Oh no, not another "couple" band!

Yes, Heidi Donnelly and Edmund Lam of Hexes & Ohs are a couple. But forget about enchanted love ballads or songs about domestic bliss. Hexes & Ohs are more about playing great pop songs than playing into old clichés.

Over the last ten years, Ed and Heidi have experimented together in pop, grunge, experimental and shoe-gazer bands. The 90’s saw them as the now-acclaimed pop quartet Jolly Bean. The band recorded two albums, including an unreleased and untitled album recorded in Halifax at the height of the East Coast pop wave with Super Friendz bassist Charles Austin. By 1999, Jolly Bean had transformed into the more electronic and more sophisticated trio A Vertical Mosaic, who still kept close to their East Coast connections by playing their first show in Cambridge with The Flashing Lights. Soon the band inked a deal with Toronto’s Noise Factory Records and continued to build a solid fan base in and around their hometown of Montreal. While A Vertical Mosaic brought more sophistication to the band’s sound, there were personal differences between band members that caused AVM to disband in the fall of 2004.

Destined to not let their efforts and a fresh record label offer go to waste, Ed and Heidi christened themselves Hexes & Ohs, and channeled their decade of experience into explosive creative energy. They shut themselves in from the outside world, locked themselves in their apartment and wrote and recorded 60 minutes of the smartest, catchiest, most danceable electro pop they had ever created, packaged together to be the aptly titled “Goodbye Friend, Welcome Lover” album.

With an expected album release date of May 2005, Hexes & Ohs plan to haul their sequencers, laptop, guitars and amps across the world in support of this release. Goodbye Friend, Welcome Lover may very well be the couple’s newborn baby, but it’s definitely the most infectious pop album to spring from Montreal in recent memory.