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Marianas Trench arrives with new album

Quick, without the use of Google, tell me what B.C. punk-rock band Marianas Trench is named for.
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Marianas Trench arrives on the red carpet at the Juno awards in Calgary on April 3, 2016. Marianas Trench performs at CN Centre tonight, with opening acts Shawn Hook and Virginia To Vegas.

Quick, without the use of Google, tell me what B.C. punk-rock band Marianas Trench is named for.

Here are a few hints: it is about 11 kilometres deep, it applies about 15,000 psi of pressure on anything it touches, and it's a place Indiana Jones would probably survive using the sheer power of awesome.

The answer being the deepest part of the ocean in the world.

How could you not love a band that invokes those qualities: incredible depth, relentless pressure, 1980s Spielbergian action?

According to the band, when Marianas Trench lead singer-songwriter Josh Ramsay came up with the title Astoria for their latest package of songs, he saw it as a concept record based on 1980's fantasy adventure films, specifically The Goonies which is set in the seemingly doomed town of Astoria, Ore.

Now Ramsay, Matt Webb (guitar), Mike Ayley (bass) and Ian Casselman (drums) are jumping to lightspeed on their way to Prince George and other points in the known universe. They're here tonight. They're pretty sure you're going to like this time-warp.

Casselman said they fended off a lot of snakes and lava flows to get this album right.

"We try really hard to produce an album from top to bottom. If we think a song is filler, it's not going on the album," he said. "You know it when you feel it. Goosebumps are always a good factor, and that thing is real. You get goosebumps when something is on the right track."

It must be sweater weather in July around this band, with all the goosebumps they must experience. Their hit-list is getting populated. They've put out 18 singles from their four albums so far. It is hard to own a radio and somehow miss some combination of Cross My Heart, All To Myself, Haven't Had Enough, Desperate Measures, Stutter or Fallout (all certified double-platinum).

Astoria is still in diapers and it's already popped out This Means War and Who Do You Love, both of which are into the Top 40 while the latter is into the Top 10 on the Canadian Hot-Adult Contemporary chart. Wildfire is another track that's gotten some fan interest from the new album, too.

You can't control fan reaction or critical acclaim, but early in their career, said Casselman, they were given some important perspective by more senior people in the industry.

"You know you've made it when you start dropping hits from the set list, and we are at a point now where sometimes we have to miss one of the singles," he said.

They don't make it easy on themselves. While many acts - most, really - arrange a lead singer atop a bouquet of instruments, Marianas Trench calls on all the band members to pull a heavy vocal weight. Ramsay leads the way, but their sound is signified by harmonies and layers of voice. Try being a drummer who has to keep perfect timing on the rhythm line, while singing a different cadence on the melody line.

"It's a challenge," he said, and it causes him a lot of extra rehearsal to live up to his band-mates' efforts and expectations.

He even gets to sing lead on one song. It's a cover tune, but he makes it his own. It might be the (second) most definitive version of You're A Mean One, Mr. Grinch.

"That one... It wasn't a joke, but obviously there's a lot of humour with it," Casselman said. "Matt and Josh had done Christmas songs and they said 'Ian, you've got to do a Christmas song' and I don't know how it came up but they said it had to be that one. We were all brainstorming and I think I said 'I could do that one (the deep-voiced Grinch tune) and everyone just laughed, so it became a reality. And everyone thought it was so funny, so then they wanted to do a video for it. I was like 'you guys are idiots, you just want to have fun at my expense' but it was actually a lot of fun to do and I'm really glad I did it."

It's a band that takes videos sensationally seriously. The Lower Mainland is one of the world's great filmmaking centres and they tap into that industry right in their laps. The props, costumes, sets, explosions and characterizations in the average Marianas Trench video puts a lot of prime time dramas to shame.

It's a sign of their streak of ambition. Casselman was part of a precursor group called Ramsay Fiction that was rattling the Vancouver cage in the early 2000s.

He and Ramsay decided to shake up their marketing and recording personalities and get serious after this high school project, so they quickly sourced out Webb and Ayley and formed around the recording of their debut EP. It was 2002. Ramsay was only about 17 at the time and had already been through heroin addiction, anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa and a regimen of rehabilitation.

He had personal material aplenty from which to draw the songs, and they brought in the best help they could find to shape that early project. For example Mike Fraser, one of the most lauded studio technicians in Canadian music history, worked the console for their breakout first album.

"He's a Vancouver guy and he works at The Warehouse (the famous Vancouver recording studio)," said Casselman. "Back then, we were more prominently rock and he was one of the better rock guys. He recorded Aerosmith, AC/DC, all those big bands, right, Metallica, he's huge. He's a great guy, he takes his work very, very seriously, and he heard what we were trying to do and thought it was cool, so he agreed to work on it. We were swinging hard, for sure. We didn't hit a home run, but we got on base. We are still very passionate about what we do, we're still having fun and we're still getting along really well, so hopefully we'll still be at it for a few more years to come."

The present must still be inspiring. Fraser came back on board to help mix some of the tracks from Astoria as well.

Be the judge of things yourself. Marianas Trench headlines at CN Centre tonight, with Shawn Hook and Virginia To Vegas opening.