Victorious Combinations

Well, Isabelle and I have been self isolating for the past month as most of the world seems to have been, and to keep ourselves feeling good we've maintained our rehearsals and writing sessions. In the course of having a month to ourselves I figured I should attempt to tune up the old Baldwin upright piano that I inherited from dearly missed friend Todd Simko many years ago. As I went about tuning the piano it occurred to me that we should revisit some of our early material again. This song, Embrace , was a favorite of ours from the debut Combine the Victorious album The World Over . The album version, which came out in 2007, is a much bigger production with a full band accompaniment and a rather epic crescendo at the peak of the song. We opted for a simpler and more direct approach with this video, something that could be pulled off with only a single piano and our vocals. Last night we set up a camera, a microphone and a light and tried our hand at this song again. It took us a...

Just wanted to say what a great time we had performing as part of A Change of Frequency this past Friday at the Chapel Arts.  The whole night was a pleasure, with several good bands, a lovely atmosphere and all falling on our pal Todd Simko's birthday (May 2nd).  Todd would have been 48 this year. This was the second show Isabelle and I have played as a duo again and it went really well.  Our set opened with our version of the Calvin Harris song " Feel So Close " and then  progressed through an updated version of Crumbling Hearts, California, an electricfied version of Brotherhood that I think we're going to include on the upcoming album, and closed with Glasgow .  The response was incredible from the audience and I think it may have been the best we've ever performed a couple of those songs. After our set our friend Jordy Birch played a couple stripped down Guilty About Girls songs (and I snuck onto stage to accompany him on the drums). The rest of the ...

We've just done a serious reworking on our latest single "Brotherhood."  This new version is the result of several months of listening and pondering, as well as absorbing the comments of several producer friends of ours.  I'd like to thank everyone who's helped us so much over the past many months in the creation of this song, it really means a lot to us.  So big thanks to Justin "Juice" Kadis for his guitar playing and arranging, Misty Reid on drums, and Stefan Sigerson, Jimmy Zee, Jason Corbett and Jordy Birch for their assistance /comments with the production. And, of course, the wonderful Robert Edmonds for the cover art! Cheers to you all! Hope you enjoy the song.  I think it's one of our best to date. Mark Brotherhood by Combine the Victorious

Brotherhood is a song that I started writing in response to a very dear friend taking his own life back in 2012.  Our friend Todd Simko , who I'd played in Pure with back in the nineties, and who later performed with Combine the Victorious for several shows in 2007 and 2008, left us in the spring of 2012.  His death created a disturbing wake of emotions that eventually found their way into this song. Back in January or February of 2013 I remember starting the core idea one afternoon and the song took shape quite rapidly.  The lyrics are personal but I tried to keep them open to interpretation rather than literal; it's been a sad realization that this kind of incident isn't as rare as it may seem.   The truth is all four of us: Juice, Misty, Isabelle and I were heavily affected by Todd's death, and it's been many months of processing.  We recorded this version back in the summer, on a beautiful day in Vancouver full of sunshine and laughs.  Misty is pl...

Just wanted to leave a note stating how much fun we had at the "A Change of Frequency" festival on the weekend.  Both nights were good but Saturday was especially enjoyable for us! A positive, life-affirming event that brought together several generations of music lovers in a lovely venue all for a good cause (Canadian Mental Health Association).  Minna Simko did a brilliant job organizing the event and I think everyone involved had a great time!  The Columbia Theatre proved to be a viable theatre to hold such a show and I wouldn't be surprised if it became an important live music venue, just as Todd Simko always dreamed it could! ChukFoto photography We performed a short set (there were eight bands each night) that contained two new songs and two favorites from the Crumbling Hearts ep . Debuting for the very first time was the song written specifically in Todd's memory, Brotherhood as well as our new song Hardly Spoken (which we shared last week).  After...

Quite excited to be sharing some of our brand new material that we've been working on. This one is the first song written by the new Combine the Victorious lineup. Begun back this past winter from a lucrative improvisation, Hardly Spoken is the first song by Juice, Misty, Isabelle and me all working together. The sound relates to where we were headed with the Crumbling Hearts ep, but there is so much more going on now. The addition of Misty's Rhodes keyboard part, Juice's flowing guitar work, the story of the lyrics from Isabelle, and the not so subtly eastern electro-disco keyboard parts, all add up to something bigger, more complete, dramatic and danceable. Our direction seems to be solidifying: perhaps all the comparisons to Abba weren't misplaced! Have a listen and let us know what you think! We'll be performing this one on Saturday night at the A Change of Frequency music festival, along with debuting another one titled Brotherhood (written s...

Our dear friend Todd Simko died last year and in his memory his wife Minna has fulfilled one of his dreams to put live music back into an ignored venue in New Westminster - The Columbia .  The music festival is titled "A Change of Frequency" and its proceeds will go to assisting Mental Health.  There is going to be two evening full of music, May 10th and 11th.   Combine the Victorious is included on the bill for the Saturday night, May 11th .  There promises to be several wonderful moments in this event, and we're all looking forward to performing (though Juice has the heaviest load of everyone!  Not only will he be playing with Combine on our new material but he's promises to also play guitar with Pure as well as drumming with Fine Times all on Saturday night!) We've got a new song titled Brotherhood that I"m really looking forward to playing on the night.  The whole thing is going to be great, just check out the poster that the inimitable  Rob E...

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...

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...

10 Jun 2008 Todd Simko to play with Combine the Victorious It's with great delight that I can announce that Mr. Todd Simko (former guitarist from Pure ) has agreed to perform with us on our July 18th show at the Biltmore Cabaret . He has also done us the honour of playing on our latest track Decay . Those guitars are all from the master himself! In addition to Todd we also shall have the pleasure of Kevin Jones (The February March) joining us on the drums as well. It shall be a more stripped down show, we're looking at restructuring some of the older songs to be playable with just bass, guitar and drums. Isabelle and I want to try out a more intimate club style on this gig. Other big news is that our label, Boutique Empire , is off the ground and proudly presenting this upcoming showcase. The roster includes Combine the Victorious , Guilty About Girls (Jordy Birch's new group) and of course, Sex With Strangers . SWS will be unveiling the new ...

14 Feb 2008 CtV band update. It's funny that even though Combine the Victorious has only been performing live for less than a year now we've gone through several band member changes. Our first gig, performed in our basement, had Todd Simko ( Pure 's guitarist) playing guitar with us. Then, after our debut show at Richard's on Richards, Jesse Smith moved away to Toronto to play with his brother in Birds of Wales . In stepped Kevin Jones , ( The February March 's drummer) as Jesse's replacement. He's still with us along with his brother Nick Jones on keyboards: in fact Nick is the only other member of CtV that's been with us from the first rehearsal. Our second guitarist, Marc Wild , gave us three excellent shows, two of which were at Richard's, but after a very hectic 2007, Marc wanted to focus on his own music this year and opted out of doing more live performances. Considering how busy the guy is, it's wasn't...

25 Sep 2007 The Story Behind Blue Kitchen Current mood: amused It's been a while since I've written about any of the songs so I thought today might be a good day to record the backstory behind Blue Kitchen . This song was the very first song that Isabelle and I wrote for our project. After the initial idea to write an album was born, a few weeks later we decended to the basement to see if we could write anything worthwhile. So armed with nothing but a concept, we booted up the G5 and sat down to write. Hmm.... I picked up a guitar and played a really silly riff: something like a Rage Against the Machine meets Extreme kind of riff - very ridiulous. However it did provide us with somehting to sing over and the first draft of Blue Kitchen was born. That initial draft had some very dodgy lyrics to it: I seem to recall my lines being sung in an incredibly awful psuedo bluesy manner, which, if anyone were to ever have heard it, probably would have ...

5 Mar 2007 Our First Gig Current mood: mellow Just a quick word to thank everyone for coming to our party on Saturday and watching the band perform for the first time ever. We had an amazing time, it was so fun and the warm reception from everyone was incredible. Isabelle sang in front of people for the first time in her life and did an awesome job. I probably could have attempted to play a bit tighter and sing a bit more on the money but I was having too much fun to tone it down enough to keep it tight. Jesse was brilliant as always, he's such a pro, his drumming thankfully kept us together when my mind went a bit blank at times. Nick was great, but for the first time ever I heard him hit a couple wrong notes on the piano (the guy's a complete perfectionist - it was good to hear him be human after all). And then I must give very special thanks to my friend Todd Simko for playing guitar with us on our first gig. Todd was the guitarist in my ...