Dreaming Friday night away
By: Vania Pagniello
Dream rock is that subtle remembrance of a distant childhood memory. It is pressure from swimming to the bottom of a pool trying to touch twinkling oval sunlit patterns. It is the reason your neck will hurt after head-banging at a Good Anya live show.
Good Anya is a dream rock band from the Hamilton area consisting of the young quad of skilled musicians Noah Spencer (guitar and vocals), Sam Anderson (drummer), Craig Jackson (bass) and Zoe Smith (keyboardist). In early May, Good Anya released their first EP, Good Effort.
The band spent the summer touring the GTA, making their furthest stop in Montreal.
The band returned to a show at The Baltimore House on Oct. 21 alongside Black Baron, Scrapheat and Pool People.
At both local venues and the occasional rambunctious house show, Good Anya’s ethereal enthusiasm has drawn an abundance of loyal fans and fellow creatives to their music.
The band’s roots trace back three years to Dundas, where Spencer and Anderson came together with the intention of forming a band thanks to the help of their drum teacher. Anderson stayed on drums and Spencer took to guitar.
Shortly after, Jackson joined as bassist. A couple of years after the cessation of an unnamed guitarist, Smith joined the group.
Coming a long way from their musical origins, Noah describes the band’s evolution.
“It was a lot more blues influenced before. We sounded more like a typical bar band… When [Smith] came in it opened up a lot of possibilities cause you can use certain sounds from a synth.”
“You can do so much with the modulation, and you can make the synth so much more outlandish than a guitar can be” explained Smith. “Synth just has so many possibilities right in front of you.”
It was ultimately Smith’s contributions to the band that allowed them to experiment with more diverse and complicated arrangements that eventually evolved into a heavy dream rock band.
Dream rock is a hallucinatory blend of sounds that evoke surrealism, enthusiasm and bewilderment. Good Anya’s airy guitar and synth sounds entangle the audience in an ethereal realm of pastel-coloured clouds while the percussion and bass keep the listener firmly grounded.
The dreamy sounds are not the only aspect of the band that is beautifully crafted. In their EP Good Effort, Spencer’s unique vocals encode sonorous lyrics describing the growing pains from seeking new relationships and shedding old ones.
Although lyrically rich, his melodic vocals seem to take precedence over the sung stanzas. But by no means does this imply that the substance is lost.
“Noah will come to us with a skeleton of a song and we fill it in with all the guts,” Anderson explained.
“If I’m writing bass parts, I am trying to match the feelings that are in Noah’s idea for a song already and then put my own kind of thing into it at the same time. I want to make it fun to play and also want to shape the song,” added Jackson.
The emotion Good Anya evokes during their live shows is intense.
The skeleton Anderson described has not only been filled with blood and guts. It is a full-grown entity embellished in beauty marks and scars whose presence can be felt in the very room.
Despite the emotional sensitivity displayed during their live shows, they don’t find that creating music grants an understanding of it.
“Being musicians doesn't make us feel like we know why we're sad. We still don't know why,” said Anderson.
“We are just trying to get it out… the only way we can,” Smith concluded.
