A band based out of Campbell River is perfectly fine with being fashionably villainous, if they need to be.
Vocalist/guitarist Lucas Antoni and vocalist/bassist Andrew Baskin co-founded the four-piece ‘hard rocking’ alternative band Vogue Villains after their previous group dissolved, which left them feeling like “everybody just wanted to make somebody a villain,” as if it were in fashion.
So they decided to collectively shoulder that weight, and the alliterative name stuck.
“Everybody is somebody’s villain and everybody is also somebody’s hero in the story,” Baskin said. “And if somebody needs to make me the enemy, then so be it.”
Since keyboardist/guitarist Rob Johnston and drummer/back-up vocalist Nate Cox joined the group, Baskin said the band has finally felt complete for the past six years.
To the Villains, maintaining a sense of humour and incorporating that playfulness is as important to their music as it is to their stage presence. One of their main goals, Baskin said, is to create an atmosphere where the audience feels like they’re part of the show.
“We want you to feel like we’re all hanging out and having a good time … But that doesn’t mean that the next song isn’t going to be about suicide and sadness … But that also doesn’t mean that the song after that isn’t going to be about metrosexual vampires,” he said.
Their ideal space, Antoni said, is to prove to people that while hanging out with friends can be fun and silly, anyone is allowed to “darken it up and get real” when they need to, and that authenticity means being brutally and unapologetically yourself.
“I just wish people could get a grain of what it feels like to be as ridiculous as we are half of the time,” Baskin said.
The Villains also value the creative freedom of seamlessly weaving through genres as they see fit. Antoni said when he and Baskin first started the group, they set down the ground rules immediately.
“There are no rules. There is no box. We’re going to do whatever we want, we’re going to be fluid in every genre. We’re going to have singing and screaming and hard rock and soft rock … We even have samba in some of our songs,” he said.
Song writing, Baskin said, usually starts when somebody has “an idea rumbling around their pocket like change,” and gets collaboratively built up from there. Such as with their 2022 single Wrong Side of Midnight, which Baskin wrote as a “folksy-joke” song from the couch in his kitchen. Before the song fully became what they released in November, the group would sometimes play it to “clear the palate” during shows to get people laughing. When Baskin realized its potential, the group reworked it and gave it more of a rock edge.
The most recent Vogue Villains single, Floatin’ Stone, which came out last month, was born from a darker place.
“In essence, it’s an introspective song,” Antoni said, adding that it feels like the ‘eureka moment’ during an identity crisis – which is something he believes speaks to a lot of people. Floatin’ Stone is also a good representation of both his and Baskin’s writing influences, he said, since the song comes from a moody and brooding place but is still pleasing to the ear with a more positive and bouncy melody. Lyrically, it’s meant to lead to a place where the singer figures out who they are and doesn’t care what other people think of them.
“Because everyone’s got their opinions and it just doesn’t matter,” Baskin said.
Vogue Villains is aiming to release their next single, Bleed, in September, ahead of a full-album release in early 2024.
The group will share the stage with rock bands Shale and Wet Future when they return to the Queen’s in Nanaimo on Friday, Aug. 18.
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mandy.moraes@nanaimobulletin.com
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