  The White Lies are on a mini club tour of Canada. Their debut album, To Lose My Life, has gone to No. 1 on the UK charts. (ALEX UROSEVIC/SUN MEDIA)
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Death as a subject in rock music is certainly nothing new.
But there does seem to be an unusual abundance of it on To Lose My Life, the debut album of British indie rock trio White Lies. The album debuted at No. 1 on the U.K. charts in mid-January and has been in Canadian stores for three weeks.
Bassist-lyricist Charles Cave says he, singer-vocalist Harry McVeigh and drummer Jack Brown aren't preoccupied with death, even if the title track has a memorable chorus that goes "Let's grow old together and die at the same time!" and even if another album track is titled Death.
"The album deals with death in a way that's not really about the act of dying," said Cave, whose band wraps up a mini club tour of Canada tomorrow in Vancouver. "It's more about the idea of losing something very important. It's about losing a person, or losing a son, or losing a friend, and dealing with the kind of emotions that everyone feels around that kind of loss -- so it's often used as a metaphor.
JOY DIVISION
"That's not to say (the album) doesn't deal with the idea of mortality, and I guess to some degree the questions that arise from death -- what happens afterward, and things like that. But (most references are to) the death of a relationship ... or something that's very important to you -- losing faith, things like that."
The album's dark lyrics and atmospheric sound have drawn comparions of White Lies to such '80s outfits as Joy Division -- particuarly because of McVeigh's Ian Curtis-like baritone voice -- as well as Echo And The Bunnymen and Tears For Fears.
Back in England, the band has come under fire in some quarters as being a Joy Division knockoff, seeing as they previously played for about three years under the band name Fear Of Flying and had a funk-punk sound.
"The only band we were into from that kind of period was Talking Heads -- we all really loved Talking Heads," Cave said. "But Joy Division? Certainly not. We've never ever bothered listening to them, and especially not since being compared to them.
"We liked Interpol a lot, they were a favourite band, but I don't see any comparisons with them, particularly other than Harry singing with a baritone voice. I mean, since starting a band and these comparisons cropping up, we've obviously checked out these various bands, to see what they're like, but they don't really influence us. The way White Lies gets its sound is by us all having our very individual tastes, and they all just kind of mix, as do our personalities."
PLAYING SINCE 15
Cave and Brown have known each other since they were four or five years old, growing up together in North Ealing in West London. The two met McVeigh, who's from Shepherd's Bush, about a decade ago.
The trio began playing weekend gigs together when they were but 15, and Cave attributes the sound of their earlier band, Fear Of Flying, to their impressionable youth.
"It got to the point where we were certainly not happy with the stigma attached to us, because of certain earlier songs we'd written and things like that. That was when we were, like, between 15 and 17 or 18. We were very impressionable, as I think all teenagers are, and you change your style, you change your opinions and you change your taste to fit with whatever's kind of popular at that moment. So because of that, our music was kind of dishonest. We weren't really personally into what we were doing, we were just hoping that it would fit with the current trend."
When Fear of Flying went nowhere, the group members grew bitter, hibernated and wrote highly personal music, not caring what anybody thought of it. They thought about releasing an album anonymously, or under a new name.
"The attitude we'd always needed, really, is just to not care and just make music for ourselves. After a bit of, I guess, self-persuasion, we decided to give it one last go as a real band," Cave said. "So we renamed it and got on with it."
