Julie Doiron (Little Scream / Steven McKay)
The Horseshoe. Thursday, February 3, 2011.
I'd just seen the mellow sounds of singer/songwriter Steven McKay a few days prior, when he was playing at a benefit show with a lot of friends and fellow members of Bruce Peninsula. So my observations on this night were more based on the minor changes that transpire from set to set than detailing the broad strokes. For one thing, I was amused to note that while the band finished their linecheck, Allie Hughes was doing some vocal warmups, including singing to herself, "Voice of Neal...". Meanwhile, it was almost the same band as at the Music Gallery show — McKay handled percussion himself while he played guitar, and besides Hughes he was joined by Samir Khan on bass and Bram Gielen on keybs. In the one notable change, in the place of Thomas Gill was Drew Smith (a/k/a Dr. Ew, ex-Bicycles) on vox and guit.
Leading off with "Restore Me", McKay was in fine fettle, with amusing banter and on this night not taking the songs too seriously. For example, McKay pumped up the sweet madrigal "Emma Comes Home" with powerful drumrolls while singing like he was auditioning for an amateur musical, giving the song a goofier tone than usual. Gielen picked up on the vibe, throwing a couple rococo fills and then pounding away with the same glee that McKay was attacking the drums with.
That slightly antic mood must have inspired Gielen, as on the following "Andy's House", he tossed off an excellently over-the-top New Wave synth solo that had the rest of the band barely holding back laughter as he finished. Another highlight was Drew Smith taking lead vocals on an accomplished version of the Beach Boys' "I Just Wasn't Made For These Times", again mixing his higher voice with McKay's in an agreeable manner.
There are times where a little looseness doesn't wear well on a band, but here, it felt relaxed and friendly — giving another point of approach into McKay's comfortable world.
Listen to a song from this set here.
There was a rather different vibe on the stage as Laurel Sprengelmeyer, who shares her initials with her bandonym Little Scream, took the stage. Sprengelmeyer came off as far less casual and engaging, a stance which shared the same mannered reserve found in her songs. Backed only by Jamie Thompson (ex- The Unicorns/Islands) on drums, Sprengelmeyer brought a fair amount of layered lushness for two people with a relatively lo-tech setup. In addition to her guitar, her songs featured slightly unstable waves of looped backing vocals, some added by a beat-up old Casio SK-1 resting on a chair beside her and held up to the vocal mic as required.
That DIY sonic sculpting — as well as the way that the songs felt more "constructed" than "composed" — offered some conceptual overlap with, say, Tune-Yards.1 But musically, there was a rather different aesthetic — Sprengelmeyer sounds more influenced by the Kate Bush school. Leading off the "The Lamb", the set featured songs from her then-forthcoming debut full-length, The Golden Record. Some songs (like "Boatman") got over with Thompson's rollicking backbeat and her engaging use of those handcrafted vocal loops. That kept the songs generally interesting to listen to, but overall there wasn't as much of a melodic throughline as I'd prefer.
Her concentration on the music also came at the expense of interacting with the crowd. "This is the part I hate, the banter part," she commented while tuning near the set's end. Her subsequent request to "talk amongst yourselves" probably isn't the best route to go, and indeed as the set went on there was increasingly more chatting going on in the crowd. That was a shame as the set closed on a couple quieter songs, including "The Heron and the Fox", which had a bit of that catchiness to it that I'd been missing earlier. Once she has more shows under her belt, Sprengelmeyer might remember to hold back one of her uptempo numbers to close out on, and leave the crowd with something a bit more emphatic to remember her by. On this evidence she hasn't quite earned her nom de rock yet, but we'll take its implied loudness as a promise that might yet be delivered on.
Listen to a song from this set here.
Perhaps one of the things that make Julie Doiron so uniquely appealing is the way in which her live performances synthesize disparate elements found in each of this show's opening acts. There's always no shortage of loose, casual banter and a stream-of-consciousness approach to her shows, but that sometimes leads to some frozen moments of second-guessing. You never know what you're going to get — in terms of what songs she'll play or who she'll be playing them with.
As she emerged this time, it was with Will Kidman (ex-Constantines), who'd mostly play drums throughout the night, but also singing and picking up a guitar as required. Although some shows I've seen in the past began with introspective, acoustic songs, it was right into the rock right from the start this time around, with Doiron full of energy and jumping around on stage as she joyfully cranked out a Crazy Horse-like rumble to frame her lyrics.
As usual, there was some affecting new material — in fact, Doiron likes playing new songs so much it's often the older material that will catch her off-guard the most. That also might have something to do with the fact that she'll try and play pretty much any request from her considerable catalogue that the crowd throws at her. Sometimes that can lead to moments that spark with that old Dylanesque first-take magic — when she called out the title for "Dance Music" and began playing, it wasn't entirely clear if Kidman actually knew the song, but he plunged in regardless.
Doiron's stage manner can come off as randomly flighty, which I'm sure alienates some people. But her asides are frequently amusing, even as they veer into such unexpected avenues of advice such as making sure your rental car has snow tires. That goes hand-in-hand with the usual indeterminacy of the setlist, with Doiron announcing there'd be a couple more songs, then remembering others that she wanted to play, and adding those in — along with a couple that she suddenly remembered people calling for earlier in the night. Doiron is the opposite of a musician who's just playing like they're punching the clock — on any given night there are different songs that she looks to be fairly itching to play.
Before a rollicking version of "Everybody Knows This is Nowhere", Doiron dropped the tantalizing promise of an album of covers that she and Kidman were working on2. With Doiron and Kidman switching places, this was a spirited ride that just managed to get from point A to point B without collapsing in a heap. And then, with some darker songs like "Some Blues" and "Me and My Friend", there was no shortage of heavy material in the end run, so it was nice that the set ended with the more optimistic "Glad to Be Alive".
The repeatedly-extended set ran well over an hour before Doiron and Kidman returned for a driving run through "Woke Myself Up" on the encore. A quiet strum through "The Life of Dreams" wrapped it all up, closing out a pretty awesome show. Maybe there's a bit of Zen in Doiron's approach — she never takes the stage like she's trying to prove anything, but at the end I'm always left feeling I've just seen one of the finest shows in recent memory.3
Listen to a song from this set here.
1 There's also a relation inasmuch as both are American musicians who have spent some productive time in Montreal — Sprengelmeyer's album was co-produced with Arcade Fire's Richard Reed Parry and contains appearances from a lot of that city's well-known musicians.
2 Another cover that was tackled was Merle Haggard's "Reasons to Quit", which sounded just as lived-in as some of Doiron's own hard-lessons-learned-from-hard-drinkin' songs.
3 Doiron will be playing The ALL CAPS! Island Festival this Saturday (August 13, 2011).
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