Recording: The Silt

Artist: The Silt

Songs: No Twig + One Day Will Come + No One Can Say Too Well

Recorded at Array Space, March 29, 2018.

The Silt - No Twig

The Silt - One Day Will Come

The Silt - No One Can Say Too Well

This typical spring day (in the sense that spring is often cold and rainy) saw the reactivation of this Rat-Drifting era unit (that had only a single one-off show last year since their dissolution in 2010) playing "all the hits" over two sets. There was multi-tasking all around here — most notably from Marcus Quin, who spent most of the set playing drums and bass simultaneously, but Ryan Driver and Doug Tielli each swapped off on several instruments as well.

Mostly favouring a sort of bent-roots crunch (though with several diversions, such as to the prog crooning heard in the second song here) and plenty three-part falsetto harmonies, the group's unstable wobble puts them at the most "out" in a constellation of contemporaries like Royal City and Rock Plaza Central. I only saw this band play once, toward the end of their run, and I was somewhat ambiguous about them then, clearly lacking the context to totally "get" what they were doing. Now, this strikes me as excellent stuff — and this performance, feeling rough-around-the-edges in the best ways, didn't feel like the work of a band that had hardly played in seven years. They've already gotten one more show under their belt, so it looks like this might be back in the "active projects" docket.