SPOTLIGHT: Real Sickies Release ‘Under A Plastic Bag’
INTERVIEW
INTERVIEW
☆ BY GIGI KANG ☆
IF YOU’RE LOOKING FOR CANADIAN PUNK GROUPS—check out Real Sickies. The Edmonton-based five-piece released their fourth album Under A Plastic Bag on March 14. I spoke with vocalist Ben Disaster about the release. He revealed that the band recorded the album in just eight days.
“It made us all just be present,” Ben shares. “The first two days, it was supposed to be eight to 10 hours, then it started being 12, 14 hours, then 18 hours. It was a mad rush. For a couple days, you’re still exploring the studio, setting up. It was a new space to us, but we knew what we wanted to do. We had our goals.”
The album was produced and engineered by Joshua Wells. “Working with Josh was perfect,” Ben says. “He really understood what we were wanting to go for. He had his own ideas as well that we were very into exploring. The amount of artistic exploring of sounds that we did in this album was really fun. It was different from previous experiences. This one felt more coherent as a unit. It feels very rewarding.”
Under A Plastic Bag follows Love Is For Lovers (2021) which introduced pop elements to Real Sickies’ sound, but the new album takes the band back to their signature grittiness. For example, it starts off with the sound of gravedigging, which Ben recorded himself. Related to the album title, the soundbite represents burying parts of yourself that may be damaged or damaging.
“We wanted to capture the digging of the grave and I really wanted a claustrophobic sound. I didn’t want just dirt,” Ben describes. “What we ended up doing was field recording. I went down to the river and there were a bunch of piles of rock. I had a shovel with me and a plastic bag. I threw my phone in that bag, put it on the ground, and shoveled all the rocks on top of that. I think you can feel the rocks kind of hitting you and getting deeper, like the sound is obviously getting more and more muffled and there’s contact.”
The theme is related to a personal experience of Ben’s own which inspired “Triage,” one of the main singles. Returning from tour, he and his wife were in a significant car accident. One of the unique powers of music is the new-found strength it injects into our toughest experiences and, bravely, Ben translated his traumatic experience into a piece of art.
“[An experience like the accident] feels like time stops, and you have all this time to think,” he explains. “When I was picturing the video, I kept running that idea through my mind. You kind of fight yourself a lot when you’re in a traumatic experience. I guess you’re trying to decide what parts of you to save. You survive this thing, then it’s like, ‘What can I change? What are the good things?’”
Further, the “Triage” music video creates a visual for this expression for which Ben handcrafted a vibrant model world.
“The idea of the characters in the video is our separate identities out to screw each other over, but not on purpose,” Ben says. “You feel like you don’t deserve something good, so you kind of self sabotage. The idea behind ‘Triage’ would be, what part of you do you fix first? What is the most important thing that can be saved? What is something you need to let go of? That was kind of the very chaotic idea behind it.”
The video is an examination of not only Ben’s personal experience, but it’s also a connection to observations of complex conflicts in the wider world.
“The chaotic idea formed into one of the main characters which was this model I had of a royal guard,” he continues. “There was a lot of a military attitude going on, just around the world. We were seeing people out to destroy each other. I thought it would be perfect to give this character a jet for a face. It was like a Frankenstein model. I started coming into a bunch of different models and decided that I was going to put them together in ways that I could fill with explosives and pyrotechnics. I talked to [director] Jesse Nash about it, and he is a very frantic thinker as well. [Along with] his partner, Angela Seehagen, we were able to make a storyline for people to follow, but also to keep the franticness, chaos, and urgency that was going on. So, yeah, I think visually, just the whole situation kind of reflects the song.”
Like Real Sickies’ collaboration with Nash and Seehagen for the “Triage” video, they invited players to the track “Paulie,” including Mark Valley from Bootlicker, Zac Ware from Proclaimers, and Pela From Víctimas Club, who all recorded remotely, adding to the experimentation of the album.
Overall, the album is a great example of using art as a space to hold our experiences, good or bad, and making something physical that allows us to process those experiences. The result is finding others who understand—the experience becomes somewhat of a collective time capsule rooted in understanding. The image of Real Sickies is inherently plague-like with a chaotic vibe. But, with Under A Plastic Bag, they introduce a level of honesty that makes it stand out as one of their best.
