By SP

A lot of good things come from Canada: The L Word, people, food and the music. The Organ is another all-girl Canadian band that had a cameo role in the second season of The L Word. They performed the song Brother from their album, Grab That Gun. Two more songs were featured in another episode of the second season, Basement Band Song and Steven Smith.

In the article The Organ by Michael Chadwick (2005) the band members were asked how they ended up on The L Word and they replied, “Ashley: Someone asked us, randomly … Katie: That’s the million-dollar question. I ran into my friend Jane at a club. And she said ‘my friend dug the video, and you should totally do it.’ And I said, ‘really’ and she said ‘totally.’ So we did.
Ashley: A friend of mine works at a talent agency, and she recommended us to appear on the L-Word. I was like, ok, whatever. I had never even heard of the L-word. And then all of a sudden we were asked. That’s the real story.”

In the German interview The organ (2006), Katie Sketch also added about their appearance on the show, “It was paid well and we were broke. That decision was really easy to make.” The band members were really surprised that in Germany the band is known as well as the series. Sketch said in response to that, “Really? It’s crazy! The series are well-known in America. Many people pointed to us the fact that they have heard about us for the first time after seeing us on the show. But now a lot of people ask where they can see the video from the series. Hey, it’s a TV-series, not the reality. There were no real cameras! There were people who played their roles.”

According to the article The Organ Grinder by Andrew Horan, video Brother, the making of which was re-created on The L Word, “was inspired by current world events. A series of arresting - albeit distracting at times - visuals were projected onto a screen set up on the Horseshoe’s stage. Webber’s [Ashley, former band member] brother Ryan created the images that featured everything from clips from a 1930’s horror movie to cityscapes and pictures of the band.”

How it all began

In the band’s Biography on allmusic.com by MacKenzie Wilson we read that “the ladies of the Organ came together in 2001 to design their own original modern sound. Katie Sketch (vocals), Deb Cohen (guitar), Jenny Smyth (organ), Shelby Stocks (drums), and Ashley Webber (bass) hail from Vancouver, and each has an appreciation for bands such as the Cure and the Smiths.”

On The Organ’s MySpace webpage we can also find out that since that time one of the original band members, Ashley Webber is not with The Organ anymore. “A critical and popular favorite, The Organ write melodic and introspective music based on layered interplay between their instrumentalists – Debora Cohen, guitar; Shmoo R., bass; Shelby Stocks, drums; Jenny Smyth, Hammond organ – and the intimate and doleful lyrics of singer, Katie Sketch.”

As we study the band’s Biography on wikipedia.com, we learn that “The Organ was conceived in 2001 by frontwoman Katie Sketch, born Katie Richie, in Vancouver, Canada. Sketch's musical training started at the age of three, when she began classical training on the violin. Her childhood was spent largely in ignorance of the underground sounds of The Cure, Joy Division and The Smiths, whom The Organ would later often be compared to.”

The comparison to The Smiths also mentioned in The organ Grab that gun article by Chris Watkeys (May 2006). “The Organ makes no attempt whatsoever to disguise their shameless Smiths plagiarism, but it's so skillfully, masterfully done that you have to abandon your reservations and just go with it. If you are able to do that, Grab That Gun is a beautifully sad experience.”

In another Biography at toopure.com we also find out that The Organ wasn’t the first Sketch’s attempt at creating a band. “The band’s pre-history resides in the ashes of Katie and organist’s Jenny Smyth’s previous outfit, Full Sketch. Determined to go beyond the constraints of band-as-hobby, they started scouting for new group members in summer 2001. They wanted simplistic playing. They wanted people enjoy making music as much as they did. And they wanted the band to be top priority. After auditions and more auditions, Sketch and Smyth eventually got what they asked for.”

As Katie Sketch mentioned in her La Blogotheque interview (January 2005), “My original goal was to try to get a group of people together who all played music that I enjoy. This was much easier said than done. I probably went through 10 people and had to get rid of them due to the amount of wanking they put out. I wanted simplistic playing. I also wanted players who could commit to the band... I guess, I didn’t want it to be a hobby band. I wanted the band to be everybody’s priority. And that’s what I got... eventually.”

As we read further in wikipedia Biography, “After finding a handful of like-minded musicians, Katie assigned them instruments and taught them to play. Taught is a relative term though -- Debbie had been playing guitar for three years, and Sketch has expressed distaste in interviews when portrayed as a ‘music teacher’ to the girls.”

The article The Organ Grinder by Andrew Horan explains about Sketch’s attitude regarding so-called teaching, “Another press-created misconception about The Organ is that Sketch was a music teacher of sorts to bassist Ashley Webber and drummer Shelby Stocks. Again this isn’t the case. Well, sort of. While Webber and Stocks couldn’t really play their instruments, they were more self-taught … ‘They seem to think they had a lot of help or something but mostly it’s just the drive to be able to learn the instruments and play them,’ Sketch said. ‘[My teaching them] was maybe a half-an-hour, hour process’.”

In another interview The Organ: Glummer Girls by Lorraine Carpenter (May 2004) we can read more about the process of creating the band. “[Katie Sketch] having studied violin from the age of three, competitive skiing in her pubescent years, studio engineering in her late teens and, currently, psychology at SFU, it’s clear that the rich croon and discreet charisma she displays on stage are grounded in discipline. The classically-trained multi-instrumentalist certainly put her skills to use throughout the three years it took to get the Organ together. Organist Jenny Smyth, the youngest (22) and bubbliest of the bunch, entered the picture when she joined Sketch’s instrumental trio, Full Sketch. After that band dissolved, the duo branched off to audition players for their new band, a grueling process that finally culled self-taught guitarist Debora Cohen … ‘It’s not like the five of us got together and spontaneously created this,’ Sketch explains. ‘Jenny and I had a direction we wanted to go in and then we slowly recruited people. We could tell if someone didn’t get it, which is why we had to get rid of so many players. It’s funny — sometimes people say the band’s moving really quickly, but I feel like I’ve been doing this forever’.”

Sketch and other band members were asked several times why they ended up as another all-girl band and in the toopure.com Biography we can read what Katie Sketch has to say about it. “The way we play is so simple … it just seemed to work and everything fell into place. There’s something in the way we write songs that it just comes together … It wasn’t important at first because I originally did have boys try out … but it just didn’t’ work out for whatever reason. Once I had four girls, I was like, ‘I might as well find another girl’.”

In summer 2002, the Organ introduced their melancholic dark style with the release of the Sinking Hearts EP. As we read about it in The Organ: Glummer Girls, “In 2002, Sinking Hearts introduced a band that evoked the minor chord melancholy of the early ‘80s, some songs achieving that irresistible fusion of dour poetry and danceable tunes. Whether it was simply nostalgia, the charm of audibly amateurish musicians with such a distinctive vision and style, or the allure of a female band with unisex appeal, these girls swiftly made away with hearts and minds across the continent, and with the recent release of their exceptional LP, Grab That Gun, it appears we’ve all made a sound investment.”

The Organ’s second album, Grab That Gun provoked a lot of publicity about the band’s style of music, lyrics and performance. As Carpenter makes her own observation in La Blogotheque interview, “Grab That Gun’s not really a funny album: it mainly deals with disappointed loves and choked resentment, tainted with self-abandonment …  It’s a melancholic album which is more likely to be listen curl up into a ball in your bed one grey cloudy Sunday morning than Saturday evening on the dance-floor … Passion, melancholy, hypnotism: perhaps it’s the mix of all these sensations that make me listen over and over again intense songs like Steven Smith or Sinking Hearts … whose emotional impact strikes me each time. Tightened, without filling, the whole thing is admirably achieved and focused, making me think that Grab That Gun is one of my favourite albums of 2004, and The Organ one of its most invaluable revelations.”