Steve's Blog
Friday September 27, 2013

Thereafter gets ceremonial

by TONY MONTAGUE

When some folks find garbage strewn about the forest, they clean it up, but the members of Thereafter never fail to see it as a photo opportunity.

When Keona and Neil Hammond needed a strong image for the cover of their band Thereafter’s debut release, Ceremony, they didn’t have far to look. In the woods behind their Bowen Island home the couple discovered a newly abandoned couch, its gaudy floral patterns standing out boldly against the mist-shrouded trees. It struck them as a curiously apt metaphor for the album’s title, and the original songs and instrumentals with Celtic and English roots.

For me a ceremony—such as a wedding—is an artificial moment that you create to link into reality, says Neil, Thereafter’s lead singer, acoustic guitarist, and mandolinist, interviewed with Keona in East Vancouver. Each ceremony is a little node in time and space that’s always there, and connects you to other people.

And that couch is like the gateway to the ceremonial space we’re trying to create, adds wooden-flute player Keona. The idea is that to gain entrance you have to lie down on it.

Ceremony is the fruit of many years of collaboration between the Hammonds. They first met at a weekly Celtic jam at the Irish Heather in 2001, soon after Manchester-born Neil came to town. They were co-founders of Cleia, which focused on traditional music and became one of Canada’s finest Celtic outfits. After the quintet disbanded seven years ago the Hammonds moved to Bowen to start a family, and began writing more of their own material.

It took us a long time to work out how my Irish flute works with Neil’s songs and slightly bluesy guitar picking, says Keona. We didn’t think we could start anything with just the two of us, but it was fun to figure it out.

A new band came together. The Hammonds first started working with cellist Shanto Acharia and soon invited fiddler Annie Brown to join, then brought in her brother Ben Brown as percussionist.

While the main element in Thereafter’s music is contemporary folk, there’s a hidden influence from a very different genre. We have a dark secret—we’re both prog-rock lovers, Keona reveals with a laugh. Bands like Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Gentle Giant, Yes—complex stuff. We don’t play like that, of course, but it’s always in the back of our minds, and Ceremony is something of a concept album.

The songs Neil chose form a cohesive theme. I’ve become increasingly aware of the nature of addiction, and not just to substances, he says. We all have our addictions to certain patterns, behaviours, and relationships. I was really addicted to patterns of anxiety and stress that I was aware can easily lead to darker things. I got interested in certain therapeutic ceremonies that address the nature of addictions and seek release from them. It’s the ceremonies we can weave into our everyday lives that can keep us present to the world around us.

One of Neil’s songs, “Leaving Tomorrow”, draws on his time in Moscow teaching English, and the Irish band he formed in the Russian capital. The bassist was a lovely guy but he had drug problems, and recently died in his apartment, nobody’s quite sure why. The song is really about him. The first two verses are about a crazy New Year’s Eve party in Moscow, with a priest present and a lot of Orthodox monks getting totally drunk—an amazing scene. But in the last verse it ties in with my experience of leaving the group.

A lot of Neil’s songs seem to be about trying to detach from things, Keona reflects. They’re about leaving, or getting rid of something gracefully, and the moment when you can finally release something—or something releases you.

It’s becoming more of a conscious thing that this is what I write about, notes Neil. The attachments are often metaphored in songs of relationships—but relationships to addictions or patterns you’re trying to get rid of.

For all the seriousness of this theme, the music of Ceremony is in the main light, brisk, and uplifting. The Hammonds’ vocal harmonies are rich, the band’s rhythmic drive is compelling, the instrumental arrangements are tight and imaginative, and Neil pitches his lyrics to the listener’s heart, not mind.

Now we know what our sound is—and Ceremony helped define that, he says. So I’m working specifically for these five people, which makes it quite different as when I write I’m thinking of what the other instruments can be doing. It’s going to be quite different kind of material on the next album—with a lot more space in it.

Thereafter hosts a release party for Ceremony at the St James Hall on Saturday (September 28).