Calgary's Des Arcs pay tribute to drummer and scene veteran Dave Alcock with all-star present at The Palomino

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Within the obituary for Dave Alcock, there’s a checklist of acts the drummer-engineer-producer labored with. It’s an eclectic bunch and reads like a who’s-who of Calgary’s scene: Everybody from Jann Arden and Tom Jackson to Billy Cowsill to Huevos Rancheros, Nationwide Mud and Chixdiggit.

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“The variety of it, that’s what’s most putting about it,” says Travis Davies of Des Arcs, the latest band Alcock performed drums for. “It’s Jann Arden to Knucklehead to Amos Garrett. He did work for everyone. There was a slot there within the ’90s and 2000s the place for those who had been recording music in any trend you had been most likely at Sundae Sound doing it. I feel his greatest legacy will simply be ensuring the consumer obtained the very best out of it. He made lots of people higher and never simply higher sounding, however higher.”

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Alcock took his personal life on Jan. 1, forsaking generations of musicians he touched as an engineer, producer, musician and normal booster of the native scene. Whereas he was most lately taking part in with Des Arcs, he additionally frolicked drumming for The Gimmicks, Parkades and Falconhawk. Within the Nineties, he was a member of Chixdiggit and engineered the band’s 1996 self-titled album for Sub Pop Information.

Des Arcs will be a part of numerous bands on Might 13 on the Palomino Smokehouse for the Dave Alcock Tribute, which is able to double as a CD launch for the four-piece act. Evening Committee, Pussy Monster, Vailhalen, Meds, Ramblin’ Ambassadors, Forbidden Dimension and Dolphins Love Youngsters are additionally on the invoice.

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Produced by Lorrie Matheson, who additionally performs in Evening Committee, Masks is Des Arcs’ third full-length album since forming in 2015. Alcock’s “large, simple-but-badass” drums is a key part to the band’s punk-fuelled rock songs, which had been penned by Davies and bassist/vocalist Mark Rudd.  The band, which additionally consists of lead guitarist Dave Anderson, labored all through 2022 on the file. The bass and Alcock’s drums had been recorded at OCL Studios exterior of Calgary and the remaining was achieved at Matheson’s studio.

Songs comparable to Davies’ thundering opener Don’t Take It (Don’t Give It Away) and Rudd’s explosive Hold Me Away showcase each writers’ penchant for penning catchy hard-rock with a punky edge.

“We’re all in our mid-40s, obtained households, obtained jobs however nonetheless need to make what I name pretty intense and keenly conscious music,” Davies says. “For me, I wrote most of my songs on acoustic guitar in my yard. It’s so fascinating to get it into the rehearsal house the place you’ve gotten your amplifiers rigged up and an actual drummer pounding the skins, it’s like ‘Wow, this turned out a lot completely different than I believed in an important, magical method.’ ”

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Lyrically, Davies says he and Rudd consciously didn’t got down to write songs that explored themes, however their shared historical past naturally produces some overlap.

“I all the time like songs lyrically that the listener can plop themselves into,” he says. “They’re obtuse sufficient you can match your individual life in there and apply some which means to it and also you’re within the tune. That, to me, is what a superb tune does; it consists of the listener and lets them apply their very own life to it. On the similar time,  I write for me. It’s fairly particular. I have to get behind it with the intention to ship the type of power to do an genuine remedy vocally. That’s the type of steadiness it’s important to search, or at the very least I do and I feel Mark is similar method. You take care of points. There are actually some problems with dying on the file, coping with dying and being round it. I feel lots of people really feel frustration and isolation and questioning the highway you’re on.”

Rudd and Davies grew up with Alcock in Cochrane. When Alcock was drumming for Chixdiggit, Davies, Rudd and Anderson performed in The Exceptions from the early Nineties to the early 2000s. Previous to that Rudd and Alcock performed collectively in The Gimmicks. Drummer and scene veteran Brendan Tincher, who additionally drummed for Chixdiggit at one level, has joined Des Arcs.

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Alcock performed trombone in his highschool band and taught himself the drums. He studied audio engineering in London, Ont., earlier than returning to Calgary. He labored at Sundae Sound, a long-running studio that started in 1980. In 2001, Alcock bought the studio and moved it to Calgary’s northeast, the place he spent years serving to younger bands kind their sounds whereas working with established acts comparable to Tanya Tagaq, Jann Arden, Amos Garrett and Mike Plume.

His dying was devastating to his bandmates and the Calgary scene on the whole, Davies says.

“He was a mild soul, so encouraging of different folks’s pursuits and the place they needed to go and take issues,” Davies says. “He was an important people-reader and room-reader and only a sort, sort individual and an aesthetic man, too. He didn’t have a number of time for folks or issues that didn’t align with what he thought was being a superb individual. He wore that by way of all the things, ever since I’ve recognized him. He might all the time be trusted to do the suitable factor, to do the great factor. He was only a actual instance for me in my life and to lots of people.”

The Tribute to Dave Alcock takes place Might 13 on the Palomino Smokehouse. Doorways open at 7 p.m.