A quixotic mix of American post-punk and ’80s post-hardcore, Aversions are modest East Vancouver work-a-days trying to live the axiom of art interlacing life. Muscular riffing, left-turn basslines and sledgehammer drumming provide the substrate for vocalist Sam Coll’s acidic takes on topics big and small, as the band alternately exalt and disparage the many contradictions of the beleaguered town they call home.
Name a perfect song and tell us why you feel that way.
There are a million perfect songs out there, which is remarkable enough in its own right. It’s amazing that human creators continually go up the mountain, not knowing where they’ll end up, and wind up finding the summit anyway. Gives the rest of us untalented schlubs hope.
I don’t think it’s ever ‘easy,’ but some artists over the years have managed to give off the illusion that greatness comes more easily to them. Stevie
Wonder, The Beatles, Tracy Chapman et al. One artist for me like that is Elliott Smith, so I guess I’ll choose a song like “Needle in the Hay.” Manages
to convey and evoke with two instruments what a lot of 5 piece bands can’t touch. Effortless and devastating in equal doses.
What’s the best way a fan can support you?
It’s hard to argue that just buying an album isn’t the ultimate form of fan support, but that’s not always possible for people because money, so I’ll say
that following us on Bandcamp is a big one. Having worked outside of music in the ‘tech field’ for as long as I have, that a company like Bandcamp exists with the business model they have, and that they’ve managed to become the primary web presence tool for artists around the world, continually blows my mind. And we love that as we go as a band, we can build this community and this relationship with our supporters
through that tool, and reach them instantly any time we want to release music in a way that encourages them to meaningfully engage with it. So yeah, Bandcamp follows are our golden eggs.
How are you using your platform to support marginalized people?
Our drummer Joe is white passing, but he’s a Status Indigenous person and increasingly seeks to connect with that identity. We don’t want to appropriate any element of First Nations identity because from the outside, we’re just four white dudes in a rock band, the milquetoast of the music world. But we’re sensitive to the areas of overlap in our respective communities and whenever we can provide support, be good allies, acknowledge pain and suffering and our respective roles within that system, we aim to do that.
Have you ever been given something remarkable by a fan?
We played a set in Calgary and one of the other bands we played with, they seemed to really take to us—their singer presented us with a single white
rose after our set and proceeded to bite the petals off and blow them to us. I keep some of those dried up petals in my guitar case as a kind of fucked-up potpourri.
What 5 albums are you going to make your kid listen to and why?
This is purely hypothetical since we’re all sterile/way too misanthropic to have kids, but I do think about this a lot for whatever stupid reason so here
goes:
Spiderland by Slint — I’m shamelessly cribbing this entry from our friend and engineer/producer Jordan who we do all our recording with. He introduced me to this record and we had a whole conversation around how it seems like one of those classic albums that would influence someone in their late teens, show them a different side of the intersection of music and storytelling. Plus they were just kids when they made it, so it would kind of be like ‘pick up a guitar, kiddo, and see what happens.’
My War by Black Flag — I think if a kid’s going to get into guitar-based music at any point, and particularly go down the punk/punk adjacent genre hole, they’re going to need to know about Black Flag.
The White Album by The Beatles — Look it’s important to have fun as a kid and listen to fun music. I feel like this album was made for kids by a bunch of geniuses, so why not indulge? When I was a kid I wore this shit out on the turntable.
The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill — I don’t need to explain this entry.
Big Shiny Tunes 2 — This would just be annoying dad shit, like this is what I was listening to when I was your age isn’t that funny? “Aren’t CDs weird?
Yeah, we didn’t have Spotify.” It’s not funny and they won’t find it funny, they’ll just think it’s crazy that people used to buy playlists and they’ll be right.