By Jon Roe
Luckily, it’s not the fictional Japanese monster (famous for its heroic battles with Godzilla through the streets of a fictionalized Tokyo) attacking first street. And it’s not the Polish metal band either. It’s an intense art metal outfit from the very real city of Vancouver.
“I don’t think any of us are super into Japanese movies,” admits vocalist Karla Miller. “We just thought it was cool. It was fitting–it fit the music. We like a lot of the images, too.”
Who doesn’t love the image of a 16,000-ton larvae latching on to and destroying the Tokyo tower? Well, besides the aforementioned fictional Japanese people. They also probably wouldn’t like the idea that their iconic bug’s namesake has been hijacked by a band who doesn’t know much about the creature. But it’s easy to see why Mothra the band could be drawn to the iconic pictures of a giant pest decimating the land of the rising sun.
In their own upcoming assault, Mothra the band is hoping to repeat the success of their previous raid on the now Broken City, as opposed to their first show in Calgary where the band had a Godzilla-less–yet still unpleasant–welcome.
“[It was] poor promotion, I guess,” says Miller. “The only people that showed up the first time was our four friends. The other band we were playing with was from Vancouver too. They had like two friends show up. There were no local bands on the bill and neither of us had played there before. It didn’t go over so well.”
Poor promotion has hit the band more than once. A poster once confused the Polish Mothra with the Vancouver-ish Mothra, and pointed viewers to the metal Mothra’s MySpace.com page instead.
Though they may not know anything about the mythical protector of the shobijin, Mothra still exhibits some of the creature’s attributes, like an abhorrence of cold. Mothra the creature comes from a tropical Polynesian Island that was the site of more nuclear explosions than the real Japan. Mothra the band comes from a city prone to panic after an inch of snowfall.
That, and they almost died in a blizzard the last time they drove on the Coquihalla, the oft-hellish toll highway running between Merritt, B.C. and Hope.
“[The Coquihalla highway] is crazy,” says Miller. “We were just like, ‘We need to make it through the Coquihalla on Monday and everything will be alright.’ We have a really old van, too–a 1991 Chevy. It’s in awesome shape and it took us all the way across Canada and back in the fall. We put like 20,000 km on it. Still, we just wanna make it [through the Coquihalla] on Monday.”
The band were almost forced to pull out their deadly scale-attack to escape from the blizzard that hit the highway when they made the drive in February. Their van was coated with ice on the trip to Kamloops and had ice in the gas line that caused the gas pedal to stick on the way back home. Luckily, Mothra the band managed to escape uninjured.
They’ll have to get used to the cold once they move to their new central location, though. To help decrease the distance on their massive Canadian tours, the band is moving to Regina, where regular moths can hardly survive the harsh winters, let alone freakish mutant ones.
“We’re buying a house and having a studio in the house,” says Miller. “We’re going to tour as much as we can. Where we are right now, it’s just ridiculously expensive to even live, never mind doing what you want to do in life. We have a lot of friends that are in bands in Regina. It’s going to be a good change.”
Confusing Ishiro Honda references aside, the three-piece band brings an interesting musical selection to the Castle this week. The band plans on spending the entirety of next winter recording an album in their new Regina pad, so this might be the last chance to check out this artsy beast before it hibernates to complete its next larvae.
“The next step will be to get something recorded,” says Miller. “Something that’s a good representation of where we are. We’re just taking it as it comes. [Getting on a label] will definitely be the next step. We do understand that we’re a little unconventional and a little bit risky. We’d appreciate a label that would be really stoked on that and be really excited about doing something that’s really new.”