The Gillis Music Archive is not a band. It is a Bandcamp page run by two sisters from Nova Scotia, Carla and Lynette Gillis, who describe it as everything they have recorded since 1993, minus a few cassettes and seven-inches that have gone missing. Scroll past the recent Overnight albums and the side projects and you reach the reason the page matters to anyone outside their family: Mass Teen Fainting, the debut album by Plumtree.
Plumtree formed in Halifax in April 1993. Carla played guitar and sang and was 16; Lynette drummed and was 14; Amanda Braden, on second guitar and vocals, was 15, and bassist Nina Martin was 16. They had already made a cassette EP, Flutterboard, recorded after school in the autumn of 1994, and put a split seven-inch out on Cinnamon Toast Records with the Prince Edward Island band Strawberry. Then, in July 1995, they went to Sound of One Hand Studios in Ottawa with producer Paul Hogan and cut thirteen songs during a heatwave. Cinnamon Toast released the result on cassette and CD that year.
Three decades on, Mass Teen Fainting sounds remarkably little like a first attempt. The band later said the early records were a negotiation between the Gillis sisters' taste for heavy rock and their bandmates' love of clean, upbeat guitar pop, and you can hear the tug in the arrangements: Lynette hits harder than the songs strictly require, and the guitars keep sliding from jangle into something closer to surf and grunge. Tropical, the opener, sets the terms: a bright, jangling guitar figure, a lyric that is stranger and funnier than the tune lets on, and a chorus that arrives early and leaves before it wears out. Two songs from Flutterboard, In the Sink and Good Time to Tell Me, were re-recorded here with more muscle, which tells you the band already knew which of its ideas were worth keeping.
The record went to college radio and built the band a real following across Canada. Martin left for university in September 1995; Catriona Sturton took over bass, and in 1996 the band collected a YTV Achievement Award. Predicts the Future followed in 1997 and topped the national campus chart; its song Scott Pilgrim later gave Bryan Lee O'Malley a name for his comics hero. Plumtree played a last show at the Marquee Club in Halifax on June 30, 2000.
The sisters kept going, first as SISTER and then as Overnight, whose 2015 album Carry Me Home and 2025's Put Me In Your Light are heavier, slower and concerned with grief in a way the teenage records could not have been. In 2020 Label Obscura reissued Mass Teen Fainting on 180-gram vinyl with notes by Vish Khanna. But the archive is the truer monument. Most bands let their early work drift out of print; these two decided their sixteen-year-old selves were worth listening to, and they were right.
