by Allan Wigney

Paul Saulnier and Benjamin Nelson have wasted little time in earning a distinguished place as one of Canada’s loudest bands. As the two-piece PS I Love You, the Kingston-based musicians turned many an ear with the release last October of a debut full-length album, Meet Me at the Muster Station. Live shows, meanwhile, have become the stuff of legend, upping the ante for post-punk duos — and shredding many a sound system in the process.

Moreover, for all the band’s musical muscle, there is at the heart of PS I Love You a love of melody and flair for the infectious riffs that elevate frontman Saulnier’s songs high above the level of the average noisemaker. Though, he admits, those shredded sound systems may not always do such detail justice.

“It depends on the show,” Saulnier muses. “Sometimes it’s lost. It depends on how out of tune I am, and how sweaty and drunk everyone is. But even if it’s not a melodic show, I think it’s still a good one.”

Spoken like the rock and roller whose music carries the essence of indie-rock gods from The Soft Boys through to contemporaries and Paper Bag Records labelmates Little Girls, via, oh, let’s say Pavement and Archers of Loaf. And resting atop the fiercely delivered guitar/drums frame is the pained, strained voice of Saulnier, a rocker not ashamed to croon a chant of “la la la” chorus as needed.

“It’s the softer sort of noise, I guess,” Saulnier suggests. “I always like joining noise with melody; I’m always going to do that, no matter what project I’m in. As a duo, our shows are pretty loud and, at least for me, pretty satisfying in the way we go from poppy songs to noisy songs.”

He laughs: “Or maybe it’s all noisy; I don’t even know anymore.”

Ah, but PS I Love You admirers know. And have been growing in number since the duo’s modest debut on the other side of Diamond Rings’ 2009 single All Yr Songs. Saulnier and Nelson’s contribution to that split-single, Facelove, can also be heard on Muster Station. A genuine collaboration between the two fast-rising artists, meanwhile, was released last week with the seven-inch, Leftovers.

“It was a really smooth and easy collaboration,” Saulnier recalls of the seemingly inevitable musical marriage. “I had written these riffs that I couldn’t figure out how to sing over top of them, and I played them for him (John O’Regan) and it was like overnight he just ran with it and wrote an awesome vocal melody and lyrics.”

Saulnier says he welcomes the idea of furthering such collaborations with like-minded musicians. After all, PS I Love You was originally conceived by the multi-instrumentalist as a band of the one-man variety.

“I’d been performing solo for a few years, just locally,” he relates. “And I’d already been in a band with Benjamin, and I really liked his drumming a lot. So for my first ‘real’ show in Kingston where I was headlining and there were a lot of people I asked him to join me… and it became a pretty permanent thing pretty fast. I think, actually, it’s the drumbeats — at least in our live show — that are the poppiest element.”

And, he hardly need add, on those sweaty, drunken nights, the drums can really bring the noise.