Lakes of Canada

So last Friday, October 8th, I went to see an acoustic gig at Grumpy's bar on Bishop.
It consisted of a one-man guitarist performance opening act, followed by a three piece
band made up of... well a bunch of instruments and singing.

Jesse Creatchman:
This guy was the opening act, just one guy, a guitar and, for a tiny bit, a harmonica.
To be honest my first impressions of the guy were not so great, if only because I'm
shallow and highly judgmental. This guy comes onto the stage wearing running shoes, slacks and a turtleneck.
Either way, regardless of attire, the guy can play and the guy can sing. Kind of like a young
John Mayer I guess. He seemed a bit nervous though, which wasn't helped by the fact that within
the first song he broke a string and had to borrow the guitar from the main band. After the initial
setback, things went very smoothly from then on. (kind of hard to get even more nervous after something like a broken string, you've pretty much got two choices: break down and end early, or just deal with it in any way you can and move on). He has a really good voice, and has some interesting songs, the most notable of which being a song he wrote about getting robbed, but they didn't take the whisky. If you're ever in Montreal and have a chance to see this guy play, I'd say its worth it, he's got a pretty good chance to get his name out there as far as I'm concerned.

Lakes of Canada:
This was the main event, the reason why I went out to Grumpy's that Friday night. Totally worth it. This trio of guys, all wearing vests by the way, really have something good going for them. Jake, Conor and Chris know what they're doing. All three of them sing, and all three of them play a number of instruments and percussions. It's obvious in their performance that they practice a lot and work well together. The trio of vocal harmonies really plays through well, and really makes the music all the more powerful. They have this really great sound, which their Myspace states sounds like "Fleet Foxes meets Sufjan meets Simon & Garfunkel meets Ingrid." Though personally I found a lot of their vocal harmonies and overall song structures and styles were reminiscent of artists like Promise and the Monster, or Lisa O Piu. The highlights, for me, of the night were two of their songs, the first being "Inconsiderate Friend", a funny little ode of sorts to those friends that you have that are just complete asshole's, yet still your friends. The second I guess could be considered a dirge for the lead singer's cat, the late Mr. Kitty Fantastico (which I must say was an awesome, poofy, white, three legged cat with personality and style). Overall it was a great show, with very interesting instrumental lineups (a floor tom, glockenspiel, tambourine, guitar, piano, charango, shakers, voices, the only thing missing was a cheese grater and an electric toothbrush) that can only really work well together with the right folkitude and, well, practice combined with good song writing. These guys are going somewhere for sure. They've been working hard at writing songs and, as far as I know, are almost done recording an EP at Concordia's Loyola campus, so that should be out relatively soon, check them out, when the EP is done buy a copy. Also if I understand correctly a music video should be out soon as well. Here's the link to their myspace, at the moment they just have one live recording up, but soon should have snippets from the EP.

http://www.myspace.com/lakesofcanada

Something that has been on my mind for a while.

So I know this gets thrown around a lot, and a lot of people bitch about it, but really it is something that is on my mind a lot, and really makes me angry.

Why is it that so many people with almost no talent "write" and record songs that sound like carbon copies of whomever their favorite musician is, and get so much recognition and praise for it? Seriously, this pisses me off. They come up with extremely generic pop music, that sounds just like every pop musician and band before them, and these music critics and radio DJs decide its amazing, beautiful and unique, which brings a tear to one's eye because of how soulful these young people are (just like all the other musicians who have done it, imagine, tons of bands and musicians sounding exactly the same, and getting the exact same praise, being called unique and soulful). It brings these useless critics nearly to tears, and it brings me to the nearest toilet to vomit. This happens so often that a lot of young people with talent, who start off making some very interesting actually original music that has potential to lead somewhere, to decide "Hey, I could keep making the music I want to, or I could just write a three chord rock ballad and get false recognition, fame and (so long as they are not deemed a one-hit-wonder) fortune for a while, maybe grow old and continuously flog the dead horse that is my career a-la Rolling Stones, AC/DC and Guns N' Roses."

It sickens me how much this stifles the creativity of today's youth (it also sickens me how materialistic we have become, but that's a whole other story). What people need to do is wake up and realize that they're allowed to be different, they can write songs with more than three to five chords, songs don't necessarily need the verse-chorus template. There should be an unwritten rule when a band signs a contract, or even gets started. They should follow in the steps of the amazing band Isis, who will forever be known as an amazing band for the music they created. They were together for 13 years, from 1997-2010. As they had written in their blog when stating that they were going to split up as a band they said: "Simply put, ISIS has done everything we wanted to do, said everything we wanted to say." ... "We've seen too many bands push past the point of a dignified death and we all promised one another early on in the life of the band that we would do our best to ensure ISIS would never fall victim to that syndrome." (the full blog post can be found here http://isistheband.blogspot.com/2010/05/isis-has-reached-end_18.html)

If only bands (like the previously mentioned AC/DC etc) would do what Isis has done, and proverbially cleared the path, left it open for new projects and new bands (not necessarily with young people, but even bands created from the remnants of the split up groups of the past) to come into the open, if these mainstream pop-rock bands had just died gracefully ages ago, we would be getting a lot more new talent within the mainstream, instead of hearing this endless wave of factory-made cookie cutter music.