Five Questions With The Bare Minimum

Toronto, ON-based punk band, The Bare Minimum has recently released a video for their single, “Bonestorm”.

Check out the video below, and find out more about the up-and-coming band via our Five Questions With segment.

Care to introduce yourself to our readers?

Hey! My name is Cam, I play guitar and sing in the Bare Minimum, a punk band from Toronto.

Tell us a bit about your music and writing style.

With our music, we try to lampoon punk clichés and subvert genre expectations. A lot of punk culture is caught up in outdated 80s DIY ethics and sort of creates a cargo-cult around battle jackets and Xerox-copied zines. Modern internet culture has become the new DIY, and we try to embrace it.

We put many layers of irony and satire into our music, we don’t necessarily want our intent to be obvious. For example, last year we released a Spice Girls cover, it’s up to the listener to interpret it as farce or tribute. In an age of fake news and mass advertiser surveillance, people shouldn’t be looking to punk bands as a source of truth; they should think for themselves.

Do you have any upcoming shows? For someone who has yet to see you live, how would you explain your live performance?

COVID-19 wiped out all our planned shows, and we can’t do live streams until we can all get in a room together. We’re gonna use our time in quarantine to finish up the recordings we’ve been working on so that we can hit the ground running when the bars open.

Our live show is all about energy. Going to a show to hear the hits played note-for-note never made sense to me, it should be an ephemeral experience. We speed things up, play our songs harder, change parts, add weird covers, dig up old songs; anything to keep the energy up and the tedium at bay.

If you were asked to suggest only one of your songs for someone to hear, which would it be?

I would choose our newest single ‘Bonestorm’. It shows where our sound is going.

When we’re working on a new song or album, the way I know it’s “done” is when I want new listeners to hear it before going into the back catalog. So in a weird way, our newest song will always be the first song I want people to hear.

Canadian Beats is all about Canadian music, so who are your current favourite Canadian bands/ artists?

My favourite active Canadian bands are: B.A. Johnston, Gnarly Horse, Dragged In, Wasted Potential, Territories, Lime Ricky, Lost Love, Talk Show Host, and Nim Vind. My favourite Canadian bands of all-time are Propagandhi, Rascalz, Gob, Pointed Sticks, Sloan, and Loverboy.

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