Armchair Cynics

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A band is like a person - the more you get to know it, the deeper it becomes.

When Armchair Cynics released the Killing the Romance EP in 2005, the Victoria-based four piece established itself as a sturdy modern rock outfit in a market already crowded with sturdy modern rock outfits.

And the Cynics might have disappeared forever inside that too-often dreary throng if it hadn’t been for the nuances rattling around inside numbers like “Bang” and “Surprise Ending” - an almost covert pop sensibility behind the arrangements and atypical chord changes that lifted Killing the Romance out of its stubbornly earthbound genre.

With its 2009 full-length Starting Today, Armchair Cynics is finally revealing how deep those nuances run, allowing that pop sensibility to bloom fully, and lifting the veil – at last – on a big, boisterous, expressive personality.

Or, as guitarist-vocalist Kenn Coutu shrugs, “We didn’t feel like we got what we wanted with Killing the Romance. We were a little too hard rock on it, and it’s just not who we are.”

“What we’ve done this time is closer to what we think of ourselves as a band,” bassist Aran Puritch adds.

Perhaps the purest dose of the Cynics’ fresh sense of self-awareness is in the title track.

“Starting Today” is a shot of radiant sunshine pop, a soaring feast of hooks big and small, and an anthemic throwdown for any and all optimists. Coutu says he likes its “airiness”. And when Puritch pleads that his band “likes danciness and a bit of fun” - in contrast one assumes to the agenda offered on the more minatory Killing the Romance - it’s almost as if “Starting Today” should start playing somewhere in the background.
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