Odds Released New Album “Crash The Time Machine”

Today, Canadian rock band Odds release their long-awaited seventh studio album, Crash the Time Machine, co-produced by Steven Page. Available to stream now, Crash the Time Machine is a vibrant painting of struggle and the community that both feeds it and transcends it. The band goes in new and exciting musical directions while retaining the dark ironic signature that has earned them a place in the hearts of listeners for over three decades. 

The record’s defiantly joyful highlighted track, “Staring at a Blank Page,” brings to bear that one could deal with immovable obstacles by altering one’s own perspective. What can’t physically change can be metaphysically changed. 

“If you’re a good friend, that can become your immortality,” says singer and guitarist Craig Northey. “The energy of a friend never leaves you. We have an amazing extended community of musical friends and they have ended up being what our journey is really about. There are friends of ours that collaborated heavily on this album by only being on our minds and in our hearts. John Mann of Spirit of the West was very dear to us and his story weaves into at least half of this album,” including “Staring at a Blank Page.”

Northey and his fellow Odds – bassist Doug Elliott, drummer Pat Steward, and guitarist Murray Atkinson – may be firmly rooted in the present, but they certainly know a thing or two about the past. Founded in 1987, Odds burst onto the recording scene in 1991 with their rambunctious, self-produced major label debut, Neopolitan. Their 1993 Gold-selling follow-up, Bedbugs, featured the iconic single “It Falls Apart” and they continued a run of successful and critically acclaimed releases including 1995’s Platinum-selling Good Weird Feeling, and the 1996 album Nest, featuring the hit singles “Someone Who’s Cool” and “Make You Mad.” Completing chapter one of their recording career on that high note, they continued touring until 1999 then began an extended hiatus until 2007, when Northey, Elliott, and Steward eventually regrouped, with Atkinson replacing founding member Steven Drake, to begin the second chapter with the 2008 release, Cheerleader. 

Over the years, the band has taken extended detours into the world of film and television (including soundtracks for The Kids In The Hall, and Brent Butt’s Corner Gas series), it sometimes seems as if their minds have been, as the song goes, “on other things.” But now, after a series of EPs (compiled on the full-length release, Universal Remote), Odds are thrilled to finally unveil Crash the Time Machine.

“We’ve been waiting a long time to share this album,” says Northey over a Zoom call from his North Vancouver home, “and we’re all really proud of it. We’ve been playing it for some of our musical inner circle for a while and it truly buoys our spirits when somebody says it sounds like Odds, but it also sounds new.”

As the title implies, Crash the Time Machine finds the Odds firmly embracing the future and the possibilities of catharsis. “We seem to, for some reason, resolve even our most dire songs with a weird sense of optimism, at least that’s what we hope happens.” says Northey. “There’s been unrest over the last few years. It’s been there all along, but upheaval allows voices to be heard that should have been heard ages ago.”

Change and adaptation even informed their approach to the writing and recording of Crash the Time Machine, which began in earnest nearly five years ago and developed over time at the band’s home studio, Doghouse Of Thunder, in North Vancouver.

After laying down most of the basic tracks, the band enlisted co-producer Steven Page in Syracuse, New York to help them sort it out. A good friend of the band since early 1990s, Page and Northey have remained frequent musical collaborators; Northey is a member of the Steven Page Trio, while Page is no stranger to sitting in with the Odds and employing them in his recordings.

After collating their various musical explorations into a unified whole, Page and the Odds handed the whole thing to trusted mix engineer Paul Forgues, and the end result is a cohesive blend that redefines Odds music for 2023.

Many of the songs evoke the same good, weird feeling of classic Odds. But while the music is still centered on the same two guitars, bass and drums approach they’ve employed since Neopolitan, the sonic palette now includes the occasional symphonic enhancements and electronic flourishes. 

Page isn’t the Odds’ only musical friend helping out on Crash the Time Machine. The striking cover illustration comes courtesy of Rob Baker, a frequent musical collaborator (Strippers Union) and founding member of The Tragically Hip. 

The urgent need for community, in what could best be described as “interesting times,” is a running theme on Crash the Time Machine. Odds embrace the awesome power of Now, while celebrating friends made along the way.