When Jason Collett sings the titular line from his new song “I Wanna Rob a Bank”, the heist in question doesn’t sound desperate. More Ocean’s 11 than Dog Day Afternoon, if we want it to put it in heist movie terms.
The song is bouncy and fun, and together and dead-on in a way his 2010 album, Rat a Tat Tat, wasn’t. That was Collett pushing his sound with the help of his pals Zeus with fruitful results different from anything he’d done before. (You can read more about that in our cover story on the bands from when they toured through Regina.)
It’s also as political as Collett has ever gotten. The press release for the song, the lead cut from his upcoming album, Reckon, quotes him as saying,
There’s a poetic serendipity to the fact that I started recording this record during the same month that Occupy Wall Street began. I have felt a genuine solidarity with the passion of this movement in these precarious and volatile times.
A lot of the Occupy spirit shows up in this song. It’ll be interesting to see how that’s represented on the rest of the album. The album features the usual suspects of Afie Jurvanen of Bahamas and the aforementioned Zeus as well as Kevin Drew of the now-dormant Broken Social Scene and Basia Bulat. Howie Beck, probably Canada’s best roots music producer, is back behind the boards for Collett, after sitting Rat a Tat Tat out.
Reckon comes out on Arts and Crafts on September 25.