. is a blues-soaked rock and roll outfit of the highest order. However once you’ve set eyes upon this dynamic duo your estimation of what it takes to make that grade may be drastically and irreversibly altered. The fact that they’re just two girls getting their groove on has proven to be a daunting equation for many of their industry peers. Add to that their amazing talent and onstage charisma and you have a formidable concoction that amounts to one explosive Molotov cocktail of female fury. For drummer Maya Miller and guitarist-vocalist Becky Black it’s just another day in the trenches.
“It’s a weird boys’ club out here” Miller says. “I don’t even know what would be considered appropriate music for a woman to play. Flowing gowns and Loreena McKennitt hair and all that stuff? There’s this belief that women have to be soft and pleasing in everything. That’s why the most common thing to do when marketing a female artist is to play up their sexuality. Women are compelled to appeal to guys; it’s wired into our subconscious and thus into our lives. We’re just a couple of people trying to write and perform great music. So we’re girls so what? When people see us live they get that. It’s irrelevant.”
Determined to pay their dues and then some these hard-working blueswomen have just completed a scorching spring tour that saw them hit 84 stages in a mere 95-day span. Not only did this intrinsically masochistic marathon put them on the musical map as ones-to-watch but it also saw them rack up some serious miles on their beloved boogie van The Falcon. As in Millennium.
“The Falcon is awesome I knock on her constantly” Miller proudly reports. “We’ve taken her from 75000 miles to 162000 with only one breakdown! I still can’t believe we did it. Apparently that run of shows was inspired by craziness although things are never normal with us. We had originally booked a short tour then a break and then our third trip to perform in the U.K. Well the U.K. tour got pushed to the fall so we just started booking and stringing shows together into this monstrous continuous chain. By the end of the third month we were so cranked and miserable sick of driving and lonesome for our own beds. It took Becky a while to get over the shock of it after we made it back home and it was all over. It was a true test of our endurance but the last few shows were totally amazing.”
With a name (the packad) that translates to “The Drunk” in Swedish you know this duo is out for a good time including rocking the SXSW and Sled Island festivals. Relentless touring has paid off handsomely earning The Pack A.D. a reputation as a no-nonsense powerhouse with a penchant for swamping bars with their sludgy brand of stripped-down blues. Black’s voice oscillates between garagey wallows and anger personified as she scales insurmountable heights of ecstasy and plunges into chasms of defeat egged on every inch of the way by Miller’s pulmonary thumping.
Though they borrow heavily from a traditional genre these new-school femme fatales effectively rearrange classic riffery and hooky vocals to forge their own distinct musical identity. Fans and critics alike have responded favourably spawning the runaway success of their albums Tintype self-released in 2007 and re-released by Mint Records in 2008 and the more recent Funeral Mixtape which was released in August of 2008.
“We did a bunch of recording in January and February and it just wasn’t enough to base an album on” Miller explains. “We were happy to be done but it sucks that it wasn’t finished. We decided to take some time off and plan to return to the studio this winter. The theory is to record it as two separate sessions.”
“That’s the beauty of being a two-piece organization; at any given time we can sit down and practise” she continues. “We’ll whip up three songs and then dump them in a single afternoon. We have the luxury of being brutal when it comes to deciding what to keep because there’s no extended period of working things out with three or four or five other people. Honestly we should be the poster people for best friends. It’s ridiculous how well we get along considering the extraordinary amount of time we spend together. I think the secret is knowing when to shut up.”
