Downtown: The music hall and the dance floor, the hub of salvation after a frantic workweek of doubt, fatalism and futility. The post-modern condition. There is a feeling of wanting, a need to find something that exists in the spaces in between. Not contentment, not despair, just ……nothing. A moment without strings that always seems to reach into both the future and the past. The connotations are endless, overwhelming, too many to count. Maybe tonight it has been found, if only temporarily, as people gather in the washes of colour gushing through the amplifiers. Neurotransmitters, hormones and misfiring synapse come together and twist around. The music twists and turns, washing the crowd, splashing all the way to the back of the room. The conscious explodes. Colour, chemicals and, if you’re lucky, the defense mechanisms of the conscious ego shatter. The crowd, raw, exposed and exhausted will dance, sing, shout and stare while Beautiful Nothing, a Canadian band from Toronto, has found their home.
After forming in 2001, Beautiful Nothing formed a niche in the local music culture they could call their own. It wasn’t something predetermined, the sound wasn’t consciously decided in any way, it just happened because five long time friends, including three brothers, wanted to do whatever it was they did. The sound is a subtle mix of 80’s pop, electronica, fat bass, heavy beats and deep percussion; whatever sounds right. Then the guitars come in, they can be dissonant and loud, not jarring just uncomfortable enough to hit that sweet spot where the tension needs to come out. But then again, there is a definite spaced-out jazzy quality too, just enough to perk the attention of the seasoned listener, the kind of listener who can’t seem to find whatever it is in a band they are looking for. Sometimes beautiful nothing’s music is darkly sexual, like a hypnotic dance where the backbeat provides the thrust and the on beat, that …stare. Sometimes the songs are of the far off cries in the suburbs. Of doubt and loneliness, the feeling of an infinite imagination caged in physical form. The songs are poppy in a way that makes it easy to go inside the song, feel it; dance or cry to it. It’s about songs that evoke a sense of purpose that is indefinable yet can exist in everything.
Beautiful Nothing is FACTOR funded, has played with The Trews, Mobile, Thornley.... Won numerous band battles, have been in the top 10 of garageband.com for 8 weeks straight...
