The beautiful season of music festivals officially begins this weekend with the holding of Santa Teresa, in Sainte-Thérèse. For the first time in its young career, the group Peanut Butter Sunday will be celebrating: a good dozen concerts – they call it their “World Domination Tour”! — are already on the agenda of Acadian rockers who have been nodding heads in recent weeks at the Francouvertes with their jovial pop-punk songs, sung in the French unique to the Baie Sainte-Marie region.
“We write the same because that’s how we talk — with our slang, our lingoit sounds a bit cheeky, in-your-faceeven if our music is not surly”, emphasizes Michael Saulnier.
Peanut Butter Sunday quartet singer and guitarist Michael Saulnier and Normand Pothier, respectively, are the first to admit they’re not reinventing the wheel with their three-chord pop-punk songs, “sometimes four”, suggests Pothier. But serving up good old pop-punk riffs in the sauce of Sainte-Marie Bay, with the banter of the French speakers of this region, suddenly makes this old sound fresh and relevant again.
“It works with punk because punk, in spirit, is against the rules said Saulnier, adding in the same breath: “I am not a rebel, by any means — I work in construction! Normand continues: “We have known a lot of backlash because of the way we sing in French. Many people tell us that we sing and speak “impure” French. Acadian French is not that of the French Academy, and doing punk like we do is also being rebellious. It’s the fun for us to speak alike, and if our language is not in Little Robertwell fuck you ! »
Michael Saulnier was not born when Green Day released his third album, the immensely popular 1994 Dookienot even when Blink-182 kicked off their career the following year with their debut album, cheshire cat. Nevertheless, it participates in the return to vogue of the pop-punk sound popularized by these groups in the 1990s by deferred nostalgia, so to speak.
“I grew up playing Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater and to ATV Offroad Fury 2 – Above all ATV, because it’s the game that came free with the PlayStation 2 console,” says Saulnier. The two video games that appeared on the market at the turn of the millennium were punctuated by soundtracks featuring several pop-punk/skate punk groups of the time. “I grew up there; subconsciously, it inspired my way of writing songs. It comes naturally to me, I had never written a pop-punk song before Peanut Butter Sunday. »
Because his musical training, he rather followed it with his family, singing and playing folk and bluegrass. “You know, the rest of us at the Bay make a lot of kitchen parties “, he recalls. Almost everyone in this French-speaking bastion of Nova Scotia can sing or play the guitar. “In our area, there is no mall, no Walmart where young people go to waste their time. It creates a pool of musicians, because it seems that back home, there are two things to do: take a walk in dirt bike or strum a guitar and write songs,” says Saulnier.
For Normand, it was the drums. Trained in classical percussion at the Université de Moncton, he was then seen accompanying P’tit Belliveau on tour. It was to chase away boredom during confinement that he and Michael founded Peanut Butter Sunday, “but I play the guitar there”, specifies Normand. ” I am not a great guitar playerbut it is fun ! »
This is precisely what we remember after seeing Peanut Butter Sunday on stage: these guys are not on stage to be bored. Laugh it up with drinking songs with friends, stage costumes and catchy guitar riffs. Peanut Butter Sunday did not reach the final of the Francouvertes which will take place on May 18, but at the end of his journey, he can still say: mission accomplished.
He is without a shadow of a doubt one of the revelations of this 27e edition of the emerging talent competition: “Hey, we had fun, we made lots of new musician friends, we did a lot of networkingit also forced us to play live in front of the Quebec public, which I hadn’t done much before,” says Michael, thrilled.
The other revelation is that alongside the members of Peanut Butter Sunday, we find a multitude of musical projects from the St. Mary’s Bay region, all equally punk, crazy and jovial, gathered around this label of discs deliciously named Acadian Embassy, founded by Trevor Murphy, who is at the head of the musical project Sluice — you must listen on Bandcamp to his punk cover of the song I Almost Do by Taylor Swift, renamed Nearly in its text in French! “Trevor Murphy is known in Nova Scotia as a guru of the music scene — Francophone and Anglophone,” Normand tells us, inviting us to the young Far Out Festival in Meteghan Station (July 28 and 29), the neo-Lollapalooza -Scottish, where Peanut Butter Sunday will also stop during his “World Domination Tour”.