WHO ARE THEY? With-it scenesters can rejoice now that neo-grungy local foursome Ten Kens have been signed, landing on Fat Cat, the UK label who introduced us to Sigur Ros, Animal Collective and more.
NO, SERIOUSLY, WHO ARE THEY? Your confusion is understandable, with-it scenester. Initially a duo consisting of Dan Workman (vocals) and Dean Tzenos (guitar), the Kens home-recorded an album, sent it to a few media outlets and labels, and were promptly contacted by Fat Cat about being signed before they had played a single show — hence your not having ever heard of them. Lee Stringle (bass) and Ryan Roantree (drums) filled out the lineup, and they re-recorded the disc with Colin Stewart at Montreal’s Breakglass Studios (co-owned by Besnard Lakes’ Jace Lasek) to be released on Fat Cat in June.
THAT MUST HAVE BEEN ONE HELL OF A DEMO. It’s not a demo; it was intended to be a fully completed CD, even if fate had other plans. “We had it mastered, and we basically took it as far as we could with the equipment we had,” Workman says while sitting in an Annex coffee spot with Tzenos. “People liked it. For the most part it wasn’t viewed as a basement recording or anything like that.”
After the songs started coming together in jam sessions, the pair isolated themselves and worked on the disc for a solid year, Tzenos explains. “We were rooming together, and decided we gotta do something more with our lives, we gotta give this a shot.
“We just sat there, spending I don’t know how much of our time in hot summers in this tiny room, just recording this album.”
The disc that resulted from those sessions (on which the pair played all the instruments, drums, keys and bass included) is far from a cutesy lo-fi affair. Ten Kens’ songs are thick and full of darkness — or as much as they can be without turning into metal, which they’re decidedly not — and are trimmed with Tzenos’ twangy, Morricone-esque guitars, setting a melancholy foundation for lyrics that touch on betrayal and violence.
ARE THESE DOUR, SERIOUS MEN? Not so much. They both have an easy, affable manner, which isn’t as surprising when you learn their day jobs —?after having met at Sheridan College, Tzenos forged a career as an animator who’s worked on the preschool-oriented show The Backyardigans, while Workman went on to become the creative director for Joe Boxer.
Tzenos attributes their sound to growing up with industrial and grunge in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. “There was a lot of aggressive stuff, but at that time it wasn’t weird. I find it stranger now that we’re playing heavier stuff, people are like, ‘Wow, that’s heavy’ and we’re like, ‘Is it really that heavy?’ I guess it is.” Those influences are easy to spot on songs like “The Alternate Biker,” a spoken-word number with a crushing riff, whose lyrics Workman often reads from a dusty old hardcover at their shows. (For the record, their March 5 CMW show will be their seventh ever.)
ARE THEY JUST LUCKY BASTARDS, THEN? They’d be the first to admit that they caught a break. Workman says, “A lot of bands we were talking to were like, ‘What the hell’s going on? How did you guys manage to do that?’ And we were like, ‘I dunno, we thought that was the way it was done.’” But from spending a full year honing their disc with Terminator-like precision to the intense practicing they did before starting to play shows, you couldn’t fairly accuse them of waltzing into position without working for it.
“We took our time,” continues Workman. “We rehearsed like you wouldn’t believe. We wanted to make sure that once we stepped on that stage we knew exactly what we were doing.
“If we only get one shot at this,” Tzenos adds, “better to make it fuckin’ solid.”