It’s Saturday afternoon and the members of Night Crash Noir – singer Nikole Wiseman, guitarist George Bettencourt, bassist Johnny Charmer and drummer Troy Larabie – are understandably elated. The night before they played their first ever show as a band during the GO Music Festival in Kitchener.
Kicking back with a brew at the low key Irish pub Failte in Waterloo, the four musicians reflect on how easily it’s all come together; literally, they had only been rehearsing together for a few weeks. But don’t mistake this for a rush job. Two and a half years of solid planning, song-writing and producing demos at home laid the ground work for Night Crash Noir, says Wiseman. “With the GO Festival coming up this year, it kind of lit a fire under us to get the band together.”
Bettencourt and Wiseman worked together those nearly three years to “layout the blueprints.” When it came time to but together the live show, they turned to a couple of friends to fill the bass and drum slots.
“For me, as a drummer, it was quite simple,” says Larabie, who was invited onto the project after bumping in to Bettencourt at the pub. It happened simply, “‘Hey Troy, do you want to play drums? Listen and tell me what you think,’” remembers Larabie. “And as soon as I heard it, it was like hey this is something I could do today. It jelled so well, I had no choice but to say yes.”
Charmer, meanwhile, saw Bettencourt regularly as Bettencourt plays bass in Charmer’s band Red Orkestra. Both men are guitar players first, so when invited to join the band, Charmer happily returned the favour and played bass for Bettencourt.
“I’ve put everything on hold right now for this because George was committed to the Red Orkestra when we were pushing stuff and playing lots of shows,” says Charmer. “So right now, Red Orkestra is kind of being pushed to the back a little bit and we’ll focus on Night Crash Noir for a while and get it off the crowd.”
The appeal for both Charmers and Larabie in building a band in quick turn around was purely musical. Both musicians say that once they heard the music and caught its groove, they were hooked into making Night Crash Noir more than a one-time gig. Charmers heard the demo in a car in Niagara Falls, and instantly knew there was something there. “As soon as heard it I said holy crap, that’s really different.”
The sound of the band plays off some shared general influences and a few specific artists unique to each band member. “If you listen to the music, it’s got a really good milieu of a lot of different things,” explains Larabie. Motown from the 50s and glam rock from the 80s being primary source material, Bettencourt highlights the sound of Roxy Music and the lyricism of The Smiths
“I listened to the Smiths as well, but I grew up listening to Patsy Cline and a lot of the war time crooners,” says Wiseman, who co-writes the songs with Bettencourt, as well as singing them. “I love that stuff,” she continues. “I love Connie Francis; I love Vera Lynn. So I mix that with my love for rock and roll and I guess this is what we end up with.”
“There are two types of music: good music and bad music,” says Bettencourt. “There are the absolute foundations that we adore, and those influences are inherent in the songs, but it’s just music.”
“I relate everything to food,” begins Wiseman, to the momentary confusion of her bandmates. “You can have your favourite foods: you can have pizza one night, you can have steak, and you can have pasta or whatever. You can have a little bit of everything: a buffet. Everybody loves a buffet.”
“So [we’re] a steak and pasta pizza?” asks Bettencourt
“We are a rock ‘n’ roll buffet,” offers Charmer.
This summer Night Crash Noir will focus on building a following and getting an album together. They want to shore up what they’ve done so far, and keep pushing themselves to reach the fullest possible potential of the band. But the majority of their focus, and their excitement, is in getting an album together, and already Bettencourt has bold ambitions.
“I want a CD to be put among other people’s CDs on the rack from Ikea,” he says excitedly. “I don’t want it to be up there because it’s my friend’s band and it’s up there because it has to be. It’s up there because it must be. It’s a reckoning.”
“I also think that if we get this album out - that’s a chapter,” adds Wiseman. “I constantly have an orchestra playing in my head, so I have a million more albums to put out. I like the idea of having the album out there and being able to move on to the next album, and the album after that.”
What’s clear though is that no matter the specifics, Night Crash Noir is a band aching to break out. They are fully committed to this outfit and believe wholly that they’re doing 
something new and fresh, and more important than that, they’re having a good time doing it.
“The reason why it’s jelled in three weeks is because I don’t just feel that I joined a bunch of musicians, I feel like I’ve joined a family,” says Larabie. “I’ve never played with this guy [indicating Charmer] before in my life, but in the last few weeks he’s become my best friend because drums and base have to stick together.”
“This is the most excited I’ve been about a project in a long time,” adds Charmer to the agreement of the band. “I love my band and I love what I do, but there’s a different level of excitement with this. It’s like playing with my first band again.”
“Everybody is in this band because the music is perfect for that individual,” says Bettencourt. “This is the best music I’ve ever done in my life and it’s only taken 20 years to achieve this.”
Night Crash Noir begins a weekly gig at The Boathouse in Kitchener starting March 4th. To hear more from the band, head over to their MySpace page.
Written By Adam A. Donaldson
