Ought

Ought are a band from Montreal on Constellation Records, which is both the most obvious and most misleading thing you can say about them. For one, they’re not actually Montreal natives, or even Canadians—their collective passports list birthplaces as far-flung as New Hampshire, New Jersey, Oregon, and Australia. Furthermore, their tetchy, talkative brand of art-punk makes them anomalies on a Constellation roster that, from the foundational releases of Godspeed You! Black Emperor to current franchise players like Colin Stetson, has mostly favored the abstract over the elemental. But this outsider’s vantage is precisely what makes Ought’s debut album, More Than Any Other Day, so endearing and electrifying. It’s an anxious, distressed record to be sure—brimming with feelings of disaffection and dislocation—but it presents itself as such simply to show you how that nervous energy can be put to more positive, constructive use. 

As legend has it, Ought came together at McGill University in 2012 during the “Printemps Erable”—i.e., the “Maple Spring,” when a push by the Quebec government to increase tuition fees across the province by 75 per cent prompted thousands of students to walk out of the classroom and into the streets for mass protests and school boycotts that lasted into the fall. For the members of Ought, it was an especially eye-opening experience, both as an immersion into Quebec’s proud tradition of civil unrest, and the celebratory, often musical form it can assume: the most enduring image of the 2012 movement is the sight of students and supporters dancing through neighbourhoods, banging on pots and pans in percussive protest. (A snippet of such a gathering can be heard in the dying moments of “Mladic” on Godspeed’s 2012 comeback release, Allelujah! Don’t Bend, Ascend!)

Now, More Than Any Other Day contains absolutely no songs about Quebecois education policy or the rising cost of living for undergrads. However, over its eight tracks, Ought strive to recapture and inspire that same sense of anarchic abandon they witnessed on the streets on Montreal in 2012. To that end, they couldn’t have chosen a more emblematic album cover—not because, as some have pointed out, its image of hands clasped in a show of solidarity bears an uncanny resemblance to another debut album from an idealistic rock band, but because, as the liner notes reveal, that photo was found discarded atop a dumpster. Accordingly, More Than Other Day is Ought’s effort to ensure that the basic tenets of passion and commitment don’t get tossed aside amid a culture of instant gratification and distraction, and remind their hashtag activist generation of how it really feels to feel. This is a manifesto to write more manifestos.  

And as singer/guitarist Tim Beeler convincingly illustrates throughout the record, the process of reconnecting with your inner iconoclast can be more potent than any drug. In the standout,Marquee Moon-lit ballad “Habit”, the addiction in question is to the act of expression itself, and the liberating/empowering sensation of getting something off your chest (even if the strung-out, string-screeched coda nods to a song about a different sort of habit). The almost-title-track “Today More Than Any Other Day” puts that transformative theory into even more explicit action: over a slowcore trickle, a dejected Beeler mutters the dispiriting line “we’re sinking deeper”—but then repeats those words over and over as the song accelerates until his ennui is reborn as exhilaration. And as the song hits its joyously frantic stride, even the prospect of going grocery shopping is elevated to a near-religious experience: “Today more than other day/ I am prepared/ To make the decision/ Between 2 per cent and whole milk,” Beeler shares, fully aware that the concept of choice in a late-capitalist economy is an inherently flawed one. But for him, even such small victories can provide one with the motivation to achieve much greater ones.

With his sardonic, conversational style and ticking-time-bomb outbursts, Beeler belongs to a lineage of brainiac-maniacs that span the likes of David Byrne and the Violent Femmes’ Gordan Gano to modern-day rant-rockers like Parquet Courts and Protomartyr. Likewise, the band’s sound encompasses myriad eras and permutations of proto- and post-punk: Velvet Underground drones (via the omnipersent hum of keyboardist Matt May), Feelies speed-jangle, daydreamy Sonic Youthian sprawl. And with the gritty grooves of “Pleasant Heart” and “Around Again”, bassist Ben Stidworthy and drummer Tim Keen display an amazingly deft, Fugazi-like facility with injecting a little funk into their punk without turning it into punk-funk.

But more so than any identifiable influence, More Than Any Other Day is ultimately defined by its unsettled, restless spirit; this is an album that treats panic attacks and adrenalized ecstasy as two sides of the same pounding heart, with its simultaneous transmissions of joy and fear, discipline and chaos, comedy and tragedy. As Beeler spells it out in the album’s thrillingly combustible closer, “Gemini”: “I retain the right to be disgusted by life/ I retain the right to be in love with everything in sight.” Though born of a highly politicized protest movement, Ought aren’t telling you what to do with your life. They just want to make sure you live it.