Bellwoods social scene
BY: As St. Lawrence Market opens, merchants are setting up sandwich-board signs and sorting through day-old croissants. Coffee in hand, Ohbijou ringleader Casey Mecija navigates the maze of grocery stalls to a secluded picnic table. After the previous night’s excitement—the hood of Ohbijou’s van flew up and cracked the windshield while the band was en route to a video shoot for the lead single off their Metal Meets album—the Brantford native seems relieved to have found a tucked-away corner. “The van belonged to April Aliermo from Hooded Fang,” says Mecija, who’s a little flummoxed by Ohbijou’s bad luck when it comes to borrowing vehicles from their counterparts in the Bellwoods/Queen West music scene. “Once, when we were driving the Forest City Lovers’ tour van, the brakes stopped working, too.”
Despite the unreliability of their vehicles, those two bands have a close relationship with the members of Ohbijou. All three groups are part of the indie-pop community that sprouted up in Toronto in 2006, around the time Broken Social Scene and its many offshoots began spending more time abroad. Mecija and her bandmates are considered by many to be the poster kids for the post-BSS scene, thanks to their role coordinating the two Friends in Bellwoods benefit albums, which documented the action and featured some early recordings by now-famous local names like Austra mastermind Katie Stelmanis, Rural Alberta Advantage and a pre–Diamond Rings John O’Regan.
“We’re very much lumped into that orchestral pop thing,” Mecija says of the chamber-pop sound most associated with the scene. “We still have that sound in so many ways but we definitely wanted to show some growth on [Metal Meets].” To do that, the six-piece enlisted the help of Besnard Lakes’ frontman/producer Jace Lasek. “We wanted to play around with toys—not just always have a glockenspiel—so we got effects pedals and tried to create a different environment for the songs.”
When it came to the lyrical bent of the third album, however, Mecija already had her approach mapped out. “I was enrolled part-time at U of T to do my graduate studies in sociology and equity studies so there was a re-imagining of emotions in my lyrics that was inspired by the authors I was introduced to.”
On Metal Meets, Mecija manages to weave the type of tales that have earned Ohbijou a bevy of believers: The Irish folklore at the heart of “Sligo” is a nod to the ensembles’ recent globetrotting, and the story behind “Balikbayan” traces the singer’s ancestry.
“Up to a certain point, I thought of my parents as just, y’know, my parents, but these past couple of years I’ve really wanted to try to figure out what their stories are and what it means to be Filipino in Toronto,” says Mecija, who, along with her Ohbijou bandmate and sister Jennifer, is a first-generation Canadian. “To put that sort of subject matter into an indie-pop song was a really neat way to try to explore that history.”
It also offers a clue as to where Mecija gets her penchant for crafting dreamy love songs. “When my mom was working as a nurse in Texas and my dad was still in the Philippines, he sent her care packages and one of them had the vinyl of their [favourite love] song, ‘Precious and Few.’ I didn’t know my dad was that romantic!”
Mecija isn’t shy about touting her parent’s lasting connection for shaping her own sentimentality, which is at the heart of Ohbijou. “They never wanted us to be engineers,” she laughs. “They always appreciated our love of the arts, and so much of my inspiration comes from them and that love.”
While sketching out tour plans for Metal Meets—a disc the group hopes will win them fans beyond Queen West—Mecija reveals she’s pushing for a gig in the Philippines. “Ohbjou was in Japan last year and we were maybe one flight away from the Philippines, but it just didn’t work out,” she says. “But that’s a big aspiration—to showcase our music in the place my parents are from.”
— Published in The Grid Sept. 29
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