Gig: Giant Hand

Giant Hand (Winchester Warm)

Imperial Pub Backroom. Thursday, January 6, 2011.

The 50 River concert series was started with an admirable idea — not just to present quality acts in the intimate space of the Imperial Pub's backroom, but to curate and contextualize the experience by having well-written previews and Q&A's with the artists available online beforehand. And to do it all with an enthusiastic, personal touch — as I rolled in to find a half-filled room on a rather snowy night, I was greeted by the effusive Holly Andruchuk, lighting the candles stuck in the tops of old liquor bottles that were decorating the tables.¹ It's always so nice to come across a genuinely nice person, the sort who will ask a virtual stranger how their day was, as if she were genuinely curious.

That quietly earnest quality pervades everything about the 50 River concert series — and there was something similarly earnest to openers Winchester Warm, an Ottawa duo of Jon Pearce (acoustic guit/vox) and Matt Godin (drums). Godin was wearing a John Deere hat, which felt like a telling detail and fit right in with their Heartland folk-rock. Pearce's voice brought to mind, say, Buffalo Tom's Bill Janovitz or perhaps J. Mascis' less-croaky moments as he reeled off a series of songs from their debut album Sky One Room. Music like this stands or falls on the quality of the songwriting, and there were some encouraging signs here, like the agreeable "Cracks and Clues".

And this kind of music is definitely enhanced in such a homey space, where between songs the band was close enough to the audience for Pearce to sniff the air and ask, "does someone have fries?" There was a bit of mid-tempo sameness in the songs, but thankfully, following a series of mellower tunes in the middle of the set, Pearce commented, "we'll pick it up a notch" before tackling "Surf's Up"². And on "Like Hell" he even had had the audience singing out the title phrase along with him.

True to the band's name, there is something warm and agreeable here. Sometimes there was only a subtle shade of difference between this and something more generic, but the songs were largely good enough to keep it worth paying attention to.

Listen to a track from this set here.

Whatever your opinion of his work, Kirk Ramsay (who performs solo under the bandonym Giant Hand) isn't at as much of a risk of being labelled a generic singer-songwriter. With a slightly quavery voice as distinctive as his lyrical stance, Ramsay seemed to arrive fully-formed with the songs that made up his debut album Coming Home.

The real trick is whether he can grow and expand upon that original template, and at this point there were definite encouraging signs. This was no rehash of what I had seen nearly a year previously when I had first encountered Ramsay. Not only was he now playing an electric Gibson instead of an acoustic guitar, but he was playing better — a latecomer to his instrument, his original technique was pretty bare-bones, and while still no virtuoso, there was a wider palette here. He was also expanding his sound with pedals and more technology as well — set-opener "Down By the River"³ came with some textual synth sounds. "Now I'm going to invent a bandmate," said Ramsay before "Bones Are My Home", which employed an understated backing track, including canned backing vox from Rolf Klausener of the Acorn.

The setlist was titled toward the songs that Klausener produced and played on for Ramsay's then-forthcoming EP Starting As People, including "Another Step Down". But, just as the last time I saw him, Ramsay was also already looking beyond his released material, and he was joined by Winchester Warm's Matt Godin who added drums on one new one.⁴ And adding percussion with a drum machine loop, Ramsay closed with another unreleased track — I can't seem to find a title anywhere — that's one of the best things he's done, a limping man's catalogue of defiant self-loathing: "don't look at me like that / I ain't no sewer rat / oh, don't look at me like that / I ain't sleeping with the maggots yet". Definitely words to live by as the short set ended and I headed out to the snowy street.

Listen to a track from this set here.

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¹ With Andruchuk a bit busier with her own music right now, it looks like the concert series is on hiatus at the moment.

² This was, in fact, an original and not a Beach Boys cover.

³ Also not a cover, but rather a song written from the perspective of a young polar bear who happens to be just as existentially agitated as the rest of Ramsay's narrators, musing, "if no one will remember me / then what was I alive for?"

⁴ Another benefit of seeing shows in the Imperial Pub's backroom is that there are frequently some random moments as regulars in the front bar wander back and forth past the stage to get to the outdoor smoking area. At this show, a nattily-dressed gent took a seat by the stage on his way back from having a smoke and considered Ramsey closely for about half a song and telling him, as he finished, "you look like Elvis Costello." Ramsey was mildly flustered, commenting, "that's weird." And that led to a semi-awkward back and forth on whether, following from that observation, Ramsay should be more inspired by Elvis Costello.