Plait Of The Land

It’s -15°F in Montreal, and the city is resting happily under about two feet of snow. 3,000 miles away in Dublin, we’re a little less impressive with the stats, but it’s still snowing hard enough that I can’t see anything outside my window. I’m tempted to use my time with Canadian quartet Braids to fish for advice on how to manage this ghastly weather. Turns out, they’re only too glad to help.
“I can show you how to make a really good snowman!” offers singer and guitarist Raphaelle Standell-Preston.

Yup, look away now, cynics – from here on out, everything about this experimental quartet is down-right adorable.
Picture this. A 13-year-old Raphaelle met a 12-year old Austin Tufts at school, and in the cafeteria lunch line one day, he suggests that they start up a band. They also start a relationship.
“Now we’re just friends,” Standell-Preston laughs. She adds that they were together for three years before they called it a day. To a bunch of 20-year-olds, 16 must seem like a million years ago.
“Yeah,” Tufts hums, “but it’s like yesterday, too. The band was together for a year before we broke up, and it was a bit like, ‘Why would we keep going if we’re not dating?’ but the relationship that we had was much deeper than a boyfriend-girlfriend thing.”
Luckily for Braids, the heartsick pair were able to make music together during the break-up.
“There was a month and a half of really awkward rehearsals!” Tufts laughs.
Everything changed yet again for Braids when guitarist Vincent Mann left their home town of Calgary and moved away to college. To keep the band together, Raphaelle, Katie (Lee, keyboards) and Taylor (Smith, bass and drums) would have to put their education on hold too. It was time to kick Braids into high gear, which meant rehearsing six hours a day and all day on weekends.
“It was like a full-time job,” Tufts remembers, “but we were coming together musically, finding what kind of music we wanted to create and really hashing it out. It was frustrating and it was hard and it was really fun.”
The four shoegazers immediately set about creating an overwhelming amount of noise that’ll probably make Animal Collective fans drool down their trendy little chins.
“It comes down to something that we really value in music,” Tufts says, “which is maturity – hearing out each idea ‘til the end and not being so frantic and A.D.D. about it.”
“We just have a lot of ideas,” Standell-Preston adds. “Writing takes a very, very, very long time for us and the songs become quite long.”
This might explain why, when it came to mixing and mastering debut album Native Speaker, they cracked out the elbow grease and did it all themselves.
“We didn’t know anything!” Tufts remembers, “The day that we decided to record was the same day that we opened up the recording software, which is why it took us nine months!”
With Native Speaker in the bag, Braids have scheduled a European tour for the month of May, so we can only assume they’ll be performing their routine pre-gig group hug when they hit Irish shores.
“It’s mainly to keep the focus,” Tufts laughs, “but also we all just hug all the time anyway!
‘Nothing can possibly go wrong on stage,” he muses, “because we’re all there to help each other. If you have the trust that everybody else on stage is trying their hardest… as soon as you have that trust, all the worries go away.”