Old and Weird’s What I Saw begins with a small resurrection. “Awake My Face Alive” piles communal voices over wiry guitar-pop, introducing an album that treats awkwardness not as a pose but as a working principle. Released on August 21, 2014, it was the Halifax group’s first record that felt, to its makers, like a proper full-length. The distinction was significant: Allison Higgins, Danika Vandersteen and Hannah Guinan had met at NSCAD, begun releasing music in 2011 and already accumulated a typically untidy catalogue of short albums, EPs and one-offs. A contemporary profile describes them as a trio who shared vocals and rotated between guitar, bass and drums; the release page also names Sandi Rankaduwa, Cheryl Hann and Nick Dourado within the wider Old and Weird orbit.
The music is pop assembled by people suspicious of pop’s tidiness. Hooks arrive quickly, but conventional harmony, fixed instrumental roles and orderly structures do not. A third of the album’s songs were made without bass; elsewhere, mismatched vocal lines rub together until consonance feels startling. “Peachy Beachy” is an irresistible miniature with something faintly uncanny behind its sunshine, while “Blight Beat” turns vocal friction into propulsion. “As a Joke” is conversational and barbed; “I Just Came to Dance” slows the record into bruised, hesitant yearning. The brittle recording makes each drum strike and guitar scrape feel exposed, as though the songs are still deciding what shape to take.
That uncertainty was carefully engineered. Old and Weird recorded during the winter of 2014, largely in Vandersteen’s living room, giving themselves five months to experiment before Mike Wright—of Each Other and Plastic Factory Records—mastered the results. Bandcamp identifies the location as the wonderfully named Boob Face Recording Centre and describes the cassette as an 11-song release, although the digital edition presents ten files: the two-part “Click Track / Orcas on Parade” occupies the final 8:35. Its slide-guitar whale calls and elongated form break decisively with the preceding run of compact songs.
The release method completed the aesthetic: self-recorded, self-mixed, uploaded directly and duplicated as only 225 cassettes. Its launch at Menz Bar paired Old and Weird with Nap Eyes, Bad P.I. and Wayne World, locating the record within Halifax’s network of bands, artist-run spaces and overlapping disciplines. Later that year Mint Records placed “Peachy Beach” on its Hot Heros compilation, connecting this stubbornly local music to a wider Canadian DIY circuit.
Old and Weird followed the album with a 2015 split with Toronto experimentalists New Fries and, in 2016, a studio cassette and a defiantly rough phone recording of their OBEY Convention set. They played their final show that year. Heard now, What I Saw sits convincingly between Plumtree’s Maritime melodic economy and early Sleater-Kinney’s abrasive momentum, yet its dark group harmonies and art-school structural jokes remain its own. It is less a lo-fi relic than a record about collective invention: six names, small rooms and pop songs made strange enough to feel alive.