One Hundred Dollars Trio (Kathleen Phillips / The Pining)
The Tranzac (Southern Cross Lounge). Friday, December 10, 2010.
Another fundraising show for The Tranzac, with a chance to hear some songs from one of my favourite bands in a stripped-down setting. The comfy Southern Cross room was set up theatre-style, with the tables moved out, leaving more room for chairs. With some people sitting cross-legged right in front of the band and a few standing back at the bar, there were about fifty people squeezed in to watch $100 playing in a trio format, with Simone Schmidt1 and Ian Russell joined by Stew Crookes on pedal steel.
Having Crookes on hand meant that while the sound was still spare, there was no shortage of atmosphere. Which was a good way to present a set packed with newer material, like the lead-off "If It Weren't For the Carnations". In fact, there was so much focus on the new stuff that, a few songs in, Schmidt was actually momentarily flustered in trying to remember the lyrics to the older "Forest of Tears", the title track of their first album. Once she was on track, though, she stepped right into the character of the song's angry protagonist, pacing the floor and stabbing her finger bitterly toward the forest.
The band had played that song in order to set up "Fires of Regret", a brand new one introduced as the sequel — a response from the point of view of the man who had abandoned the narrator in "Forest of Tears". It says something about the writerly investment that Schmidt makes in the characters in her songs that she feels compelled to go back and re-visit them, approaching their stories from different angles — that might explain why $100 have more "sequel songs" than most bands.2
Meanwhile, this was also a noteworthy occasion, as Schmidt made her guitar-playing debut, sporting a credible finger-picking style that will now stand as one more element for the band to draw on. "That was super weird," she laughed afterward, thanking the crowd for helping her along. That was followed by another brand-new song, "I Hate That Highway", Schmidt commenting, "we always say we don't write songs about the country, but this song's about the country" — or more specifically, the roads that lure the young generation away to the cities: "it's taken the best and brought the bad to town".
As usually happens at these events, there was warm appreciation given for the Tranzac, no surprise as Russell and Schmidt had played their formative gigs in this very room, a place where "you can masquerade a spoken word performance as a country concert and play to people that will listen to you". The set closed with a fine version of "Not For Me" that required a re-start, Schmidt admonishing herself for missing a line as well as the crowd for missing their cue to join in on the refrain of "don't lock me, don't lock me away". Once it got rolling again it all worked pretty magically.
A couple selections from this set: you can check out something brand new here or sing along to an old favourite here.
The night had been set up to begin with the headliner — all the better, we had been told, to get the heavy stuff out of the way first. There was still a dark undercurrent in a comedy set from Kathleen Phillips, but now in the service of a different sort of storytelling. Lacking a Christmas story of her own, Phillips borrowed the voice of Stuart McLean to tell a tale definitely not heard on the Vinyl Café. Taking on the "undead voice of Jimmy Stewart" — an exaggeration of her own slightly laconic speaking style — Phillips got McLean's tone and cadences and folksy asides just right in relating the tale of a rather macabre road-trip. Anyone who gets that slightly-queasy bizarro world feeling on hearing McLean's stories would find this to be a perfect corrective — and indeed, I thought it was rather brilliant. And, for an extra bit of disorienting frisson, after a few minutes, a weird organ drone drifted over from whatever show was going on over in the Main Hall, and it fit right in.
Closing things out was The Pining, a group I'd been meaning to see for awhile. There were a couple familiar faces in the lineup — I had seen Julie Faught, one of the main voices and songwriters here, as a frequent guest vocalist with Kids on TV, and I had seen violinist Mika Posen with Timbre Timber and Forest City Lovers (as well as collaborating with a whole bunch of other artists). But there was lots of talent to go around (and plenty of cowboy boots!) in a band a half-dozen deep. Despite the numbers, the sound was relatively uncluttered, leaving lots of room for some fabulous harmonies as the main element of their back-porch folk/country sound.
The members were joking back and forth with each other and clearly having a fun time, despite — or possibly because of — the sad songs they were playing. The set started with "Seed of Doubt" and didn't get much brighter from there. "Here's another upbeat number for you," was the introduction to "Cold Hearted Man". It was introduced as a cover and played as a spare, spooky lament, three singers trading off verses. It was only after the fact when I looked it up that I realized vocalist Emma Moss wasn't kidding when she shouted, "AC/DC!" at the end.
The tempo picked up with the sprightlier "Back Again", with drummer Dani Nash (who was playing with an stripped-down kit, with snares and no cymbals) took to the spoons for a song. Beyond that, there was more good stuff like "She's Gone", showing that the band could pull off both the slower songs and the more upbeat numbers with panache. After the closing pair of "Better Life" and "Call it Quits", the crowd was calling for one more, so the band invited everyone to sing along on a run through The Traveling Wilburys' "End of the Line" that was a little ramshackle but managed to stay on the rails.
Listen to a track from this set here.
1 Schmidt appears to have reverted back to using her government name from her previous alias of "Simone Fornow".
2 The first time I heard "Courting My Heartache", it was introduced as a sequel to "Black Gold".
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