Elementals Madness Widens

Friday night, let's go see what the kids are listening to nowadays down at The Garrison. First up was Kite Hill composed of a singer on keyboard, a clarinetist, a violinist, a cellist, an upright bass-player, and a drummer. They played melodic tunes that tend to move from soft, slightly melancholic passages to head-nodding rock refrains. They are getting better the more times I see them. The sound mix allowed the softer instruments like clarinet and xylophone to be heard. As before, I sometimes wish that they break out of the pop music structure and add some complexity to their tunes (and not in the soft-loud-soft-loud sense).

Next came Slow Down Molasses, a five piece outfit from Saskatoon, composed of 4 guys, in a typical band set-up, and a girl doing harmony and synth. For this tour, they enlisted a female cellist for even more harmonic goodness. With 2 male singers, some of their songs were great with 4-part harmonies. A fairly noisy pop outfit, with lots of feedback on the guitar and a drummer with an heavy hand on the snare, they got the room to move (or at least for heads to nod more vigorously). Like the first act, they were unable to get the typical reserved Toronto crowd to close the 6 feet between the first row and the stage. It was kind of weird standing up there by myself, but I guess when you get old, being weird is par for the course. I preferred the second singer who had a country twang to his voice. He sang less often on lead, but his voice was strong with heart-ache and loss, and his songs packed a more emotional punch.

Finally Forest City Lovers came on stage. This was my first experience of this local outfit. Last week, I saw the lead singer/guitar/keys, Kat Burns, took the stage for the Junos. Unlike that appearance which was all sad, all the time, with a violinist, drummer, bassist, and a second singer/keyboard (one of the girls from rouge), there were some happy, upbeat tunes. One of my favourite songs (Light You Up) had Kat stuttering syllables to be echoed back by the violin. At the end, some people in the audience even started dancing.

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