OLD SOUL Bathes Audience in Sound: Undercurrent Album Release Party

Old Soul, a rock band together for nearly a decade, released their new album, Undercurrent, two weeks ago. I streamed it soon after it dropped. It was early morning on the bus to work, and I wasn’t expecting the tone change for this album after having listened intensely to their first album, Overgrown, three years ago. The audience was given context for this upcoming project: flowing water, the colour blue, and a siren lounging along a rock face. Even if we hadn’t been given these visuals, the muted tones of certain tracks where Loreta Triconi’s voice seems like it’s coming from deep within a lake, the glide from one song to the next, showed me that Old Soul is fluid. It’s clear the band has emerged from the lush forest of their previous album and has found themselves digging into a reservoir of experimentation, exploring what rock is and can be.  

Hearing them live, however, was entirely different compared to the cocoon of my headphones. 

The sounds were fuller, the pitch of the lyrics varied, and the live performance let the band improvise. The bass, played by Joe Bottaro, grounded the depth of sounds that I was experiencing with rich chords, while the drummer, Ryan Palfalvi, punched through the songs, bringing a sharpness I hadn’t anticipated. This audile fullness was something that hadn’t occurred to me so clearly until then. By streaming their album, I had compressed their sound. Streaming can be great, I can guarantee that. It’s how I listen to my music, other than the weekly vinyl. Similarly to photographing an object, a landscape, or a person, streaming strips a certain essence from music. That additional layer of atmosphere created in live venues can never be replicated through speakers and headphones (try as technological innovations might). Rock resides in the rapport between audience and performers in live spaces.  

On November 13th, I arrived to the venue, Le Balcon (connected to St. James United Church) a little while before the crowd and happened to cross paths with Old Soul’s guitarist, Peter Rallis. We chatted for a bit, and we agreed it would be best for me to explore the space and get a bird’s eye view from— you guessed it—the balcony. The room the band was playing in was very red and warm, at odds with their themes of flowing water and blues. There were intimate seats up on the balcony that were clearly meant for the canoodling couples lining the semi-circle wall above the stage. A great view, but I was here to plant myself squarely at the center of the crowd. I went back down as the opening set, Space Wizards, were getting ready to perform. The band set the feel of the night with cool, jazzy-psych tunes that transformed into a more intense rock energy at the end of their performance. We were given sips of what was coming next. We were primed.  

Old Soul got on stage, and the lights changed to blues and purples. Psychedelic swirls tattooed the walls surrounding the band. For this album release party, Old Soul was playing Undercurrent start to finish.  The album opens up with synthy bass chords right off the bat with “Closer”, something that felt more contemporary, more indie. But it also sounded like something from an 80s sci-fi film. Loreta maintained the gliding notes the audience is familiar with that extended and wrapped themselves around the instrumentals. I am shamelessly using the analogy that this track sounded as if I were hearing music through water. There was something muffled, intimate and close (ha) about this opening song that set it apart from their previous musical past. 

While Overgrown was a call reincarnating the rock and blues energy of the '60s and '70s—think Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, The Doors—Undercurrent blends this past sound with their new one. The album itself is more mellow at times—at one point, when the band performed “The River”, an acoustic forward piece, the audience all sat on the ground and swayed. I’d never sat on the floor of a venue like that before, at least not intentionally. We were lulled into believing it would remain this mellow the entire time. We were wrong. Old Soul tripped us up and recalled their rock essence with piercing guitar riffs, heavy bass and intense drum solos. Tracks like “Talking to Myself”, “Rolling Rock”, and “Colours of the Moon” added that high-energy beat to balance out the more lo-fi and groovy sounds.  

Between two songs, Loreta spoke to the audience about how this album was more intimate than what the band had previously made. I felt the intimacy and sensuality of their music, in hearing it performed live before my very ears. Engaging all the senses at this album release is part of that intimacy: the vibrant music gracing the venue, the bodies that crowd together and brush alongside each other, the smells of people’s perfumes, colognes, body odours, the taste of the double gin and tonic in my hand,  the pulsing lights in time with the music. I didn’t feel that intimacy when I first heard the album on the bus. Time and place were totally essential here. However, when I do listen to the album, which has been a lot more since the album release party, I’m reminded of what I felt when I was there. The auditory cues are like what the madeleine cookie is to Proust’s narrator in In Search of Lost Time, jogging my memory involuntarily, conjuring just as sweet recollections of my experience. I wonder now how my experiences of countless albums before this one would be entirely different had I heard them live.  

Undercurrent feels like a new vision of rock. One where bodies still shimmy and writhe in response to the music. This vision is informed by the past, but does not dictate where the sounds converge in pools.  The fluidity of Old Soul cannot be confined to falling somewhere between genres—they rearrange themselves according to the vessel they find themselves in. And that vessel can be broken down and reconstructed countless times over.