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