Katie Stelmanis/ Castlemusic/ Timber Timbre/ Bruce Peninsula
Saturday June 9th, 2007, at The Music Gallery
Sal Hassanpour
Posted July 9th, 2007.
This particular installment of the Pop Avant Series at The Music Gallery promised "Lomax-inspired folk spirituals by urban indie youth," but in reality should have been billed as "Bruce Peninsula and friends." More on that later.The coinciding of NXNE, Luminato, and a couple of city-sponsored street festivals meant that this was the most culture-intensive night in, arguably, the city's history. Somehow the Music Gallery was not left entirely by the wayside, as — at the very least — the pews were filled. Yes: Pews. For those of you who haven't been to my favourite venue in the city, The Music Gallery doubles as St. George the Martyr Anglican Church during the day.
Katie Stelmanis went straight for the piano, but what became immediately obvious was that the sounds we'd hear from her wouldn't be limited to ivory pounding. Foremost was her deliberately theatrical voice, which she projected in an early 20th century style, although minus the fuzzy gramophone sound. Although Stelmanis' voice was powerful and attention-grabbing throughout, her lyrics weren't very content-heavy, so she repeated a lot of lines to fill up the songs. But with an accompanying array of dirty violent fragments, deep brass, bells, and Bogdan Raczynski-type beats, one didn't mind. A shoe-in for future female Final Fantasy.
If you've never seen Jennifer Castle (aka Castlemusic) perform, you've missed out on Toronto's resident folk queen. Castlemusic plays slick jazz-blues-folk electric guitar, complete with tricky time signature changes and deliberately loose passages. She likes to stretch things out like toffee, despite the danger of having the instrumental passages in between the singing collapse under their own molasses-weight. A first-timer to Castlemusic may have been perplexed, since her stage presence manages to be less intrusive that a TTC busker's, but she knows her folk better than any Hugh's Room attendee. That said, lyrics like, "That's a piece of glass/Don't put that in your pocket" are idiosyncratic enough to make you want to shake the confusion out of your head.
Timber Timbre's name says it all. Timbre is the physical characteristic of sound Ð in other words, the quality of a tone. And so while the band (normally a four-piece, it was Taylor that took the stage, solo with an acoustic guitar in tow) doesn't literally sound like timber-wood, they do evoke a cold, foggy, late-summer night in, let's say, Bobcaygeon. Taylor started by activating bird-call whistles and rattling devices, looping the sounds each time. After the first minute, once he had a dense wall of animal noises that evoked a teeming, macabre swamp, he proceeded to sing in a style that ran the gamut from Andrew Bird to Bonnie "Prince" Billy, and even a cotton-mouthed Tom Waits, not to mention a dab of Elliott Brood's gothic-bluegrass. Showing a lot of restraint on the guitar (down to a single-note strum, even), the Timber Timbre performance was heavy on mood and atmosphere, and I can only wait to see what the full band can come up with.
The members of Bruce Peninsula walked from the back of the pews onto the stage, sporting various percussion instruments. I can't describe Bruce Peninsula's music with reference to any single pre-existing musical style in particular, and I can't imagine better praise for a band. Clearly, the four female vocalists were singing in a style redolent of American folk and labour songs, hence the "Lomax" thing (Alan Lomax being the United States' pre-eminent folk-musicologist of the 20th century). And yet, their vibraphone pulled the band in another, jazzy direction, while the electric guitars pushed Bruce Peninsula into the instrumental indie of, say, The Advantage. Sometimes even the vocals switched into more of a pop music mode, recalling Fleetwood Mac more than The Carter Family. Add seamless transitions in-between songs and some sweet call and response and you have BrucePeninsulamusic, and it's wonderful.
My one problem was with the concept of this night. Simply put, every performer got the Lomax style right, but not the substance. In other words, while every one knew enough about folk, labour, field, and traditional American songs to at the very least riff on them in their own work, if not come close to performing homages to that tradition, they seemed to have missed the entire point of those recordings in the first place. For example, when you hear the music of Nimrod Workman, the renowned coal miner and singer from Kentucky (who most famously appeared in Barbara Koppel's seminal 1976 labour documentary Harlan County USA), what he's singing about is nothing less than his material conditions, and this bears true for nearly all folk music. And yet, the impulse of contemporary "urban indie youths" is to shy away from that, either because they haven't got over being from small-town Ontario (never mind Midwestern United States) or because they never were from there in the first place.
I was hoping to hear "urban youth" speak of and/or address their material conditions by embracing Lomax-style folk, and was disappointed. Obviously, hip-hop occupies that function in the urban context already, but there's nothing that says reusing folk to speak of the city is that big of a stretch. None of these musings, however, could possibly distract from the music, and now both you and I have four other bands not to miss in the future.