Since 2008, Lab Coast has been delivering hazy bursts of hook-laden guitar pop via a string of critically-acclaimed, award-winning albums, EPs, and singles. From their basement studio in Calgary, Alberta, the songwriting team of singer David Laing & multi-instrumentalist Chris Dadge (Chad VanGaalen, Alvvays, Bug Incision, Samantha Savage Smith)carve out detailed analog productions, drawing from the wealth of instruments that friends leave at the Lab Coast practice space, and gradually advancing the ever-evolving studio techniques that they've been honing since day one. The band’s home-brewed recordings sit in the tradition of DIY-recorders such as McCartney, early Guided By Voices, and R. Stevie Moore, while the songs themselves recall the likes of Teenage Fanclub, early REM, and Britpop lynchpins like the The La's and The Stone Roses. Reviewing their last full-length album, "Remember The Moon", the Toronto Star wrote that “Lab Coast has grown so good at making a certain species of scuffed-up, small-scale psych-pop that the rest of Canada really no longer has any excuse not to pay attention.”

In 2017, the band teamed up with Brighton, UK-based label Faux Discx to release "Lab Coast", a compilation of the best of the band's first four albums. The 16-song collection presented the cream of Dadge’s bustling rhythms and compact, tightly-wound strings of melody, Laing's understated crooning and strangely-abstract-yet-poignant lyrics, and the band’s melange of FX-drenched guitars, rubbery bass parts, cello, violin, hybrid sampled/live drum parts, pitch-shifted percussion, sax, banjo, and organ. AllMusic called it “essentially an introduction to what an outsider to the Calgary music scene can only assume is one of its best-kept secrets.” 

Onstage, Laing and Dadge are joined by guitarists Samantha Savage Smith and Scott Munro (Preoccupations, Chad VanGaalen), and bassist Ryan Bourne (Ghostkeeper, Sleepkit, Chad VanGaalen).

Villa Villa Nola began as a website to sell recordings online, we opened up on February 14, 2008. The site’s named after Villa Villa Nola recording studio in Montréal, Québec where some of these recordings were made. In 2011 we began broadening our approach, refining our reasons, & moving away from strictly selling music. Through partnership, donation, sales, & events we are funding & commissioning new work for exhibition, distribution, and unique performance.
♥ VVN

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