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What goes around comes around

Conventional wisdom says what goes around comes around.
burnthe8track

Who: Burnthe8track with Field Day and Savannah

Where: Boot Pub

When: Thursday, June 3

Back in the mid-1990s, when Calgary punk band Field Day was in its heyday, they offered a scrappy up-and-coming Winnipeg band called Guy Smiley the benefit of their experience and helped them book and arrange their first tour.

The years went on and Field Day toured less and less as the Smiley crew toured more and more.

As a new millennium dawned Field Day fell into the vortex of "whatever happened to?" bands.

The guys in Smiley kept up the pace though, hitching their wagon to such punk rock luminaries as the Misfits.

But in 2001, on the eve of a Misfits tour, Guy Smiley broke up. Lone remaining member Derek Kun wasn’t about to cancel on the skeletal punk troupe though. (Some of the nicest guys you’ll ever meet, he claims. Jerry Only still calls him up just to see how he’s doing.)

Kun assembled a crew of mercenaries that included his brother Jason on guitar, and Sam Osland for drums. When the tour ended that summer the new band decided to stay together, adopting the name Burnthe8track, a loose reference to an old school record company that burned and destroyed its recordings to avoid paying the artists when it went into receivership.

With the exception of current bass player Mike Gorecki, the Misfits mercenary crew has since remained the same.

Burnthe8track’s fusion of more emo-like melodies with Guy Smiley’s driving punk and hardcore sound has worked out very well. Their first recording, March 2003’s Division EP recording led to a world wide record deal with Abacus Recordings for their debut full length album, recorded later that year. The Ocean LP is slated for release on June 1 in Canada and the U.S. and in Europe in late autumn.

The release will occur during the current Canadian tour, which will take the band from sea to shining sea, west coast to east. Guy Smiley did several shows in Whistler, but Thursday’s show at the Boot Pub will be Burnthe8track’s first.

Kun is hoping he’ll bring back some of Smiley’s Whistler fans.

"We have a very intense live show," he says. "We’re not shoegazers. We really get into the music."

His statement applies onstage and off. Kun says he’s a huge music fan and collector, and it was his personal habit of seeking out information on bands he listened to that inspired the detailed bios the band sports on their Web site. The band reveals current musical picks and reading material. They’re brutally honest. Check it out for yourself. How many guys admit to listening to Sarah McLachlan?

"We’ve always been the kind of band that doesn’t hang out backstage," Kun confirms. "Just because we’re the people on stage, we don’t consider ourselves any different from the people in the crowd, because we’re music fans too."

They’re still fans – as well as friends – of Field Day and Kun is now reciprocating for his first Guy Smiley tour.

Wondering what happened to Field Day? Come by the Boot Pub on Thursday and find out. And expect to see more of them in the future, Kun adds.

"They’re such a great band," says Kun, "and great bands like that always seem to reappear."

Thursday’s show at the Boot Pub is a special presentation of The Punk Night. For more information call 604-932-3338.