By Jim Barber
Music does so much good in the world. I makes people feel good. I lifts folks up when they’re feeling down, it expresses things that mere words alone cannot. It can rally people together, it can inspire change, share messages of love and light, inclusiveness, independence, tolerance and community. Music tells stories, can be therapeutic, healing and inspiring. A love for music, a passion for creating, sharing and enjoying music can bring groups of people together – or it can bring two people together, their shared love for music broadening into a love for one another.
Such is the case with Christina and Pete Kasper. Veterans of the Ottawa area music scene, the two had been separately and occasionally jointly playing in bands, as well as spending years booking rock and metal bands into various venues throughout the city for years. Their paths crossed innumerable times leading to business collaborations, creative collaborations … and eventually they collaborated on a marriage and two kids. Besides the children, the couple also built a reputation for heavy music excellence in the second decade of the 2000s with their band Doll.
“Pete and I used to organize concerts in the Ottawa region, and we still do. And that’s kind of how we met. Peter was organizing a lot of heavy metal shows in town with Black Metal Promotions. I’d go to a lot of the shows, and I had my own booking company as well. So we met through the music scene. I think at one time we were booking 70 shows a year, and have been doing it for over 20 years,” Christina explained.
“We both would go to probably 100 shows a year. We’re big supporters of the Ottawa music scene. So we met through those shows and at the time we were into the whole Riot Grrrl and Grunge thing and we saw there wasn’t a lot of bands doing stuff like that and decided we should do it just for fun. And we were already a couple by then, so we were together before we started the band.”
Doll was originally a four-piece when it first formed in 2007, and release two well-regarded albums before going on hiatus in 2011 (although it was more of a slowing down, than a complete break), Inside the Dollhouse in 2009 and Ragdoll Diaries in 2011.
After being somewhat quiet for the past dozen or so years, Doll is back with a high-octane new EP, Better Days, Different Times, a reminder of the Kaspers’ remarkable ability to craft insightful yet incendiary punk and grunge tinged heavy music that speaks to our times, and also speaks to your mind, body and spirit through it’s insistent potency and power.
“It’s been about 14 years since out last record. We never stopped making music, but we definitely took a break from playing live and recording and all of that. We had two kids and we used to tour a lot and just be on the go non-stop. But with kids you can’t really do that,” said Christina Kasper, who hails from a small community in New Brunswick, and even after nearly 20 years in Ottawa, retains the charming Maritimer’s lilt in her voice.
“So that’s the reason there’s been a bit of a hiatus. We definitely stopped playing music. We did put out a few songs here and there and we still kept playing together, but we never really kind of felt like we wanted to put an album together. We said, ‘well, we’re not really touring anymore.’ But we kept playing in our basement and making songs. We probably have a hundred songs just kind of lying around and eventually we said, let’s actually go record them and make something for ourselves. We put it out and people loved it. So there are no expectations, but we enjoyed putting out this EP and we’ve been getting a lot of great feedback from it. We recorded over the span of a year and it was nice because there was no pressure, nothing was really forced. Usually we would write probably a song every month or so. And if we thought it was a cool song, we’d recorded it. So that’s what we did with this new album. And we’ve just released it digitally got now. No physical this time around. The way people consume music now is so different, right? The big pop artists release single, single, single, single, after single. And then maybe the combine things together into an album because, like, I still buy CDs and vinyl, but I don’t know how many other people do. For our second album, we made vinyl and they’re expensive to print. It’s a cool, cool thing, but then you have the cost of shipping and all. I remember getting the shipping bill it was a thousand bucks to get the vinyl shipped to us from, I think, California.”
As the title of the new EP suggests, the theme is about thinking back to the good old days, to simpler times, to when we were all kids and the end of the day came when the street lights came on. The cover art of a kid’s bike sitting under a street lamp surely brings back memories for anyone in their 40s or older who hung around with pals and goofed around with them in person, not with their faces glued to a phone.
“A lot of the album is about reminiscing about how our childhoods were really great and how it’s really different now for kids. It’s a lot more complicated. And the songs are very different from one another. We’ve always been like that. We don’t just do punk rock, or we don’t just do metal, or we don’t just do kind of like the shoegaze stuff. It’s a little bit all over the place because that’s how our musical tastes go. On this album we’ve got some songs that are a little bit more in-your-face and punk like ‘Shark Bait.’ Then we’ve got a doomy version of ‘Smoke On the Water.’ I think the last three songs on the EP are a little more in the indie rock vein – ‘Scene Dream,’ ‘Ends Like This,’ and ‘Goodbye.’ So there isn’t necessarily a theme. I think it’s just songs that we wrote in the moment that we kind of liked and that felt like they might fit together.”
The Kaspers have an 11-year-old boy and nine-year-old daughter, both of whom have taken an interest in the family business of making music.
“They play music. They play drums and piano and they love all their own bands and things. We go see concerts together. We went to see Nine Inch Nails together last week, which is great. And having kids opens you up to different genres of music too. Like, my daughter’s big into K-Pop and I never heard of K-Pop in my life before. But we went to see Blackpink in Toronto a few weeks ago. So through the kids, they open us adults up to different things too,” she said.
Being a couple on and offstage makes the logistics of songwriting a little easier, in that all you have to do is holler from one room to another to let your partner know there’s a good musical idea a-brewin.’
“We’ve got our jam space, a little bit of a studio in the basement here. As the guitar player, Pete is usually the one who comes up with a lot of the musical ideas, usually some riffs. And then I come in there and I like to put things together. So he will get a cool riff and I come in to help put in an intro or the chorus or things like that. I am the one who kind of glues it together after he comes up with the initial idea. And his ideas are always great. I play drums, I play guitar, I play bass and sing lead as well, so most of this EP was just the two of us together recording down in the studio,” Christina explained.
“What I start with usually depends on how I am feeling that day, and what feeling I am getting from that riff. Usually these days it’s been a lot more of me on the drums, getting a feel for the speed and the rhythm of the song and then adding the other parts. It’s then that I will come in and do the vocals and make sure that it all works together. The last thing is usually the solos and the lead guitar parts, which I do a lot of too. Most of what we do is spur of the moment. We’ve got full-time jobs as well. We often have lunchtime meetings and things like that or take some time whenever the kids are not here. It’s hard to plan anything so we’ve got used to doing it on the fly. It’s not like we can schedule hours ahead of time. I think that makes the songs come together a little bit more magically.”
And that magic has evolved over the years as the Kaspers have as humans, a couple, parents and musicians – which it should.
“I think we’re a lot more mature in terms of the lyrics and the overall songwriting as well. I think before we were always thinking a lot more about the audience and what they were always asked for, or thinking that we’re going to be playing with Lacuna Coil or we’re going to be playing with maybe Halestorm [which they did in their original incarnation] so maybe we should write some more heavier songs like them. We were worried more about what other people were saying. Now the only expectations we have are our own. We are doing more of what we like. But in a lot of ways we haven’t changed all that much. I still feel like in 16 in my brain,” she said.
“Like, the body doe change. The body’s not the same. But I still feel that we still like all the stuff we used to love when we were kids. When I was a teenager, I was bit into the Riot Grrrl movement. I loved L7 and Babes in Toyland and Hole and all that stuff. And Pete was definitely a big fan of Sonic Youth, Nine Inch Nails and stuff like that. A lot of those influences haven’t changed, we’ve just added to them over the years.”
One of the standout tracks on the EP, and one which has garnered lots of positive attention is ‘Shark Bait.’ Full of doomy vibes, crunching chords and chaotically melodic vocals from Christina, the song was recorded and planned for release, entirely coincidentally, at the same time as a marketing plan was unleashed to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the classic Steven Spielberg film, Jaws.
“That was definitely a happy coincidence. We like a lot of the newer hardcore bands like Gel and Scowl and some of those artists that are, you know, it’s hard to describe, but they’re hardcore, but not your traditional hardcore. They have some interesting elements that make them a little different, and they’re very cool. We were just playing around with some hardcore riffs and I think Pete was trying to start some hardcore projects with his friends and stuff like that, but then this song started to come together like, super, super fast and super easily,” Christina said.
“And then we started singing along and it was just two words at first, shark bait. And we kept singing that and realized it was a great title for a song. So everything else came along super fast and very easily. But then I was like, ‘oh yeah, wait a minute. It’s the Jaws anniversary.’ It was definitely not intentional, but it was certainly, as I said, a happy coincidence. We like old school kind of horror movie artwork and all that stuff too, so it just made sense.”
The song ‘Bleeding’ was inspired by a popular TV show, but the idea evolved into a statement about the injustices experienced by Canada’s indigenous peoples over the years, including the continuing scandal of missing and murdered indigenous women and the ongoing discovery of the graves of indigenous children at former residential schools.
“I got inspired from watching the latest season [its fourth] of the TV show True Detective [set in Alaska and featuring the deaths of eight people, including an indigenous woman]. I got inspired from watching that but the song is more out of respect for the indigenous people in Canada and the trauma that they’ve gone through. There’s just so much more terrible information coming out every day. You turn on the news and there’s more of these unmarked graves, or they’re finding missing indigenous women in landfills, or something like that. It’s just so tragic what they went through. I just felt I needed to write a song about that,” she explained, while ‘Ends Like This,’ is about the difficulties of being in a relationship.
“That one is more about two people struggling being together in a relationship. No matter how hard you try and how much you promise, and there’s always a lot of promises on both sides, sometimes there isn’t a thing you can do, and it turns out not to have the outcome that you want it to have. It’s saying how you didn’t expect things to end how they did.”
Besides the pulse-pounding excellence of the original compositions on Better Days, Different Times, there is a unique cover version of one of the most popular and iconic rock songs of all time – Deep Purple’s ‘Smoke On the Water.’
“My daughter [who is nine] plays drums and one day she was learning the drums for ‘Smoke On the Water.’ Usually what happens, and whenever she’s got a certain piece that she’s working on, I will learn the guitar part and play along with her, right? My guitars were tuned down like C or D: they’re all like that for some reason, I don’t remember why. But they’re always super tuned down. And when I was playing along with her with that tuning I thought, ‘it’d be so cool to do like a Doors version of ‘Smoke On the Water,’” Christina explained.
“And I realized that, yeah, we can make something really cool out of it. So that’s how the idea came about. Obviously, we like Deep Purple, but it was never like we ever felt it was important to cover a Deep Purple song. It just kind of came naturally. And we changed the lyrics a bit too. When we were working on the song last summer it was the time of all the wild fires and things that were happening here in Ontario, and also we remembered all the bad wild fires out in Alberta a couple of years ago. We kind of updated the lyrics to talk about those fires and disasters [as opposed to the burning down of the Casino Barrière de Montreux in Montreux, Switzerland, which inspired the original version] and how they made us feel and changed the tone to match our emotion.”
Having two kids and day jobs makes any sort of touring a difficult proposition for Doll, but the couple is not ruling out playing some shows to promote the new EP.
“We’re thinking about it again. It’s just been the two of us and we’ve definitely been approached by a few people who think we should play live. We have people offering to drum for us and things like that, so we’re thinking about it for sure. It’s be a lot of fun, but we don’t have anything kind of locked in for now,” Christina said.
For more information on Doll, Better Days, Different Times, visit their socials or https://doll.bandcamp.com/album/better-days-different-times.
- Jim Barber is a veteran award-winning journalist and author based in Napanee, Ontario, Canada, who has been writing about music and musicians for more than 30 years. Besides his journalistic endeavors, he works as a communications and marketing specialist and is an avid volunteer in his community. Contact him at jimbarberwritingservices@gmail.com.
