On its 2007 debut album, Galore, Canadian electropop-rockers Dragonette covered plenty of bases ‘- literally. Late night hook-ups, affairs and sex in limousines were just a few of the topics addressed via the band’s infectious 11-track album.
‘ ‘ ‘ ‘ On the recently released follow-up, Fixin’ To Thrill, the lyrical content might be slightly toned down, but the band’s sound is as amped up as ever.
‘With Galore, there was lots of shouting and glitter because we were having so much fun with that,’ said lead singer Martina Sorbara in a phone interview. ‘We were having fun with super poppy sounds. It was kind of a genre we had never really played with and we were taking it to the limit. With Fixin’ we were kind of turning back and bringing some stuff from before Dragonette.’
‘ ‘ ‘ Before coming together in 2005, Sorbara was a solo artist, writing and performing her own singer-songwriter, folk-inspired pop. It wasn’t until she met The New Deal bassist and future husband Dan Kurtz at a music festival that Dragonette was born.
‘ ‘ ‘ It didn’t take long for the band to sign a deal with Mercury Records. However, thanks to major label politics, Galore suffered from not only leaking online, but also from a number of release date changes that resulted in different countries getting the album at drastically different times. This time, the band made sure the release of Fixin’ was a much more organized affair.
‘I can imagine if you’re a superstar it must be really crazy [promoting a global release],’ Sorbara said. ‘It’s not paralyzing, it’s definitely a lot of work, but it’s better than promoting to a continent that has downloaded it for free a year ago.’
Although the band has toured with the likes of Duran Duran and Basement Jaxx, the band is finally ready to hit the road on its first headlining North American tour this fall.
‘We’ve just been rehearsing, getting to know these songs inside and out, having an awesome time on stage together,’ Sorbara said. ‘We’ve all got it now. It took us a long time in the past to get our stage boots on and really own it.’
The hardest part, Sorbara said, is figuring out the arrangements for the band’s heavily layered and often electronic-infused music.
‘We have these things called computers’hellip;’ Sorbara said. ‘It takes a lot of time to figure out who’s going to make what sound and what needs to be coming off humans versus computer help. I’ve lost bashfulness about having a computer on stage. It’s awesome because Dan is now DJ man and manning keyboards, bass and the computer. It feels much more fluid now and there is so much more flexibility on the programming side of things.’
The band made its Boston debut at the Great Scott in Allston Wednesday night, playing to one of the liveliest crowds the venue has hosted in quite some time.
Flanked by a simple backdrop of multi-colored LED lights, the band opened with its breakout hit, ‘I Get Around,’ before venturing into fan favorites from both albums, including ‘Competition’ and ‘Okay Dolores.’ The band closed the show with a rousing rendition of its latest single, ‘Fixin’ To Thrill,’ which literally made the floor shake from the crowd jumping, and the unreleased ‘Get Your Titties Off My Things.’
‘We’re pretty happy with where we are and with this album coming out,’ Sorbara said. ‘Unbeknownst to us, it was anticipated by our audience and has been really well reviewed and we’re playing to full rooms on tour of people singing our songs.’
This is an account occasionally used by the Daily Free Press editors to post archived posts from previous iterations of the site or otherwise for special circumstance publications. See authorship info on the byline at the top of the page.
