Jets OverheadRemember when Radiohead released In Rainbows in 2008 and you could pay whatever you wanted for the 11-song download? Remember how the music world was up in arms, either over its revolutionary nature or its downright sabotage of the careers of full-time musicians?

Well, Canadian indie-rockers Jets Overhead did that whole dance two years earlier for their full-length debut, Bridges.

Without the pressure of a major label, the band was able to do whatever it wanted with their album. Physically-speaking, the release strategy was a good move – it is still being called out to this day for its innovation. But flashy releases like this demand music that lives up to the hype. Bridges turned out to be a solid piece of ambient rock, exploring the atmospheric road less-traveled by their peers and garnering a 2007 Juno nomination for New Group of the Year.

Jets Overhead set the bar perilously high with this release – not only was it good, it was free. It was hard to spread the word as the band landed opening slots for Tegan and Sara, Broken Social Scene, Sam Roberts, The Stills, The Dandy Warhols, and Our Lady Peace, but they had to find a way to get people to buy their next album.

When they released No Nations in June, it was with some trepidation they opted for the simple strategy of a record store release, some iTunes distribution and a Creative Commons license allowing them to stream the album online for free. Six months later, it seems to be working out. The band are on a cross-Canada tour opening for Lights, and this summer took their album overseas to China and Japan, two scenes often very curious of Canadian music.

“The response has been really amazing. We’ve played some really cool shows, gotten some really neat feedback,” says Antonia Freybe-Smith, vocalist and keyboardist for Jets Overhead. “We had a really neat connection at quite a few of our shows. It just seems to be on a different level than when we were touring our last record.”

Undoubtedly the biggest gig the band booked in their six-year career was Neil Young’s Bridge School Benefit Concert this fall in California, alongside Neil Young himself, No Doubt, Chris Martin of Coldplay, Fleet Foxes, Wolfmother, and Adam Sandler among others.

“It was such an honour to be there, like a dream,” says Freybe-Smith. “We had the great fortune of playing some really neat shows. It’s good press – that’s always great for a band staying on the radar.”

Admittedly an opening band for much of their career, Freybe-Smith says this has always worked out in the band’s favour. Not only do they get the pleasure of sharing the road with veterans, they book the kind of mid-sized venues their following may otherwise not yet afford, like Vancouver’s Commodore Ballroom and the Kool Haus in Toronto. At many of their gigs this summer, when they toured from the West Coast to Winnipeg with The Dears, Freybe-Smith noted a cultural divide in their audience – from pre-teens to senior citizens.

“We make the kind of music that’s quite hard to pigeonhole into a certain genre,” says Freybe-Smith. “We remind some of the older fans of Pink Floyd or something and they like that. Younger fans don’t know what they like about us. We don’t fit in anywhere.”

Of course, the Pink Floyd thing is no accident – Freybe-Smith cites them as a major influence, albeit cliché. As for current bands, she says they’ve always dreamed of playing a show with Wilco, which also comes as little surprise considering a good chunk of No Nations sounds like the offspring of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (most notably “Weathervanes (In the Way)”).

No Nations is a blend of classic Canadian folk-rock a la Neil Young with the whiskey vocals of Adam Kittredge and Freybe-Smith’s harmony, and a touch of ambience and distant prog echoes courtesy of Jocelyn Greenwood (bass), Piers Henwood (guitars, keyboards) and Luke Renshaw (drums).

There’s something different about Jets Overhead, though, something evasive. “Fully Shed” has the essence of Sloan or Sam Roberts (two Canadian acts, it’s true), but the addition of vague synth gives what could be a marketable pop song a dark hue reminiscient of the angsty, edgy Dandy Warhols.

It’s still pop – the layers of “Always a First Time” and the catchy chorus of the album’s opener, “I Should Be Born,” only assert the fact.

“This record we took a lot of time writing the material. We would jam and record it all, a bunch of garbledegook,” says Freybe-Smith. “We didn’t put any pressure on ourselves. Let’s just make a neat-sounding record that we would want to listen to on roadtrips and stuff. That was the only real ambition we had with it.”

In the end, No Nations took about a year and a half to record, some of which was done at a secluded cabin on Hornby Island, B.C. In the end, it was produced by Neil Osborne of 54*40, and mastered by Malcolm Burn (who has produced Emmylou Harris, Bob Dylan and Daniel Lanois.)

Freybe-Smith notes with ProTools at musicians’ fingertips these days, it’s easy to record an album in your bedroom with no help. But in order to get the full sound No Nations boasts, Freybe-Smith says they are glad they made the decision to shove more money toward the production.

Yet it’s the bare bones of Jets Overhead that make them a band worth following: song structure, lyrics, instrumentation and a dash – just the essence – of pop sensibility.

“We just want people to listen to it over and over again,” says Freybe-Smith.






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