Evening Hymns reveal details of new album, new video and… themselves

07 January 2011, 09:30 | Written by The Line of Best Fit

(News)

Having released one of Oh! Canada’s favourite albums of 2009 in the form of Spirit Guides, 2010 saw Evening Hymns tour their native Canada as well as releasing the album and touring in France and Germany. During this time on the road frontman Jonas Bonetta has been drawing together songs and ideas to form a follow up record, tentatively titled Spectral Dusk. While Evening Hymns started life as a solo project, the line-up that will head out of the city and up to a log cabin in Northern Ontario later this month to record has expanded to include Sylvie Smith (also of The Magic), Shaun Brodie, several members of The Wooden Sky, and Ohbijou’s James Bunton, who co-produced the band’s first record. The band will be blogging the recording process, and promise audio and video will be posted on their Tumblr site as it progresses.

To mark the return to the studio the band are revealing a new video for ‘Dead Deer’. The video was directed, filmed and edited by Jessie Hayes, Chris Altorf, James Cooper and Mary Gerretsen. Bonetta took some time out to explain how the video came about:

“We worked with these guys on a really cool show called Late Night In The Bedroom. It’s like an arts talk show filmed in Toronto in different locations and it’s really great. They interview different artists and have a musical guest. Evening Hymns was a guest last year and I played a song on a rooftop in Toronto, and it was freezing cold then too. Not sure what’s up with these folks making me work in the bitter cold but alas, they do great work and I’m happy to have met them.

The water scenes were shot in late August on Lake Ontario. It was freezing cold and super windy. Not the most ideal weather conditions to shoot a nude music video. Originally we had “nude” underwear on so that we wouldn’t be completely naked but eventually, well, after a couple beers, the directors convinced us to just get naked so the shots would look better. I remember being pummeled by waves and Shaun and Sylvie both looking at me like “what the fuck are we doing naked in Lake Ontario in late-August?” but I was hit by another wave before I could answer. Eventually we had a lot of fun with it though. The waves were massive and you could kind of bodysurf them in to shore. I think the other parts were shot in Prince Edward County, which is a couple hours east of Toronto. We were actually away on tour when that segment was shot so we had no idea what it was going to look like. We were pretty blown away with the whole thing when they sent us through the first cut.”