Small Sins Return from Limbo with New Album 'Pot Calls Kettle Black'

It's been a long rocky road for Toronto indie synth-poppers Small Sins. After receiving rave reviews for their debut, which landed them a deal with Astralwerks, their follow-up, 'Mood Swings,' was met with indifference both from critics and their label.

"There's sort of a dark age that happened there for a bit in the Small Sins world," confirms group mastermind Thomas D'Arcy. "When the first record came out people wanted to put us on the cover of their magazines, and [with] the second one, for whatever reason, we couldn't even get a review. It turned into this situation where it was like, 'What happened here? What did I do wrong, and why does nobody love me anymore?'"

The problem was compounded by label woes both in Canada and south of the border. "Basically, when the last record came out we almost immediately left Astralwerks, which was kind of a 'You can't fire me, I quit' situation. The company was kind of falling apart and we knew that we needed to leave. Well, we knew we'd be dropped anyway," he admits.

"The money was gone. And the same thing was happening in Canada... [Boompa] closed down their office and stopped really pushing any of their artists, stopped signing anybody, and I think only put out our record and somebody else's that year. The legwork was never done. It wasn't that they weren't happy with the performance; they never even tried to make it perform. That's not to say we didn't try to support it."



Problems with D'Arcy's professional life coincided with unnamed issues in his personal one. "I really needed to take a break," he says. "I took a year off."

But he didn't turn his back on music altogether. D'Arcy worked on several side-projects and played in friends' bands, including a stint playing bass in k-os's touring group. He even tried his hand writing music for ads. But in between, the once highly-prolific D'Arcy, accustomed to writing a new song every day, "spent some time on the couch."

Eventually, after one aborted album, D'Arcy and his bandmates made the trek down to Chicago to once again record with Tortoise's John McEntire. The resulting record, 'Pot Calls Kettle Black,' is being self-released by D'Arcy, with distribution being handled by Arts & Crafts.

"The wait was kind of worth it for me," he says. "I'll always continue to make my own music -- it's an addiction like any other, just like I'll never quit smoking, realistically."