In-store: The Balconies / Ghostkeeper

The Balconies / Ghostkeeper

Criminal Records. Friday, March 12, 2010.

One of the side benefits of something like CMW is getting extra chances to catch bands play. The cool people at Criminal Records are definitely into the spirit of it, putting on early in-store shows on a couple nights that served as a good way to ease into an evening of venue-hopping.

On a cold, rainy Friday, I was thinking I was going to get to Queen Street just in time to catch the start of the show — but any worries I was going to be late evaporated when I noticed that Balconies' singer/guitarist Jacquie Neville was on the same streetcar as me.¹ So indeed I had a couple minutes to settle in as the band got ready to play. Perhaps it was bleh-inducing rain outside, but the crowd on hand was a bit thin given the amount of buzz around the bands on hand.

The Balconies, for example, have turned a lot of heads with their high-energy live sets. I know I was sold when I saw 'em playing late last year and listening to their poptastic, self-titled debut album absolutely sealed the deal. More familiar with them now, I was able to spend more time just enjoying the band and less trying to think on how to describe them.² The Neville siblings traded off leads to start, with Jacquie on "Ghost Fever" followed by Stephen on "Lulu" and from there the trio continued for over half an hour — almost a full-length set for a band with a single-album repertoire. The band threw themselves into it with break-a-sweat gusto, too, clearly not scaling back their energy because this was "just" an in-store show. I was glad to have the chance to see them again and confirm that the one show I saw was no fluke — you can mark The Balconies down as a reliable source of rockin' fun.³

Listen to a track from this set here.

After a break for the bands to switch over, an even smaller crowd stuck around for out-of-towners Ghostkeeper. Not just a cool band name, they are in fact named after singer/guitarist Shane Ghostkeeper, rockin' with his Métis heritage on display in his beaded guitar strap and feather dangling from his guitar. Hailing from Alberta, the band is apparently usually a five-piece, but was stripped down to a trio for in-store purposes. The group are aligned with Chad VanGaalen's Flemish Eye label, but take that as a commitment to a certain skewed approach to music-making more than sharing a sound with any of their label-mates.

The band played a sort of abstracted, experimental take on blues-rock, an interesting mix that had their songs sounding as if they might be as likely to veer into a Pavement cover as into, say, The Georgia Satellites' "Keep Your Hands to Yourself". The songs' structures weren't off-the-shelf rote, but the excursions did sometimes lose focus. Meanwhile, in the store's PA, drummer Sarah Houle's vox sorta disappeared into the mix. But there was something interesting going on here — I wouldn't say the band is all the way there yet, but given the half-hour ended strongly with "Well Well Well" and "Turn Up the Heat", there's signs that Ghostkeeper are on to something.

Listen to a track from this set here.

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¹ Celebrities! They travel just like we do!

² I'll stick with my earlier assessment of Laura Branigan meets the The dB's, even if that hasn't seemed to have caught on anywhere else yet.

³ And if you haven't seen The Balconies yet, I note they're playing a Steam Whistle "Unsigned" show on May 28th.