Bird? Plane? No, manrayGUN | How strange: two shows with mancrazyspelling this week.
If you’re ever looking for a crash course in the history of the Edmonton music scene, I’d recommend sitting down with Dennis Lenarduzzi. He’s been playing music here for almost 30 years, under many different names and in many different genres: from his punk origins in the late 1970s (at the forefront of the same movement that spawned DOA, among others), through rockabilly with The Draggnetts in the ’80s, and on to The Dusty Chaps in the ’90s, where he played a combination of roots, blues, and surf.
His newest project, manraygun, continues that streak of reinvention with a blend of dark folk ballads and twisting narratives about magpies and circus freaks. And while the journey from first-generation punk to wandering carnival troubadour might sound odd on paper, to hear Lenarduzzi tell it, everything about the band—including the recording of their debut LP, Misfortune Telling—has been a collective and wholly organic process.
“It’d be very easy for us to have that singer/songwriter-with-a-backup-band kind of thing, but we’re really more like a jazz band,” he says. “Even if we have tight sketches of the tunes, everyone is throwing in stuff. It’s like jazz, where you learn the sheet music and then you throw away the sheet music.”
manraygun officially formed in 2005, although, like Lenarduzzi, the other members have similarly deep musical roots. Bassist Tom Murray and drummer Silas Grenis both list almost a half-dozen other bands’ worth of experience each, and fellow guitarist/vocalist Everett LaRoi even enjoyed a brief major-label stint with Idyl Tea in the early ’90s. While third guitarist/vocalist Steve Lenarduzzi had never been in a band before manraygun, he and Dennis are brothers—so they go way back in other ways.
Misfortune Telling is unmistakably a product of the band members’ experience and breadth of taste. During our conversation, Lenarduzzi makes casual reference to Otis Redding, Tom Waits, Elvis Costello, and Hank Williams, and he isn’t simply name-dropping—you can hear each of these influences at work in manraygun’s songs, and not always in the ways you’d expect. The biggest testament to their range, though, has to be that the album ends with “Here Lies Love,” an adaptation of a Bing Crosby number from the 1932 film The Big Broadcast.
With so much informing their music, the question remains: what kind of a band is manraygun? What do you call these kinds of songs? Lenarduzzi is reluctant to commit to any one genre. Instead, he looks for inspiration to artists who work on the fringes of the mainstream, and who can’t be easily identified as one thing or another; it’s the same reason he writes so often about the circus, where misfits become star attractions.
“I think we are outsiders. Some of us are old, too old to be ‘indie’—we were ‘indie’ the first time around,” he says. “There’s a great tradition of outsiders, and we’re perfectly happy being there, because we don’t have to play by any rules. We make up our own rules as we go. But it is tough to find an audience.”
If what Lenarduzzi hints to me is any indication, the band’s tendency to cross boundaries will carry over into their CD release show this Saturday. Expect all kinds of theatrics and a stage set-up to match; for one night only, manraygun plans to transform Teddy’s and Jasper Avenue into a sweaty slice of New Orleans.
