CLOSING THE DOORS
Source: Vue Weekly, July 2-8, 1998

The Tea Party shrug off comparisons
By Darren Boisvert

It has been a long time since a band has been as savagely attacked in the press as The Tea Party was in the early '90's. They were mercilessly hounded by music critics for their lack of originality. A huge portion of the criticism was leveled at their Jim Morrison-lookalike and soundalike lead singer, Jeff Martin. For years, the Tea Party weathered a flurry of negative press, which called them nothing more than a Doors rip-off band. But with the gradual decline in cultural fetishization of Jim Morrison, the press lost a valuable counterpoint to use against the band, and the Tea Party gradually became a media-acceptable Canadian band.
They became so Canadian that they were selected to be one of the secret bands for Molson's Blind Date promotion. Featured on prime-time commercials and promoted heavily by the brewery, the Tea Party received a lot of intensive, high-profile support. That success has carried on even to this day. As a sign of their current media legitimacy, they, along with Sloan, headlined the Canada Day celebrations in the nation's capital.
Quite the turnaround.

FROM CIGAR-SMOKING TO BEER-CHUGGING

Drummer Jeff Burrows disagrees with allegations that their success came at the price of selling their souls to the corporate powers. He goes so far as to defend corporate involvment. "It is inescapable these days that businesses like Molson's are sponsoring shows," says Burrows. "No one is willing to front the money for shows anymore. It's been called selling out, but I don't agree. It has usually been the role of the cigar-smoking type of promoter to put on these shows, but that has all changed.
"People are not going to the shows to drink Molson beer. They're going to see the bands. That is the reality fo it."
With their new disc, Transmission, the Tea Party is back on the airwaves and on tour promoting their new electronic twist. It is a darker and angrier disc than their previous ones. The electronic touch-up adds a certain edge to their music that hasn't been so obvious before. Unlike their previous disc, The Edges of Twilight, which contained an astounding 31 different instruments, Transmission is more focused on techno.
Burrows neither apologizes for the techno nor for the multitude of instrumentation. He claims that the Tea Party's eclecticism is one of their strong suits. "We put the 31 different instruments on because we love the Eastern sound," he says. "We might hear an instrument on the radio and like it. Music stores in port cities are the best for finding strange ones. We collect them when we go traveling through those parts of the world, like Hungary. It keeps you on your toes. It is very easy to get drunk or lazy, or to rest on your success. Take Bryan Adams -- he has done the same album for the last five. Each of our albums is going to be different."

ROCK FOR THE MILLENNIUM

Their press package (a semi-factual documenting style not know for modesty at the best of times) declares: "What they've really created is post-millennium rock -- new and uncharted." It also quotes Jeff Martin declaring, "The whole record is about the human condition...its spiritual and its physical state, right now, before the millennium ends."
The Tea Party has never been a band to deal with trivial concerns. This band attempts to trade in the metaphysical. From the beginning, there has been a sense of mission to Martin and the Tea Party, as if the need to be the great communicators of the "human condition" at the millennial age outweighed any other concerns.
Shades of Jim Morrison.

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