The Pack A.D. at Lucky Bar

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Thursday, October 2nd, 2014
8:00 PM

East Vancouver indie-rock duo The Pack A.D. perform on October 2 at Lucky Bar with guests.

Tickets are available at Ditch Records, Lyle's Place, and online. (Ages 19+)

About The Pack A.D.

"We never really consciously have a plan of action. If you call a plan of action 'just get better,' then that's the plan we went with for this album."

So says The Pack A.D. drummer Maya Miller of the process that led the hard-slogging East Vancouver duo to its fifth album and Nettwerk debut, Do Not Engage. And it's hard to disagree. Long celebrated on the fringes of Canada's endlessly fruitful indie-rock scene as a feral live act non pareil and a band destined to eventually make that one record that finally puts it over the top, The Pack A.D. has delivered the album that should finally, genuinely – yes – put it over the top. The tirelessly hard-working and hard-touring duo of guitarist/vocalist Becky Black and powerhouse drummer Miller doesn't even consider Do Not Engage as a fifth recording, in fact; it's moved so far beyond the primal banshee-blooze of its first two albums, 2007's debut Tintype and 2008's Funeral Mixtape, that they no longer considers them part of their catalogue. "I don't count the first two anymore as they feel so far away from what we do now," Miller told the Vancouver Province earlier this year.

"We've been getting more straight-up rock, I think, and I guess a little weirder," says Miller. "It's sort of a natural evolution, how we've changed," adds Black, crediting some of the new record's advances to a habit shared with Miller of "listening to too much psych-rock and zoning out. I really like that genre of music."

"I guess some bands never change but, I don't know, I think most bands do. You've gotta keep trying new things or it's just boring."

With its most confident and original recorded calling card to date now in hand ("Let's put it this way," says Miller wryly, "I don't hate this album yet, and I usually hate them fairly quickly") The Pack A.D. will continue to do what it has relentlessly done since the beginning – albeit this time on a larger, more international scale.

"We're probably gonna tour this one even harder," says Miller.

"We record an album and then we kinda have nothing to do except tour," affirms Black. "This is our only job. We're itching to tour."