Acrpost: A Project of the Pacific Association of Artist Run Centres

Event Description

The Albertans
Joel Bravo, a native of Milwaukee, and bassist Ian Everall, Albertan by birth, met while members of New York’s Bravo Silva. When that outfit ended they, along with a large and talented rotating cast of players, began playing in New York City under the name Sex with an Angel. They played CMJ in 2007, they moved to Vancouver in 2008, took up the name The Albertans and, along with new fellow travelers, Curtis Mclean, Alison Yip, and Krystin Monaghan, took to the road. The Albertans, though, are not about place or pedigree. It is passage, the extremis of transmitting real bodies across the tangled wires and abstracted networks of space and person, that comes through when they play. Their songs are a cartography of North America mapped on the trail of human footsteps’ fading heat signatures. It is traveling music, and they sing their songs in search of a road through territory made uncertain by love, dreams, and strange frustrations, the few directions to be heard tuned in dubiously on the last working AM radio.
Legends of Sam Marco, follow-up to ‘08’s “Sex with an Angel” EP, is a trembling journey through the mystery of pop, a fugue of fifty years of Americana, rock, blues and soul that finds us after that journey in no place other than the weird intersection of here and now. It is an offering, a concept record that comes into your life as only pop music can, gifting listeners the moments of its progression to acknowledge that we are all bound together- sometimes bewildered in fear, but also dazzled by hope.
The Wheat Pool
For a band frequently described as ‘driving music’, collisions would be something to steer clear of. However, the formula for a new record seemed ironically hidden inside the collision of many opposing forces. Hauntario is the sophomore recording by this western Canadian indie-alt-country band, an evolved collection of songs brimming with the layered tensions of their lives, played out between albums. The record itself was named for two colliding concepts that continued to bubble to the surface. Robb Angus tells us “From the very beginning, the first songs possessed a haunting quality, dark subject matter and melodies that wouldn’t get out of our heads.” Guitarist Glen Erickson adds, “Ontario wouldn’t go away, as a lyric, as a destination, or as the home base in our industry. For a western band it remains a necessary evil, a difficult girlfriend to win over, yet on a different level it possessed so much of what we love about our country.” Both ideas worked, and the concept crystallized on a recent eastern tour, while the album was being mixed. Despite entertaining numerous production options, Hauntario was made with the same production team that helped TWP achieve “Township”, their 2007 debut, which carved an immediate niche with fans and radio for its unique song-writing and amped-up canadiana. (Earshot top50, CBC Radio 3 top10) Hauntario continues where “Township” left off, with noticeable alternations between the brothers’ songs, dynamic exchanges between swells and whispers, rock and roots. The familiar influences remain, while more obvious impressions made by current indie flavours have put their mark on the new songs. Pedal steel, organ and piano continue to wash around the band’s foundational guitar-driven delivery, with the signature blend of vocals taking a greater share of the spotlight. The Wheat Pool will be on the road across Canada throughout the fall, promoting Hauntario, which reaches the public October 6/09.