Vancouver’s Uncle Strut is doing its part to make guitar solos, and moustaches, cool again
Headlining the Khatsahlano Street Party’s Burrard Stage, the fast-rising band is unafraid to spice up its surf-inspired indie rock with country, funk, and Latin elements
Uncle Strut
Uncle Strut performs at the Khatsahlano Street Party’s Burrard Stage on July 11 at 8 pm
THERE’S SOMETHING TO be said about a band with a distinctive image. Think of the Beatles in their marching-band uniforms circa Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, or the guys in Devo with their matching jumpsuits and red “energy dome” hats.
Uncle Strut hasn’t gone to quite those lengths, but as Jasper Matthias learned, there are certain elements that go into the band’s look. Matthias—also known as “Raspy Shreds”—now plays lead guitar in Uncle Strut, but he started out as a fan.
“Before I joined the band, I saw these guys play at the Hollywood Theatre,” he tells Stir during a slightly chaotic five-way Zoom call alongside his bandmates. “I was in line to get in, and the security guard comes out with a bunch of fake moustaches. And I was like, ‘Uh, what the hell is this? What are you giving me a fake moustache for?’ And I didn’t put it on at first, but as soon as I walked in, I just looked up, and there were, like, 150 people all wearing these fake moustaches. And it was all for the Uncle Strut Show, so then I was like, ‘Okay, this is a thing.’”
The lip warmers on the stage, mind you, were all genuine, as were the flowing locks of hair, which meant that when Matthias got tapped to join the group—he replaced original guitarist Will Horning—he was compelled to make some alterations to his personal style.
“When he joined the band, he sort of had short hair and no facial hair,” drummer Quincy Flowers recalls. “We sort of jokingly said, ‘Uh, you know, if you're gonna be in this band, you gotta at least try to grow a moustache.’ And Raspy, you were pretty sure you couldn't grow one, right?”
“I have never grown a moustache in my life until I joined Uncle Strut, and then I got the power,” Matthias says. “And the music came to me and it flowed through my hair follicles and it said, ‘You will now grow a moustache.’ And my girlfriend was a little bit questioning it for a couple weeks, but she said, ‘I'll give you two weeks and we’ll see what happens.’ And here I am. So…”
Soup strainer solidly in place, Matthias took his place in the Uncle Strut lineup alongside Flowers, bassist Simon Tejani (who also happens to be Flowers’s brother), and singer-guitarist Tyson McNamara.
The four-piece has built a reputation as an act to watch thanks in large part to its high-energy live sets, and solidified that stature with the release last spring of its debut album, Home At Last. The core of the Uncle Strut sound is indie rock infused with back-to-the-beach elements. This is perhaps best exemplified by “Love”, which rolls along on a bass-driven surf groove before hitting a rip-curl chorus with thundering drums.
Elsewhere, though, other elements drop into the mix. “Exit Sign” injects a bit of country twang into the proceedings, for example, while “Scarlett” takes a hard left turn towards California funk. The band’s brand-new single, “Bitter Ends”, released on June 23, is a sun-splashed rocker with a Latin accent thanks to its reggaeton-esque rhythm—and the trumpet doesn’t hurt, either.
Tejani says that the key to spicing the group’s signature sound up with disparate elements is that nothing should ever feel forced. “It almost always comes naturally,” he says. “One thing that I think is really special about our project is that there’s really no ego when it comes to bringing a song in. Once you bring it into the band, it kind of just becomes what it is. And if you hold onto it too tight, it often loses the thing that makes it cool in the first place. And so with something like ‘Scarlett’ or the song that we just released, which is ‘Bitter Ends’, both of those started very far away from where they ended up. If you’re open to the collaborative process and you can just let something kind of become what it should be, you can often get this vastly different song from what you originally wrote it as. That’s the coolest thing about working in a band. We all have different tastes, and it only serves the music more when you’re open to just letting everyone use their influences to bring a song to life.”
Adds McNamara, “I think it’s interesting because we have four different songwriters, so everyone kind of writes a little bit differently, and then once it’s presented to the band, everyone kind of gets to sprinkle their magic dust on it, and that’s how it becomes an Uncle Strut song.”
Matthias’s particular brand of magic dust is his facility with guitar solos. He may not be a highly technical shredder in the heavy-metal sense, but his fluid and melodic leads always serve the song tastefully. There was a time, of course, when guitar solos were decidedly unfashionable, but a certain other local band renowned for its six-string pyrotechnics helped move the needle just a touch.
“Yeah, I guess Peach Pit made it okay to do lots of guitar solos in indie-rock music,” Matthias says. “I’ve always just been a huge classic rock fan, obviously, a big fan of the greats, and I just love a good guitar solo. So, when I joined the band, these guys were into it, and with the style of music we're making, it was just fun to do so.”
“Also,” Flowers admits, “none of us are very good at writing bridges, so guitar solos fit in nicely.”
“We want to make them cool again,” says Matthias. Stranger things have happened, and Uncle Strut is already well on its way to rehabilitating moustaches and long hair in the indie scene, so why not? 
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