Guelph Mercury (Guelph) 04/12/04

Rob Szabo ready for new projects

by Eric Volmers

If Rob Szabo's intent was to follow up his sparsely backed and low-key solo debut with a bit more of a splashy release, he couldn't have chosen a better vehicle than his upcoming mutimedia offering.

The release, the Kitchener native excitedly explains, will combine the former Plasticine leader's songcraft with the animation and filmmaking talents of fellow K-W native Cal Brunker.

Twelve short films on DVD will be packaged with a full album of new material by Szabo.

The project has no title yet.  Nor has a release date been set.  In fact, Szabo admits, it might be a bit early to be plugging it in the press.

But such endeavors do not happen overnight.

"We're working together, it's a real collaborative process," said Szabo, who will play Wednesday night at Guelph's Bubba Gib's.  "Some of the tracks on the CD will be more of a soundtrack for the film's he's making.  It's really quite a different process.  There's lots of CDs that come with companion DVDs, but they are not content heavy, just a bunch of odds and ends.  This is a piece constructed from the ground up.  I don't think there's anything out there like it."

The sheer ambition of the project seems in stark contrast to Szabo's don't-blink-an-eye-or-you'll-miss-it release of A battery Of Tests, his criminally overlooked 2003 solo outing, recorded in his Toronto apartment.

That album seemed to again confirm what those who follow the local music scene already knew: that Szabo was a top songwriting talent.

It was a largely acoustic offering, recalling the despair-laden musings of Elliot Smith or later work from Paul Westerberg.  Not the most marketable of sounds, and cynical observers might assume the resolutely independent-minded release was a quiet lift of the middle finger to a music industry that had left him out in the cold on more than one occasion.

Not so, Szabo said.  The intent was actually to find homes for newer songs and the odd orphan lying about that didn't fit with his previous bands: the guitar-heavy Plasticine and it's earlier incarnation, K-W's club favourites the Groove Daddys.

"It's surprising," he said.  "People just kind of took it in stride.  I thought people would have freaked out in terms of a negative reaction.  But I didn't get that at all."

Szabo does not seem to harbour any of the bitterness that one might expect from someone whose bands never graduated from perennial next-big-thing status.

That began in the early '90s with the Groove Daddys, an act that caught the elusive attention of major labels in the U.S. and landed a high-profile Toronto management.  No deals ever materialized and Szabo moved on to Marigold, later rechristened  Plasticine.  That band did land a deal.  Unfortunately it was with Song Corp., a promising artist-friendly label that quickly collapsed into bankruptcy after the release of Plasticine's debut.

"That's the story," he said.  "As far as what I have to say about it, it's just business.  It would have been nice, a way to get your music out there obviously and it's disappointing if it doesn't work out.  But that's not what I got into it for."

These days, Szabo is thinking of releasing an EP of new material before his CD/DVD collection, which he hopes to release sometime in 2005.

The films associated with the album will be shipped out to the normal video outlets, including Muchmusic and Bravo and CBC's ZeD.

And, as usual, Szabo said he will not be worrying about whether or not his new songs are the sort that will win approval of radio and record labels.

"I don't know that anybody does," he said.

"It's not like Nickelback, or some other supposedly contrived band sits down and says, 'I'm going to write a really crap song so it will get on the radio.'  It's just a taste thing.  My tastes are a little left-of-centre."