Vancouver’s The Pack A.D. carve out their niche

They’ve been likened to everyone from The White Stripes to The Black Keys but Vancouver duo The Pack A.D. are determined to find their own place on the alt-rock landscape.

Sirens, the first single off the band’s recently released album, Unpersons, has been moving up the Canadian Alternative Charts since it was released early last month.

With that attention, the pair is finding critics are prone to compare their music to their mainstream counterparts which is both a blessing and a curse, says guitarist/vocalist Becky Black.

“It’s a reference. If you like those bands, then you might like us,” she explains. “But just being compared as a copy or a rip-off of a band makes you feel like the music you’ve created is too much like something else.”

Black thinks most of it comes down to the fact The Pack A.D. is a duo so, naturally, they get compared to other duos. But some comparisons do leave her scratching her head.

“We’ve been compared to Tegan and Sarah which, musically, I don’t think we sound like them at all. And, I think we’ve been compared to Hole,” she says with a laugh.

Considering Tegan and Sara are folk-pop musicians and Hole is, well, Hole, it’s easy to understand why those comparisons are laughable to Black and band mate Maya Miller.

Unpersons, the band’s fourth full-length album, is packed with tons of 70s guitar riffs and gritty, almost self-deprecating lyrics.

Naming the album, Black and Miller started to think of books they both like. Having used literary references in some of their earlier music, they automatically thought of George Orwell’s novel 1984.

“A really cool thing in that book is when somebody is rendered no longer existing, like they never existed before. They become an unperson,” explains Black. “I thought that idea was really cool. It’s kind of what we’re born from, I guess.”

It’s almost a reflection of the way Black sees herself and her bluesy garage rock band fitting into the music industry, or not, for that matter.

“You want to make money selling what you create and part of that, for a musician, is that fame kind of comes with it,” she says. “It’s probably the half that I don’t really care for so much but you can’t have one without the other.”

Though, she admits, it’s not that bad.

“Knowing that people are listening to us and they want our music, it’s a good thing.”

The show

  • Get tickets Catch The Pack A.D. with special guests at Cafe Dekcuf (221 Rideau St.) at 8 p.m. Saturday night. Tickets are $12 at the door.

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