Ladies' Night

My first encounter with Montreal country band Ladies of the Canyon was seeing Maia Davis play a solo set at The Dakota Tavern. I last saw them at The Horseshoe quite a while back. So I was happy to see them do a month-long residency every Tuesday at The Dakota, trying out new material from their upcoming album.

Tonight, the opener was NQ Arbuckle, a veteran country band from Toronto. Songs like Cheap Town and Punk Rocker had an alternative flavour: a country foundation with forays into rock. They had a good sprinkling of fans singing along. But I couldn't get into their music. The lyrics were usually interesting and the songs would start with some nice bluegrass or old country feel. But by the middle section, they invariably wandered into generic Top 40 radio.

Ladies of the Canyon is a striking band at first glance: all female, very attractive, and decked out in eye-catching clothes. Their sound had that same brazen attitude. The new songs (Dark Water, I Get Down) were definitely on the rock spectrum end: full of swagger, guitar riffs, anthemic bass and drum, and Fleetwood Mac harmonies. What a great sonic evolution for this band. Old songs were strictly pure country including Haunted Woman from their last album. There was only 1 or 2 songs treading close to middle-of-the-road country-pop. Now Maia just need to tell the sound tech to crank up her guitar feed because she had some major rocking-and-rolling going on.