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Since embarking on a national tour, Vancouver’s Five Alarm Funk are discovering the real meaning of a Canadian winter. Even with the first few stops of their tour in frigid Saskatchewan, the intensity of their live performances hasn’t cooled.

“I say that Five Alarm Funk is an omni-musical, multi-sensical experience, where we’re going to give many kinds of music and we’re also going to see a big visual assault, we’ve got lots of choreography, lots of jumping around,” says saxophone player Dameian Walsh.

According to Walsh, the music playing in their tour van has included Frank Zappa, gangster rap, James Brown, and gypsy music, just to name a few.

The array of sounds, beats, and personalities isn’t lost on the stage.  It’s likely that a band member will don a gorilla costume at some point in the night, although it was relegated to the washing machine for a brief period. “It got a little too funky for us for a while,” says Walsh.

Unfortunately, the band’s shark costume was damaged during the first part of the tour, so there won’t be anymore silver-backed gorilla versus great white shark wrestling matches. But according to Walsh, this doesn’t mean the show won’t be a wild time.

“We aim to see the audience getting down really hard.  We want to have a great time going on where you can lose yourself in the dance and the sweat of the moment,” he says.

The band’s costumes are a reference to Anything Is Possible’s tongue-in-cheek album cover,a sketch of a gorilla and a shark engaged in a toothy battle.  Walsh explains that their drummer inspired the art as well as the name of the album.

“Tao was imagining the fiercest thing he could get tattooed on himself,” he says. “He figured if he had a silver-backed gorilla tattooed on his chest being attacked by a great white shark coming over his shoulder then it would be one of those real fierce combinations of beasts. It turned into a joke that went around the band for a month … that’s how we got the name for the album, and that’s how we had our attitude in making the album. We could get the sound that we wanted because anything is possible.”

It’s remarkable that these ten individuals can get together in the studio, with all their different backgrounds and sounds, and make music as complex yet cohesive as the tracks on Anything Is Possible. The songwriting process begins when one band member brings in a riff or a beat that inspires the rest of the group to build on it, coming up with the different horn, percussion and guitar parts. Then all 10 band members work on getting the song ready for recording. “We call it trimming the fat,” says Walsh. “We take a jam and turn it into a fully arranged song.”

The band is planning some more dates in and around Vancouver this April, followed by a few shows in the U.S., which means their next album probably won’t be released until 2012 at the earliest. This will give them time to introduce more people to the music on Anything Is Possible.

“That’s how we spread the word about Five Alarm Funk, through word of mouth,” says Walsh. “When people come to see our show and they have a great time, they go tell their friends.”  

Five Alarm Funk plays at The Belmont on March 15 at 8:30 p.m.