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A Great Music Video–Library Voices, Unplugged

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Library Voices is an absolutely great band from Regina, Saskatchewan. They’ve been through New York City twice on tour since I discovered them a bit more than a year ago. The video below is an acoustic version of their song “Traveler’s Digest,” from the website of Green Couch Sessions. Library Voices plays with a boisterous enthusiasm, whether unplugged as here, or with full compliment of amps and synths in tow. I hope you enjoy the video. Their albums are great, including the most recent, “Summer of Lust.”

Green Couch Sessions says  it’s “a place where music lovers come to listen. Found abandoned in an alley it has transformed into a hub of local and awesome music. Reviews, Interviews and anything else we want to talk about!”

Green Couch was also responsible for the Tracks on Track musical extravaganza this past June, when 10 bands, including The Matinee, and Shred Kelly, CBC Radio 3 host and author Grant Lawrence, plus a couple dozen fans of Canadian indie music traveled by rail from Vancouver to Toronto. I was unable to join that journey from west to east, but I met many friends from the trip in Toronto for the annual North by Northeast festival (NXNE). There’s lots of cool video from Tracks on Tracks online.
Special thanks to CBC Radio 3 pal Rebecca Gladney for posting “Traveler’s Digest” on Facebook tonight. //end//
 

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This Week at The Great Gray Bridge

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In the past week at this blog, I’ve written about the best TV ad of the presidential campaign thus far; a brave woman in Alaska who fended off an aggressive grizzly bear; the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema of Austin, TX, which is entering the NYC market only a couple blocks from my office; the great Canadian band Library Voices; Sarah Silverman’s bawdy video that pokes fun at right-wing casino magnate Sheldon Adelson; a new album from Bob Dylan; the award-winning CBC radio host, Jian Ghomeshi; Greenland’s worryingly shrinking Petermann Glacier; a young chess master and Franconia College classmate of mine who vanished in 1978 under mysterious circumstances; the late, great baseball writer, Robert Creamer, who chronicled the life of Babe Ruth; the sweet severance deal Mitt Romney arranged for himself from Bain Capital; the moving book I’ve been reading by Rob Sheffield, my #FridayReads yesterday; and my own personal history, including the story of how during a teenage road trip my brother Joel and I happened to adopt our longtime black lab Noah, pictured here with me.

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Library Voices, Kicking it up in Quebec City

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I love the music of Canadian power pop septet Library Voices, and in the past year have twice had the pleasure of hearing them play live. The first time was last November when they played the Knitting Factory in Brooklyn with the six-piece outfit Ohbijou*, a show I wrote about in the early weeks of this blog. The second time was this past April when they played Pianos on the Lower East Side with Yukon Blonde, when the photos accompanying this post were shot.

Library Voices play their power pop with an exuberant intensity that I’ve found a great joy to take in. In my post last fall, I wrote they have “a brash, fun sound with vibrant catchy hooks, bookish song titles and literary-minded lyrics by synth player Mike Dawson (‘Reluctant Readers Make Reluctant Lovers,’ ‘If Raymond Carver Were Born in the 90s,’ ‘Prime Minister’s Daughter’), and a very athletic performing style.” Among the foremost of the athletes on stage is bassist Eoin Hickey-Cameron, a big man with a great personality who in a photo shown here utterly dwarfs me! Eoin jumps in place while playing his instrument, which he does with great abandon. It is for good reason that Library Voices got a lot of votes in last year’s CBC Radio 3 Bucky Awards in the “Best Live Band” category, including mine.

I was delighted to read today that over the past weekend Library Voices played a festival in Quebec City, far from their prairie base in Regina, Saskatchewan. And, according to Mark Teo of Exclaim magazine, the show they played at the Festival d’été was one for the ages. Teo writes their “eager energy — more befitting of a hardcore act — translated into scintillating pop, converting ‘If Raymond Carver Were Born in the ’90s’ and ‘Generation Handclap’ into insta-memorable shout-alongs. And when they closed with the Misfits’ ‘Where Eagles Dare,’ it became official: Library Voices owned the funnest set of the Festival d’été.” About Eoin, he adds, “Bassist Eoin Hickey-Cameron pogoed as if he were in Youth of Today.” Teo’s terrific review is only a few paragraphs, and really worth reading at this link.

* Ohbijou is a great band too. In my post last November, I described them as playing a kind of “space jam with soaring notes and lyrical interludes with great vocals by sisters Casey and Jenny Mecija, who also play guitar and violin respectively.” In the last photo in the gallery along with this post, I’m pictured with Jenny, who happens to be Eoin Hickey-Cameron’s girlfriend.

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Bonding with Shotgun Jimmie & John K. Samson at the Bowery Ballroom

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I love one-man bands, those musical artists who can stomp, holler, and play licks while animating a whole set entirely on their own. Soloists like this captivate an audience with talent, musicianship, and personality. Last Thursday night’s show at the Bowery Ballroom offered ample pleasures like these, with the fresh and funny Shotgun Jimmie opening for master singer-songwriter John K. Samson in a show for the ages. Jimmie was charming, talented, playing kick drum with his foot, ripping on his Fender electric, and singing his quirky songs of striving and nerdy romanticism, maintaining despite all disappointments a cockeyed optimism. Even the title of Jimmie’s latest album suggests wit and wordplay: “Transistor Sister.” Here are some lines from the opening track “Late Last Year.”

Oh my darlin’ the legs under this table/are independently bumpin’ in to mine/They’re on a mission dispatched to disable/My defenses and they’re working just, fine

Like the Canadian rockers Library Voices, John K. Samson’s lyrics exude a literary quality, filled as they are with learned allusions to explorers, the classical world, and existential reality. He’s co-founder of a publishing collective in Winnipeg called Arbeiter Ring Publishing, a sort of Workmen’s Circle for books, which recently brought his Lyrics & Poems 1997-2012. As a book professional myself, I am intrigued with this rocker who also has a big footprint in the book and publishing camp. I see that Vancouver writer Steven Galloway, whose novel Ascension I published in 2002, has articulated what’s special about Samson’s work:  “John K. Samson is one of Canada’s finest living writers. He creates a world with a phrase, devastates with a word and restores hope with an image. Many novels do not contain as much humanity and emotional resonance as one of Samson’s lines. As a writer I am torn between admiration and jealousy; as a reader I am enthralled.” // more w/photos . . .

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