I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: THE RURAL ALBERTA ADVANTAGE-Live at Massey Hall (July 8, 2014).

The video opens with Nils Edenloff saying that this concert is an amazing posterity thing.  That it’s ungraspable for them right now, but they’ll look back after the fact and say, “Oh wow, I looked great then.”

“As a scrappy indie band it feels wild to be allowed to set their gear on stage for a spell.”

I have hears some songs by the band, but, wow, live they are a powerhouse.

The way “Luciana” opens is incredible: Drummer Paul Banwatt is a maniac sounding like two or three drummers as he crashes through some snare drum pattern variants and cymbals galore.

Nils Edenloff’s guitar has a great loud sound–very electric and large.  It sounds like the strings are loose wires smacking against the guitar and the fretboard (bot not detuned or anything).  And he sings with abandon.

Amy Cole’s keys are not as powerful as the rest but they provide a foundation for the rest of the band to play on

Muscle Relaxants has Cole singing backing vocals which fleshes out their sound even more.  They make a large racket for a trio that’s almost all acoustic.  Between songs, Nils comments:

“Wow you guys are quiet, no phones out, I guess.”

Don’t Haunt This Place is slower.  The vocal melody is familiar if not common, but the drums are just so thumping, it sounds great.  And the backing vocals are perfect.

Introducing “Tornado 87” he says

For those not from Alberta, you don’t have to sing Alberta songs if you’re from here, it’s just something we stumbled on.  Oddly enough we played part of this song last weekend at the Stampeders home opener and there happened to also be a tornado while we played this song.  Lets hope for the best tonight.

The song continues with the intensity of the other songs but it has a wonderful quiet middle section which erupts into an explosion at the end.

Two Lovers is solo, just Nils and his guitar.  It’s a nice break from the intensity.

“Terrified” is a new song that opens with just a guitar but then …boom…  great harmony vocals and a powerful chorus.

The show ends with “Stamp” which has a great clap-along section and wonderful ooohs to end the song.

This was the final video in Season One of the Live at Massey Hall series.   There are four seasons in total thus far.

[READ: May 9, 2018] ”Without Inspection”

This is the story of a man falling to his death: “It took Arnold six and a half seconds to fall five-hundred feet” is how it opens.

The story zooms in on Arnold’s mind for those six and a half seconds and the few seconds that remain before he actually dies.

He sees his son, Paris and Paris’ mother, Darlene.  And he flashes back to how they met, what has happened since they met and what he hopes will happen after he is gone.

The fall was unplanned and occurred when his left foot slipped off a scaffold and he fell out of the loosened (or broken) safety harness.

The story also details the fall–faster by the second.

What goes through his mind?  He thinks about The Lopez Brothers and their food truck.  Only five years earlier they’d arrived from Cojimar on a raft made from a refitted nineteen-fifties Chevy and look at them now.

This leads to how he met Darlene.

He along with nine other men and four women were fleeing Port de Paix and were ditched in the middle of the sea and told to swim ashore.  The women had drowned.  The other men struggled.  But as he reached the beach a woman sat there and he said “Ede m–Help me.”  Amazingly, she did.  She helped him limp to safety as the police siren zeroes in on them.

He felt bad for the other men, men he had come to know on the horrible journey that was supposed to last two but was in fact four.  They had run out of water half way from Port de Paix and had been drinking seawater and urine

Darlene said she never took anyone home with her–she knew a shelter to take him to. But a few days later she returned to the shelter.  She explained that she had a son and that the boy’s father, her husband, had died at sea.  She watched him drown and was only able to save her son.  This was Paris.  Paris still suffered complications form being in the water.  She wanted Arnold to know how much baggage she had.

I won;t discuss exactly how he died as it seems so unlikely.  It’s also staggering to think that these two went through so much–Darlene especially–to have it end this way.

The author is kind of a jerk.