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"This thing will shock people." That's heavyweight producer Bob Rock's appraisal of The Moffatts' striking new album, Submodalities. And, hey, we're not about to argue with him.

A bold stylistic shake-up for the band, Submodalities is indeed a bit of a shocker. But only, really, if you've forgotten what it was like to grow up. Identity is never stable, no matter what your age. It just happens that the four teenaged Canadian-born brothers who make up The Moffatts -- elder Scott and triplets Bob, Clint and Dave -- are currently at a point in their lives where identity is particularly malleable.

They're still figuring out who they are, just like everybody else on the planet. The only difference is The Moffatts have to do their growing up on stage and on record.

So, yeah, with its amped-up guitars, lush Brit-rock textures and a sometimes soft, sometimes squalling sonic adventurousness that'll completely obliterate any preconceptions you might have had about the band, Submodalities doesn't sound like "a Moffatts album."

But what, exactly, does a Moffatts album sound like? The energetic pop-rock act that made a worldwide splash on 1998's prophetically titled Chapter 1: A New Beginning -- which sold more than two million copies worldwide and went almost double platinum here in Canada -- bore little resemblance to the popular kiddie-country outfit that first emerged from Nashville during the early '90s. And you can bet whatever the guys choose to do next will mark another leap forward from where they are right now on Submodalities.

"It makes perfect sense to us," says Dave of the album title. "It means 'anything to do with a visual change in image.' Clint found it in a book, 'Using Your Brain For A Change'. We should be able to use this title for the next couple of albums, too."

Submodalities' punched-up, noisier approach is, more than anything, a result of The Moffatts' changing musical tastes. These days, the band is name-checking artists like The Beatles, Nirvana and Radiohead as favourites. The mingling of those influences with their own ever-developing songwriting talents (The Moffatts write or co-write almost all of their material) -- not to mention the formidable studio presence of Bob Rock, who's previously produced massive albums for such superstars as Metallica, Bryan Adams and Bon Jovi -- has yielded a crunchy, but resoundingly tuneful collection of tunes on the new record.

The first single, "Bang Bang Boom" -- already a No. 1 hit at Top 40 radio and on the retail singles chart in Canada -- combines stick-in-your-head immediateness with a more straight-ahead rock bite. That perfect balance between hooks and viscera surfaces again on cuts like "Typical" and the vaguely glammy "Life On Mars."

Submodalities' varied program also takes in the affecting ballads "Always In My Heart" and "Who Do You Love," the crystalline guitar grind of "I Don't Want You To Want Me" and the anthemic, Oasis-like wash of the album opener, "Just Another Phase" (could this title be yet another ironic reference to The Moffatts' ongoing creative progression?). Most startling is the record's final track, "Spy," a powerful, slightly metallic, prog-rock-leaning epic unlike anything The Moffatts have ever attempted before.

Clearly, they've become a different band since we last encountered them. "No matter who you are or how old you are or what profession you are in, if you do something enough times, you get better at it," says Bob. "It's been three years since we recorded Chapter 1 and over the past three years we've grown older, toured the world twice and, only naturally, improved as musicians, entertainers and songwriters."

"Sure, there were ditty-pop songs on Chapter 1," adds Clint, "but they sold records. And if we didn't sell records, we wouldn't have been able to continue to grow and make more records. What is most important each time we record is to make an album that we can be proud of in years to come. For the record, we've never made a bad record. They're just different. "But anyone who's seen our live shows knows we're a rock band. This time, we stuck it on the record."

True enough. Veterans of the music industry before they've even hit their twenties, The Moffatts' intuitive live performances long ago demonstrated the distance between them and the pre-fab legions of "teen pop'" acts to which they're sometimes, mistakenly, compared. Just this past summer, in fact, the brothers proved they could win over an unsuspecting, discerning "rock" crowd when they were called in as a last-minute replacement for The Bloodhound Gang at Germany's enormous Bizarre Festival. Taking the stage right before Moby and sharing a bill with the likes of Underworld, Beck, Coldplay and Ween, The Moffatts were warmly received by the mob of 20- and 30-something neophytes.

The mature, confident and harder-edged Submodalities does indeed seem poised to bring The Moffatts to an audience that might previously have dismissed them as just another "teen" act.

"The only obstacle we have left to hurdle," notes Scott, "is the discrimination against our age. But we'll grow out of it."

"We hope the old Moffatts fans have grown with us, and at the same time we're always trying to gain new fans of every age and gender," says Clint. "As a band, we're on a continuous mission to make great music and to gain new fans. We're not worried about alienating our fans because when we were in the studio we made an album that was us -- commercial and diversified, yet experimental and heavier."

"This album is all about the music. And if the music is good, the fans will come."

->taken from: www.themoffatts.com