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Densil McFarlane of garage-punk trio The OBGMs is through with being self-deprecating.
“I kind of came out of the pandemic with this ‘not happy to be here’ mentality,” the guitarist and singer says over the phone from his Toronto home, taking time off from his day to talk about his band’s appearance at Midway Music Hall this Saturday as part of Super Friendly Fest. “I am not happy to be here and I deserve my comeuppance. So, you know, I’m tired of the narrative of the band that has to say ‘Hey, we’re kind of good but we’re also super sad and don’t like ourselves.’ Sure, that can be true, but I’m also going to say that we’re probably one of the best bands you will ever see live.”
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That takes a certain amount of chutzpah to say, but McFarlane isn’t the only one doing so. Media in their home town have been shining a light on them over the past three years, and Spin Magazine announced the three-piece as one of their Top 50 Rock Bands Right Now after the release of their second album, 2020’s The Ends. The record was also shortlisted for the 2021 Polaris Prize; considering they’d been bouncing around Toronto since 2009 this was a step forward from scrabbling at the margins of an industry that didn’t know what to make of a black-fronted punk band that wasn’t Bad Brains.
It could have also gone sideways; dropping a new album during a particularly fraught time in world history might have ended badly for the band.
“Hey, those months during the pandemic offered a lot of opportunity for reflection,” McFarlane asserts. “Like, really, really figure things out about what it means to be a musician or what it really means to be a person. Honestly, I had a great time. I’m already antisocial. You want me to stay inside? Hell yeah! I learned how to edit videos and I found out a lot of things that were important to me about the music community. So I really explored and when we finally got out or when we started playing shows again it felt like things were kind of lined up for us.”
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The story of the birth of the OBGMs (short for The oOohh Baby Gimme Mores) has been written about many times now, so we’ll just summarize. McFarlane and drummer Colanthony Humphrey initially got together as a hip-hop production team in 2007, but a ludicrous charge against McFarlane for assault against a police officer (eventually dropped) during Toronto’s Caribana Festival changed their direction. Held back from crossing the border, McFarlane was now sidelined from his intent to attend university in the States; he picked up a guitar to pass the time and thus the band was born. Bassist Joe Brosnan rounds out the trio, which also featured synth player Jemuel Roberts for a spell.
“We don’t know anything about rock music,” he says flatly. “Like, we know a little bit about a little bit, but there are people that actually got to grow up in rock music and that community, going to gigs and buying records. I never did any of that until I was in my ‘20s, so I don’t know that culture. I didn’t know whichever musician unless they had a top 40 hit or whatever.”
McFarlane is being a little coy here. He may not have started out with an encyclopedic knowledge of punk or rock music buzzing around in his head as he composed early songs, but he’s well equipped to discuss it now. If you bring up Bad Brains, an early, all-black hardcore band that also shifted from one style of music to another in their adult years, a light immediately goes on and he brings up their seminal song Banned in DC.
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“The fact that we could be talking about them 40 years later is amazing, but I would even say that there are other bands out there that are so right now that are more what I listen to,” he says. “I would go to N.E.R.D first, I would go to Oxymorrons, Troi Irons, Ashlee Schatz, Wild Black. Those artists are far more influential to me than what happened 40 years ago. They literally probably grew up like me. I know Bad Brains are a legendary band and that we have some parallels to them, but I came to this in a different way. So, think of it as two bands on different ends of the world that came to the same conclusion.”
However McFarlane and The OBGMs got to where they are, he believes that the band’s disconnection from any early punk rock roots has allowed them to come up with something original and powerful.
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“It’s a gift, because I have no rules and we can kind of do whatever we want,” he notes. “It’s also a curse because there are all sorts of things that you eventually learn about this community. Like, for the first album we were just kind of making cool guy stuff. The second album we decided that we should learn how to do this cool guy stuff but also put some choruses in, and now it feels like we’re all choruses and singalongs now.” He laughs. “So yeah, we’re still learning; whatever comes out of our body that feels good, really.”
The OBGMs are taking off, but there’s still a long way to go. They’re currently finishing up a new release for 2024 that McFarlane enthusiastically declares to be better than The Ends, and they’re hitting the road for longer periods of times The economics of touring in 2023 are dire, but McFarlane is still somewhat upbeat about the situation. After all, as he wryly points out, he’s not really made to do anything else but make music.
“The music industry is currently in a model that doesn’t make sense,” he admits. “Nobody is making money from record sales, and artists are basically just mobile clothing stores. Even then, you have venues that are taking 20 per cent off of your merch without actually investing in the creation of it. It’s a wild, wild time to be a musician. If anybody told me that they wanted to be on I’d have to say they were a crazy person. You better love it, and you better not be easily deterred. Because guess what? You don’t get into something like this unless you have something in your body that you need to get out.”
Super Friendly FestWith Pup, Face to Face, Nobro, The OBGMs, Chixdiggit, No Trigger, Real Sickies, Wares, Old Wives and King Thief.When: Saturday at noonWhere: Midway Music Hall, 6107 104 St.Tickets $80 and up, available at the door or in advance from areyousuperfriendly.com.
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