Watershed Hour

vibesflint:

if i sing around you i am 150% comfortable with you because i fucking hate my singing voice

brokenartsca:

WATERSHED HOUR are a garage rock duo from Whitby/Peterborough comprised of Natalie Resimes and Laura Klinduch.

Hit List
-voted Artist Of The Year in the 2011 Broken Arts Music Awards
-won Best Teen Band and Best Drummer at Oshawa Public Libraries’ 2012 Band Vs. Band competition
-played Toronto’s prestigious Wavelength concert series last September

Discography
Bend Your Knees [EP] (2011)
Bang With The Van Gogh [EP] (2013)

http://facebook.com/Watershed.Hour

lets take a moment to appreciate bass players

thrashin-of-the-christ:

when you can hear the bassist in a band

Current songwriting process:

• listening to too much Tame Impala
• recording songs with made up guitar chords and piano and psychedelic repetitive washed out lyrics
• recording songs without equipment aka using my webcam

Problems:

1. I don’t play guitar
2. We don’t have a guitarist
3. We’re not Tame Impala
4. I can’t write anything else

with an ‘x’

kissedanewok:

1. My professor is amazing 

2. I get to go on Tumblr, make memes, play Minecraft and roam the internet for marks! 

Before we were a band, Natalie wanted shirts. Just like how she wanted a touring van (which still comes up) & band posters (if anyone requests a poster, we will make you one). However the guitarist & I were all about the music, until we started playing shows & started losing gas money. I realized that we needed to stop losing money & with no cds, shirts seemed like a good idea at the time. 

Natalie & I were eating dinner with Cole whom some of you may remember as playing the electric kazoo for us. Anyway, we were eating at Jack Astor’s where you can draw on the table. Natalie drew a cartoon version of Cole wearing a shirt that read “some obscure punk band” as he is notorious for his band shirts. So it seemed fitting that when it came time to design a shirt that this would be our mantra. 

[*actually, Cole had told me way before I drew that picture that we should be called “Some obscure local band (you’ve probably never heard of before)”. Because we’d decided on ‘Watershed Hour’, I wanted to use “some obscure band” as our tagline or something because I thought it was brilliant] -Natalie

Natalie insisted on drawing. Here are the first prototypes:

You can see the logo that the guitarist came up with in the last one. So I consulted Defne Inceoglu with one of Natalie’s prototypes & she turned water into wine & came up with this:

Now those hardcore fans (my mom & Lisa) will notice the text is different. The drawing reminded Natalie of a Sonic Youth shirt she has & insisted it be changed to comic book text. We ended up choosing the closest colour to her shirt too. When I wore the shirt to school, my teacher said it reminded him of Sonic Youth without even knowing the story. 

I still like the original text better. By the by we just got more shirts in kiwi & lime. 

Depends. On 4 factors really.

• Writing utensil? -pen/crayon/lipstick
• Paper? -memo/receipt/napkin
• Time? -5 minutes before performing
• Mood? -can/can’t be bothered to write

If all these things are present then we have a set list. If even one of these things are missing than we’re winging it. 

But who writes the set list? Our guitarist did because Natalie & I didn’t care. However he was no longer in the group and we didn’t foresee the implications. I remember our first show without the guitarist & Natalie & I both realizing that they wrote the set list. I asked Natalie if she wanted to write the set list & she said “no.” So I got stuck with the job.

How do you write a set list?

Well it’s a complicated process that involves algorithms… actually not enough effort goes into writing one. Probably more effort should go into it but it’s hard to be impartial with your own music & therefore for sorting it. I could probably make a set list for another band no problem. Some things that we’ve learned through trial & error. 

• Don’t play your loudest song at the beginning in a cafe. Sometimes we’ve followed folk acts & you need to ease your audience into the heavier stuff. “Morgan Freeman” is the first song to go when we don’t want to play anything too heavy. 
• “Knock knock, Who’s there?, Doctor, Doctor Who” is the last song. It’s up for debate why this is.
• Leave something for the rare chance there’s an encore. We’ve been there where someone calls the dreaded “encore” & you’ve played all your good songs to fill in your time slot. We’ve then be left to play old songs, those loud songs we threw out or that new song we learned today.
• Laura’s song is only played if we don’t have enough songs to fill the time or it’s requested. Enough said.
• We’ve retired playing “The Last One.” Interpret that as you may.

Other than that I organize songs in that despite the saying, I don’t want too much cowbell or too much bucket. In discussing set lists with Bloody Boy Blue & Jonathan of The DGB, Jon came up with the brilliant idea that you should make a set list through iPod shuffle.    

5 minutes to the bus. Why we keep doing this to ourselves I don’t know. I’m carrying equipment in the stairwell, when all of a sudden a slow moving creature catches my eye through the window. Natalie. I begin to knock vivaciously and she’s not hearing it. I keep knocking until she jumps & looks behind herself. Eventually she notices where’s it’s coming from & peers at me uncertainly. I charade a running motion & mouth the word “run” while she gives me a blank look. It slowly cliques & she’s running on the spot to see if that’s what I meant before she’s running to grab the equipment. I abandon the equipment in the stairwell before I go to help her. We reach just before the bus stop before I tell her I have to go back for the stuff I left. When I get to the bus stop there’s all the equipment, but no Natalie. I leave her alone for a few minutes and she’s gone. Where the fuck did she go? The bus pulls up, the doors close & then Natalie shows up. We somehow catch the bus.

On the bus Natalie asks me if I know where the venue is & I told her I looked at a map (which for a directionally challenged person means nothing.) We get to a stop & Natalie notices it’s right there but it’s too late, the bus is already in motion. So we end up 2 blocks away at the terminal. We got off the bus & to say we’re moving slow is an understatement. You come to realize how much cracking is in the road with the amount of times the rolling amp got stuck on the sidewalk. I almost get hit by a bus. The bucket falls. Its contents spew out onto the oncoming traffic. 15 minutes later we somehow reach the intersection which is normally a minute away.

Our next obstacle is crossing. Another thing you come to realize, how little time you have to cross. Multiple times we try to cross the road before the amp gets stuck on the road, the hand tells us to stop crossing & Natalie is shouting at me, “RETREAT, RETREAT!” A guy who later tells us he’s “an environmental lawyer who went to Trent in the 70s” comes to our rescue. He helps us get the amp across & ends up pushing it the rest of the way.

In conversation he notes that we’re a two-piece & then asks if we play folk. Natalie says no we play “alternative rock.” To this he responds, “oh like Coldplay.” Natalie says no & he asks what our influences are. Natalie says “Nirvana” & he goes “oh that’s heavy.” Along the way he makes us take a picture of him with his phone because his friends won’t believe him. He then asks us what we’re studying. Cultural studies? To which Natalie says Forensic Science & he starts laughing. We ended up giving him a shirt & he wanted to take our picture too.   

And my Media Studies prof was at the show.

You hear frantic knocking on your door on a Saturday afternoon. You open the door to see me staring at you with a pleading look. You fast walk to my room and pick up whatever drum crap is lying outside of my room today. You then begin the arduous walk to the other side of campus wondering how the heck I’m going to catch the bus that is leaving in 5 minutes. I drop a drum on the bridge and it rolls to try to commit suicide into the river before I stop it with my foot. We soon catch up to someone pushing an amp with their purse and a box of drum stuff on top and a bass strapped to their back- my bassist/singer. We catch up just in time to see the box drop and the contents spill out onto the walkway. Somehow, we make the bus. If you’re living in my residence, you know this story all too well. This is a typical Saturday for Watershed Hour. 

If you related to this post, sorry. I will make it up to you somehow. Still haven’t figured out an economic way to get to a Peterborough show this Saturday though…

I need to see your ID. 

• We’re the band.
• I don’t carry ID.
• I forgot it.
• I’m not drinking.
• The owner said we could be here.
• Sure, right after I carry this giant amp in. 

We’ve used all this & more to get past this request. At a recent show we carried equipment back and forth in no problem. Then we slyly avoided the door people before escaping to the porch. It was then that security tracked us down & asked us the dreaded question of where our ID was. We got kicked out and our last ditch attempt was that we were on the club’s LED sign. We weren’t even allowed back in to get our equipment. It was a Halloween show & I said how we should’ve dressed up so that they wouldn’t have been able to tell us apart from people’s IDs. 

One time Natalie said that she didn’t have ID because she wasn’t planning on drinking because she has to drive. I stood beside her thinking, Natalie, you need ID to drive a car. Later on in the night they tried to kick us out while the band after us was using my drums. I told them straight up I wasn’t going anywhere without my drums & they tried multiple times to get us to leave. Security ended up standing beside us during the whole set before kicking us out after I took my drums.     

Age ain’t nothing but a number, try telling security that.

I saw Adam (also known as “Feiz” so says his facebook) drumming in Quantum Odyssey with a large but shitty sounding cowbell. Bigger doesn’t always mean better kids. I gave Feiz a cowbell because I had 2 identical cowbells. You can now hear the cowbell at the end of his new band’s first released song that you can download for free. 

http://www.reverbnation.com/theneighboursband

Now another cowbell of mine was accidentally taken by a band called The Shit Disturbers who mistook my cowbell for theirs at a show. Send them threatening messages demanding my cowbell. (Actuality: I haven’t got around to picking it up from them, it’s been a year)

My most recent cowbell comes courtesy of my dad & Value Village: