Local band Sham Family is poised to have a very, very good year

Call it a good start.

Maybe a good restart, more accurately. Semantics aside, no one involved and/or fortunately present for the occasion can deny that Sham Family’s first hometown gig ever at Lee’s Palace last Dec. 3 — a performance preceded only by a single, sweaty basement show in Barrie snuck in just before COVID-19 rode in to generally rid us of the pleasures of live music for two years straight — went exceedingly well.

With the January release of its searing, self-titled debut EP still a month and a half away, and granted an unforgiving 8:45 p.m. opening slot on a Friday bill shared with rabble-rousing twang-punks Sh–bats and high-drawing local psych-o-maniacs Wine Lips, Sham Family stepped onstage before a roomful of distracted punters who had no idea who they were and proceeded to efficiently, confidently and abso-freakin’-lutely destroy the place. Just destroy it. By the time the deconstructionist noise-rock tangle of the quartet’s ready-made back-pocket showstopper “Spitting Image” had finally abated, the crowd was not only gasping for breath but gasping for more, eventually making a valiant attempt to coax a second encore from the band as sympathy mounted all around for the acts who’d have to pick up from the wreckage and follow.

Both acts did fine, for the record. The impression left at the end of the evening, nevertheless, was that one had genuinely caught a whiff of Something About to Happen in Sham Family’s performance. This writer walked home thinking of the young Constantines’ first, legendary-to-all-who-were-there Toronto gig at Ted’s Wrecking Yard way back in 2001, but the same feeling would apply to the first time you saw, say, METZ or F—ed Up or Death From Above and you just knew.

Turns out Sham Family, longtime friends in their mid-20s who’ve already put in enough time to qualify as DIY “lifers” in oft-overlapping bands — Common Age, Glass Face and Mappe Of among them — has had a cunning plan to give you that exactly that same tingly feeling all along.

“Well, yeah. That’s kind of our thing: ‘OK, the record’s cool. But wait until you see this live,’” frontman/guitarist Kory Ross told me last fall — full disclosure: I love this band so much I agreed to do their press materials — and it does appear they’ve put in the hours and hours of rehearsal required to follow through on the threat.

“Well, we had nothing better to do,” laughed Ross over prerehearsal drinks with guitarist Cole Sefton, drummer Zachary Cockburn and bassist and resident engineer Jason Brum earlier this week. “But we’re all used to being perfectionists to the point where nothing we do ever comes out because we don’t know what to do with the project. We put as much work into this as we did with all of our other projects, but this one finally broke through that and put it over the edge for us, I think.

“We’re doing it the best we can because, at the end of the day, we’re still those same perfectionists. So it’s the same thing with pushing that we want to be the band you wanna see live. We want a perfected show. We all love going to shows that aren’t necessarily, like, flawless but that give us chills.”

“We’ve always done that, too,” offered Cockburn. “I think throughout our lives, we’ve just been people who make music 95 per cent of the time, rehearse a couple of times a week, write together and then on days off hang out together. So it’s like we’re just always talking about or making music but yet never have played a bunch of shows. So having this lineup for this project, it’s just on our brains all the time. We’re either rehearsing or writing. It’s been a couple of years of us going so steady working at it.”

Added Sefton: “I don’t think we would have put this much time in if we didn’t think it was gonna click.”

Two years of on/off, pandemic-imposed stasis was actually a bit of a boon to Sham Family. The band had another record ready to go in 2020 but, upon contemplation, collectively decided they could already one-up themselves, so they retreated to their rehearsal space and bashed out “Sham Family,” the EP live off the floor, with Brum lending the recordings just as much meat and punch as any “real” studio affair. It’s a caustic slice of bristling agit-punk that rubs sonic shoulders with the lofty likes of Fugazi, Refused, Wire, Preoccupations and Toronto’s late, great Uncut yet gains its own spin thanks to the intermingling of diverse intra-band influences ranging from Nordic death-metal and doomy drone to jazz and ambient Eno to Pavement and Yo La Tengo.

Soon after, the foursome had the honour of being the first act signed to Born Ruffians’ Wavy Haze label and that beloved local indie outfit will further aid Sham Family in showing the live goods to the world with a whole bunch of joint live dates in the spring. That tour kicks off March 18 in the Ruff ones’ hometown of Midland, before winding its way around various southern Ontario ports of call and crossing the Great Lakes into the northern United States.

Before that, after the disappointment of losing a dream spot opening for Brooklyn noiseniks A Place to Bury Strangers at Lee’s Palace earlier this month when that gig got COVID-bounced to June — full disclosure again: APTBS asked me to pick them an appropriate opener and I gave them exactly one name — Sham Family plays just the third “real” show of its nascent career at the Monarch Tavern on Saturday as part of Exclaim! magazine and always on-point Toronto promoter Dan Burke’s “Class of 2024” concert series.

Once again Sham Family is lowest on the bill. And once again, woe to those who follow — although it should be noted that the synthy Secret Sign, upstart power-popsters Super Genius and Preoccupations-affiliated headliner Peeling are part of the Class of 2024 for a reason.

“I think we’re just ready to play,” said Cockburn. “I think we’re just ready to f—in’ play a lot.”

The reception for their cold call at Lee’s back in the fall has emboldened Sham Family somewhat, but those aforementioned perfectionist tendencies have ensured the lads aren’t developing swelled heads over it. The stage fright-prone Ross, for his part, quipped that he spent most of his first night ever singing in front of a large crowd “trying not to cry.”

“It was a good test,” said Brum. “We obviously get in our own heads and think about how it’s gonna translate, and what can we change and what else can we do, but to test it out and see it translating in a way that was meaningful for the audience, and they got it and they loved it, I guess it showed us we’re on the right path and we’ll keep working more toward that. But we’re still changing things all the time.”

“We still ripped it apart afterwards,” said Sefton. “We basically have a different set now.”

“If you liked any of the songs last set?” laughed Ross. “Sorry.”

In any case, the stage is set for Sham Family to have a very, very good year. They’ve already been called “the buzziest Toronto band of 2024 so far” by one publication and that buzz will only increase once word gets around of the live show’s might.

The only thing diminishing the joy of the moment is, sadly, the passing of Ross’s father, Dan, from cancer last Sunday night. But his son said he would be right there in the pit if he was still around.

“He opened his home to years and years of noisy rehearsals and always pushed us to put our music career before everything else,” said Ross. “He lived and breathed rock ’n’ roll. He was our biggest fan and my biggest inspiration to pick up a guitar.”