I Am Committing A Sin is full of liars and chain smokers. How appropriate.
Late one summer night I rode my bike to meet up with three-fifths of the newly formed Burlington band. I met them at guitarist Paul Rousseau’s house and then after much discussion found myself at Coffee Culture, a nearby coffee shop - called 'Coffee Couture' by Ryan Henderson, the band’s second guitarist - listening to them (Rousseau, Henderson and vocalist Daniel Tremblay) debate the relative value of our available table choices. One was too shaky, the other too close to another group. They might have stolen the band’s secrets.
We sat at the shaky table, and within minutes I knocked it, causing Tremblay’s coffee to spill. Henderson used the top of the muffin (prime bakery currency) to stop the liquid from flowing off the edge of the table, and “took one for the team” according to Tremblay.
Their antics were still in first gear, but revving up fast. They’re smart, witty and quick as hell, so it’s almost impossible to quote them in any sort of typical way.
“So,” I said, “Tell me about your band.”
“What band?” deadpanned Rousseau.
“Skabal,” said Henderson, referencing another band he plays in. “Well, we first played on my 18th birthday at the YMCA. Unsolicited. …Excuse me, I’m getting a call…Hello?...Yeah? I’m in the middle of something.
“Can you just put this audio file up?” asked Rousseau.
Tremblay piped up. “Make sure you write that we speak in ALL CAPITALS.”
“…alright, bye.” Henderson was back in the game.
“So,” Rousseau prompted, “Skabal.”
“We’re waiting in the wings.”
I Am Committing A Sin (or IACAS, the acronym they’re trying to promote) is made up of the three coffee enthusiasts that I hung out with, as well as Andrew Basso on bass (again, how wonderfully appropriate) and Kelly Bilan, the former child prodigy (he joined Cain & Abel when he was fourteen) on drums. The band has played two shows so far, one in Barrie and a second top secret, highly illegal show that they won’t tell me about. They have two songs on their MySpace page and vague plans to release an EP later this year (titled Bad Times: The Musical and made up of three two-part songs). Basically, other than a handmade sampler Rousseau gave me, there’s little proof the band actually exists, and yet these guys are definitely not novices. Each brings his own baggage and war stories from the “roughly a hundred” (according to Rousseau) previous bands they’ve been in.
“I’m in at least 24 right now,” said Henderson.
“If you count international bands, way more than that,” Rousseau told me. “One band is huge in North Korea. And actually, the five members of this band actually go under a bunch of different pseudonyms in different countries.”
“Math can’t even calculate the amount of bands we’ve been in.”
It’s hard to tell where the truth ends and the lies begin. As the interview progressed, the line between fact and tall tale got blurrier, but I abandoned my inner fact-checker and just surrendered myself over to the hilarity.
“So is this an actual band,” I asked, “or just another side project?”
My question was met with laughter and awkward silence; I may have hit a nerve.
“That’s like when somebody asks you and a girl if you’re dating and then that’s kind of the moment that you start dating,” Henderson explained.
“I’m hoping,” said Rousseau.
“We’re seeing each other, officially.”
“We have a good rapport with each other’s parents,” Tremblay added.
“We haven’t had a Christmas yet, though,” said Rousseau.
“What about Thanksgiving?” I asked.
“We don’t celebrate; we’re all vegetarian.”
Henderson: “NOT THANKFUL.”
Their collective rock star resumes read like a Who’s Who of scene points. Rousseau estimated that they have played somewhere around 800 and 1000 shows between the five of them. Trembley guessed that they have topped the triple digits just in YMCA shows - I can attest that I have personally booked each of these boys multiple times at the Hamilton YMCA - and Rousseau corrected him: “More like a hundred thousand YMCA shows.”
“I’ve been punk most of my life,” Henderson proclaimed, and sang a few bars from his sixth grade punk band.
Their stories are impossible to corroborate.
I then asked them to explain the choice in band name. I don’t know what I was expecting, but this is what I got:
“So we’re sitting in a Starbucks,” said Rousseau, “Much like we are now.”
“A Starbucks in a Chapters,” Tremblay added.
“This is such a stupid etymology to the name,” Henderson said, and then paused. “So this summer I started taking diving lessons, I don’t know why. Scuba diving. I was just like, I don’t know, I was pretty interested in underwater stuff, so I found this place where you could take classes in Lake Ontario because there are some part of Lake Ontario that aren’t that murky of whatever. So anyway, I was on my fourth solo dive and it was a night dive, so it was pretty intense. So I was at the bottom of the lake. It wasn’t that deep or anything, maybe 35 feet or whatever. I was at the bottom of the lake with my flashlight and I find this plaque. There was a ton of sediment on it right but I could tell it was a plaque from the general shape of it. I swam up as fast as I could and I brushed the sediment off the plaque and kind of washed it off a bit and it just said on the front, “I am committing a sin.” And I thought, “How cool is that, that I found this plaque in the middle of Lake Ontario” and so that’s where we got the name from.”
Henderson didn’t blink, and the other three of us squirmed, stared and tried to control spurts of laughter.
“Is that a real story?” I asked.
“It is now,” replied Paul, on the verge of giddy guffaws, “Don’t think about it. It is what it is.”
“I thought you were sitting at a Chapters. I’m calling your bluff, Ryan Henderson.”
“I was telling them about it at a Chapters,” he said, straight-faced.
The laughter became uncontrollable.
I Am Committing A Sin has a familiar punk rock feeling that sounds like an amalgam of fifteen different scene luminaries, only really intelligent, if it’s possible for music to sound intelligent. It’s kind of dancey, and on the aggression continuum it falls somewhere between Japaned and the Stickup. The sound is honest and intricate - one song apparently has a drum sequence that has been deemed ‘impossible’ for anyone other than Bilan to play; others have tried and failed. This, however, is all coming from me. By this time, you can probably imagine what they told me the band sounds like.
“It’s kind of a mix of various early classical composers fused with recent modern rock artists like Nickleback and Theory of a Deadman,” said Rousseau.
“[Tremblay] sounds like a grittier, less talented Freddie Mercury,” said Henderson
“Kelly Bilan plays drums a lot like the way a drum programming machine could,” said Rousseau
“Andrew [Basso] plays like a fish out of water in the way that he flaps around on the bass,” said Tremblay
“I sound like a guy who’s really good at guitar who’s trying to forget how to play guitar,” said Henderson
“People think I play guitar like Frank Zappa. Every band I’ve ever been in, I’ve gotten that,” said Rousseau
“It’s Japaned lite. It’s the Barenaked Ladies of Japaned,” concluded Tremblay. “A while back, three of us - Paul, Andrew and I - were in the best band ever. Japaned. And we wrote really good music that only some people wanted to hear. We don’t draw any influences from previous bands because we had to dumb down the music.”
According to Rousseau, the band has a series of very strict career goals; they have even procured a white board to keep track of them all. “First,” he said, “is to write a few songs. That’s pretty easy. We do that in our sleep. The next goal is to take over the airwaves. Not just air though, but every other type of waves. Microwaves. Heatwaves.”
“It ends with us just standing dramatically at the peak of Mount Everest.”
The interview is full of antics, tangents and distractions. Henderson twice answers his phone to talk to his girlfriend, and Rousseau spends about five minutes trying to cellularly explain to his dad how to find their music online. (“It’s myspace.com/iamcommittingasin - are you spelling committing right?...Two ms and two ts…You have to search ‘music…’”) I would have been annoyed if it weren’t so entertaining to be an outsider witnessing the goofing around of best friends. There is, however, at least one topic that remains free of colour commentary.
The band will make their first official Burlington debut October 3, 2008 at the 3rd Annual Brofest, an event hosted to raise cancer awareness and promote healthy living. Organized in part by Henderson, the concert was planned to honour the memory of friend Nicholas Hurlbut, who passed away from cancer in 2006.
There’s no laughing here.
“It’s obviously important for all of us, having played in bands with Nick before. It’s going to be really fun,” said Henderson.
Rousseau considers himself lucky to have been able to perform at Brofest each year since its inception. “It’s the one thing we actually take totally seriously.”