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Open road for Two Hours Traffic

East Coast band heads to B.C. on Canadian tour with material from Little Jabs, and their latest album in the works
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Power Pop Two Hours Traffic rolls into town next weekend for a performance with Hey Rosetta! and The Danks at the GLC. Photo by Remi Theriault

Who: Two Hours Traffic

When: Saturday, Nov. 15, 9:30 p.m.

Where: GLC

Admission: $10 in advance at GLC, Katmandu and The Hub

With Liam Corcoran on lead vocals and guitar, Alec O’Hanley on guitar, keyboard and vocals, Andrew MacDonald on bass and Derek Ellis on drums, this indie band packs a powerful punch with their folk-inspired pop rock.

The foursome are pretty good pals, with at least two members — O’Hanley and Corcoran — going way back, all the way to kindergarten, in fact.

“I took piano lessons from his aunt with him when we were six years old,” O’Hanley recalled. “We’ve been picking away at it for a while now.”

The two formed an acoustic duo, also named Two Hours Traffic, during their high school years, bonding over a mutual appreciation for bands like Weezer, Beck and Radiohead. The moniker, which is actually extracted from the prologue to William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, carried forward to the four-man band they formed while studying at the University of Prince Edward Island in Charlottetown.

“I think the name just, these days, speaks to the universality of the band,” he said. “A lot of people like to take a crap on Shakespeare it seems just because everybody likes him, which has a parallel in pop music, too. A lot of people are pretty dismissive of the whole thing just because people like it, which is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”

The band put together a demo and handed it off to a well-known East Coast musician and producer, Joel Plaskett, who was playing a gig at a bar in their hometown.

“We’d been fans of his, and I just waltzed up at the end of the show and gave him our first EP, The April Storm , and he, gratefully, took it.”

A week later, O’Hanley sent him a gentle reminder via email to listen to it, and received an unexpected reply: Plaskett wanted to work with them.

“That was huge. You never expect that people actually listen to these things, but we lucked out — it was the first CD that we’d given to a person, really,” he said with a laugh. “After that, we just kind of packed it in, in terms of giving CDs out.”

Plaskett came on-board to produce their first self-titled full-length album, which was very well received — the track, “Limelight” was featured on the hit TV show, The O.C. “Better Sorry Than Safe” made CBC Radio 3’s year end list in 2005, and the album was ultimately nominated for best rock recording at the 2006 East Coast Music Awards. The success was definitely unexpected.

“We were pretty green to the whole scene and how it worked. We didn’t know what a publicist was, so we just handed our money over to this dude,” he said.

Well, it seems that luck is on their side. After the success of the first CD, they crossed paths with a producer from Beverly Hills, which led to their songs being picked up by some major television shows. They also soon found themselves on the road, touring with the likes of Wintersleep and Jill Barber, and The Joel Plaskett Emergency.

“That’s one of the best things about the touring is the new bands you meet — you cultivate various friendships over the years with bands like The Golden Dogs,” he said.

“We haven’t been in the studio in almost two years now, so its been a near perpetual tour, which is cool — I like being on the road quite a bit,” O’Hanley mused, reflecting on the pros and cons of lowering gas prices.

“Ultimately, it’s bad,” he concluded. “People are going to be driving more and pumping more carbon into the air.”

These musicians clearly have a lot on their minds.

Lyrically, Two Hours Traffic’s music is strong, but fairly pop-oriented, focusing mainly on young love. But O’Hanley said the content is quickly changing as members of the group grow up and gain more life experience, while they’ve maintained the catchy pop sound.

“A lot of the songs on Little Jabs , we were still teenagers when we wrote a few of them, anyways, whereas now, we’re not cynical — I don’t like to use that word — but we’ve had our fair share of hearts being stomped on,” he laughed. “…I think there’s going to be a cool thematic expansion on a lot of these tunes.”

The band plans to head back into the studio in January to work on their fourth full-length CD, again with Plaskett. But before they do that, they’re road testing some of their new material, so expect to hear a different take on Two Hours Traffic during their upcoming performance in Whistler, where they’ll be joined by Hey Rosetta! and their brother band, The Danks, which features O’Hanley and MacDonald, as well.

“The new tunes we’ve been road testing on this tour are, I think, on a whole other level. I think people are going to be knocked on their collective arse when the new record comes out,” O’Hanley said.

On the newer material, there’s a definite effort to sculpt the hooks and structural elements of their music.

“I think we’re more in tune with the idea of preserving the beat,” O’Hanley said. “Realizing the simplicity and pop economy are not bad things, at all.”