May La Force Be With You

Thursday night, I was at The Drake Underground for a show by Ariel Engle. A recent addition to Broken Social Scene, she is best known to me as AroarA, a duo formed around 2012 with husband and also BSS member Andrew Whiteman. Tonight they are back with some additional band members (including Carleigh Aikins) as La Force.

With multiple projects over the years including BSS and Hydra, there was a fairly big crowd for Engle; the first show on Wednesday was actually sold-out. La Force's music was upbeat, muscular synth-pop. It was interesting to hear her lyrics as Aroara's verses were taken from poet Alice Notley's In The Pine. Engle is a good songwriter herself, given emotional heft to catchy numbers. For the live show, she liked to sneak in lyrical snippets of other songs: Technotronic's Pump Up The Jam in Upside Down Wolf and Sinead O'Connor's Troy in Ready To Run. Engle played several Aroara songs including the sublime #14 ("I was born to be a poet"). Apparently, Whiteman doesn't usually play live with her on La Force so the encore Epistolary Love Song felt special and intimate.

La Force's debut album was released last year, so there were plenty in the crowd who knew the words. But I'm sure all were converts after tonight's wonderful set.