Victorious Combinations

20 Feb 2012 Even though it's a few years after the initial release, here is a new lyrics video for our track FKBC.  Pretty straight forward, but it seemed fun to do.

3 Mar 2011 Jellyfish vs. iTunes    We are offering a free download of this song at our bandcamp page.   Please click here to jump.  Jellyfish footage courtesy of Archives.org .   Lightshow courtesy Apple. 

25 Aug 2010 New Video - Way Stations in Space We've just made a new video for our song Back In Style .  Thanks to our friends Mark Hjorthoy (of Good Natured Threat ) we have discovered the joys of digital archives.  There is a great massive storage of video footage from all walks of life.   In a random scurry through the virtual vaults we discovered this film Way Stations in Space and Isabelle became very excited about the idea of placing our song to these images.   The most remarkable thing is that there are several moments where the two seemingly disparate narratives overlap to create an new story.   Kinda like that famous Wizard of Oz mashed with Dark Side of the Moon thing.   Only ours involves Space!   If you haven't already yet, please check out our new bandcamp page.  I honestly think this  is the best music service on the net>>> http://combine...

10 Mar 2010 A review for "Disagreements" Just found this one online.  It was published last month, but Isabelle came across it in her travels the other night.  Thought it was rather favourable. Combine the Victorious are having "a very fun life" in Vancouver "A love for music starts off quite innocent. It begins when you’re young and you hear something catchy on the radio. That’s when you decide “yeah I like this.” From that point on the gateway is open and it doesn’t take long to flood. Soon you’re an addict and there’s no turning back. Music has become the cornerstone of your existence. Mark Henning and Isabelle Dunlop are two people very familiar with the compelling addiction that is music, and Combine the Victorious is their electronic fix. Henning, former keyboardist for alternative rockers, Pure , back in the 90’s, is a renaissance musician. He’s one of those people who can walk into a jam session and show everyone a thing or two ab...

20 Jan 2009 Province Review of "Disagreements" Just had a heads up from a few friends that we received a review in the Vancouver Province paper today.   Not a bad one I think.  Always happy to see what Tom Harrison makes of our music.  

24 Nov 2008 "Disagreements: tomorrow (hopefully) Happy Monday to you! Well if all is going according to plan, we should have our second release up on iTunes tomorrow, November 25th 08 .  The Disagreements ep took quite a bit of work, and seemed as though it might never be finished: but we did put a stamp on the package and sent it in to our distributor last month in the hopes of it actually being processed in time for our release date.  We decided to release the ep entirely online, no cd's, just downloads.  So far we've sold almost five times as many copies of The World Over from iTunes than on cd (I'll admit that this might possibly be due to not utilizing a physical distribution system other than our myspace and .com page - but I've had nothing but grief from such services in the past) so it makes sense to us.  Additionally neither Isabelle nor I have actually purchased a cd in more than 15 months - we're truly converted to the con...

7 Nov 2008 New Song: Please Current mood: inspired After many months of writing, recording, erasing, re-recording, re-arranging, waiting for objectivity to return, abandoning, peaking at it and sharing it with friends overseas we've finally posted our best song to date: Please.  Well best song is rather subjective so I'll let you decide which is best, but it's certainly the best one in my opinion. Please was written in it's first draft back in January this year.  We posted it for a while in that version but it started to grate on me a bit so we took it down thinking it just needed a better recording to make it work.  I had Kevin over to track the drums at a slightly faster tempo than the demo, and then I figured it would just be a case of overdubbing the parts onto the bedtracks and we'd have our song.  However it was anything but that simple.  Rather like our song Decay , Please took months of reworking to get it into the arrangemen...

25 Oct 2008 New Song "Charmer" Afternoon everyone, Isabelle's in Alberta on the SWS western Canadian mini-tour, and I was left with too much time on my hands, therefore wanted to post another of the new tracks for the upcoming ep.  Charmer is the first track on Disagreements , an instrumental and meant to be the welcome mat for the collection.   It's kind of the darker side of our song Decay, well, it's meant to be at least.  After listening to all the songs in a row we thought the album might be a bit too dark, too moody, so the instrumental is an attempt to balance the entire listen, make it a bit lighter.  Anyway, hope you like it.  Looks as though my deliberations have put us back a bit on our release date, but I really want to make sure everything is as good as it can be before we set these songs forth into the world.  Hopefully I'll submit the songs to our distributor on Monday and then we can shoot for a late Nove...

14 Oct 2008 Disagreements - Credits Hello, happy tuesday. The songs for the ep are all mixed now, the mastering has been done but we haven't heard it yet, hopefully tonight.  In anticipation of the release I wanted to post the credits for the songs as a way of saying thank you to everyone involved.  It wasn't as extensive this time as the first album as we made it here at Imagined Aire Studio rather than going to Mushroom (sorry, Hipposonic West).  However I think we've managed to get a few very nice guest performances from our friends, and the songs all sound better for their contributions. 'disagreements' 1) Charmer (henning) - instrumental 2) Decay (henning, dunlop, simko) vocals: isabelle backing vocals, bass, drums and other instruments: mark guitar: todd simko party vocals and percussion: rachel watson, arielle olivier, jordy birch, cory price, mark richards, mike gentile. 3) Fat Kids Big Cars (henning, dunlop) vocals: mark & isa...

27 Aug 2008 Updates - August 27-2008 Hi - just writing to say that we're trying to finish up the songs for the EP but have had a very exciting idea to get one of our friends to help us complete the last song.  We've asked Ingrid Schroeder to see if she could add her amazing voice to our song: Please .  There is a wonderful breakdown in the song that we both feel she could enhance with her sultry vocals and we're waiting to see if she's into a collaboration.  Fingers crossed because I just know it would sound incredible.  Please is over the top right now.  Probably going to be the best song on the ep.  It's very changed from our initial demo that we posted back in January.  More dramatic and orchestral sounding.  Now I'm thinking that's the way we want to go for the next record! Back in Style is almost done, we're re-singing our lead parts and I've changed the mix quite a bit as well.  A bit harder sounding and the...

22 Jul 2008 NEW SONG: Back In Style Hey, Wow, finally we have another new song. This one was another epic journey of recrafting and fine tuning, and though not nearly as arduous as Decay , it still it took quite a bit of fiddling to get it into this shape. I suppose it was really more about the mood and performance this time rather than the actual song itself. We'd written Back In Style back in September last year and it stood as an acoustic demo for months and months. Back in March I started to play it with the band and we kinda worked out an arrangement that seemed right. The other parts have all been abandoned but Kevin's drumming stood the test of time and is on record now. I will admit it's a lot easier to have someone else do the drumming! Thank you to Kevin Jones : very nice work. The lyrics are pretty stark on this one and it took both of us a while to come to grips with how it should/could be sung. As somber as they are, they...

25 Jun 2008 NEW SONG "Decay" Current mood: working Hey! Well after weeks of messing around, (over a year really) we've finally got our song Decay (formerly known as Bohemian Athenian ) up on our page. The story on this song is outrageously long, and for a little four minute song it seems quite strange that it took so much effort to complete. Back in March 2007 we'd recorded the original demo for a song then titled Bohemian Athenian. It had that title because in a dubiously inspired moment I'd started the song off with a little whispery chant of "I am a bohemian Athenian." I guess that lyric was born from our desire to one day have a little place in Greece to live in: somewhere warm, quaint and lovely, where we could hang out, walk to the village, have our friends over from North America or where ever and just relax and have fun. Of course the only little hitch to those words was the rest of the song had absolutely nothing t...

Good evening, I’m rather pleased to say we’ve finished the first song from our upcoming ep " Disagreements ." It is the awkwardly named track " Fat Kids Big Cars ." I think you’ll be able to guess what it’s about from the lyrics so I’ll leave that up to you, but it’s a curious little song that’s been floating its way to the surface over the past month. Isabelle and I had been trying to write another track when the chord progression to FKBC came out in a two minute flurry. I made sure to capture the rough idea, but we put it aside for a little bit so that we could focus on the other song, Please . I knew there was something cool about it because it seemed so simple and direct. It lived under the working title "Kinks Idea" for a couple months (just to give you an concept of how it sounded originally); almost like a punk song. However, my version of Punk Rock has always been tainted by New Wave , so I question if I could write a true Punk...

10 Mar 2008 Where Are You? Good afternoon, Well I was hoping to have a different song ready to upload this week, but I haven't been able to finish off either Bohemian Athenian or the final version of Please and we're quite a ways off on the other two songs still. (They're written just not recorded yet). So I've posted the almost completed version of Where Are You? . For those of you that have been following along, Yes this is the same song I put up back in November, so it's not really a debut, but rather a hint of things to come. As things currently stand I believe that Where Are You? shall be track four on the Disagreements ep, right before Please . Without that context it might seems rather downbeat compared to our other songs, however, in the flow it is a rather dramatic song and kind of makes sense with the other four songs. We've both been really busy these past few weeks and finding time to record the parts has been a ...