Montreal, QC · ska

The Planet Smashers

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Montreal's long-running traditional-ska party band. Horns, dance moves, and singalongs — a guaranteed good time on a sweaty Gainesville stage.

The Planet Smashers trace their name to 1992, when Matt Collyer, Ceco Munaretto, Andrew Conway and Dave Jones played together as a punk-inflected group influenced by the Manchester sound. That version of the band broke up within a year. Collyer and Munaretto reformed it in late 1993, added horns, and the retooled lineup played its first show at Montreal's Station 10 on March 17, 1994.

The band's ska punk favours short, horn-forward songs built for movement rather than showcase solos. Lyrics stay mostly around love, partying and tongue-in-cheek innuendo, matching the brightness of the horn charts, and the group has rarely strayed from that direct, danceable approach.

Collyer co-founded Stomp Records in 1994, and the label went on to release records by other Canadian ska and punk acts, among them the Kingpins, the Flatliners, the Know How and Bedouin Soundclash, making it a hub for Montreal's scene well beyond the Planet Smashers' own catalogue.

Touring carried the band beyond Canada into the United States, Europe and Japan as the third wave of ska spread internationally through the 1990s. Their songs also turned up on screen, including the Japanese series Catman, the Canadian show Radio Free Roscoe and MTV's Undergrads, broadcast in Canada on Teletoon.

Three decades on, the Planet Smashers still tour steadily, and their live shows lean on the catalogue's most danceable, singalong songs, keeping the horn-driven party atmosphere of those early Montreal gigs largely intact.

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ska