AWmusic

Music-appreciating citizens of Toronto and whatever other weirdos frequent this blog do not need to be reminded of who are Bruce Peninsula. The band have spent the last few years building a rabid cult following in their home city and digging out pockets of fandom in more remote reaches of Canada, including my home city of Montreal, and this past year with the result of their debut album, A Mountain Is A Mouth – perhaps tied with Still Night, Still Light for my favorite album release of 2009 – was even granted a spot on the longlist for this year’s Polaris Prize.

I actually saw Bruce Peninsula for the first time at the 2007 POP Montreal festival, and part of the thrill that was Wednesday night’s performance was how different that show was from this recent one. The band of two years ago were intensely focused, neatly dressed and generally showed a lot of humility before the crowd, including being unfairly modest to me when I spoke to them. The Bruce Peninsula that stormed the stage of Il Motore were animated, limber and personable – the concentration was still present in the midst of their furiously energetic performance. Of course the Mountain material was as strikingly tight as it ever had been, and the incomparable performances only highlighted that the aural intensity of the band’s live sound is beyond the capabilities of any stereo system. And even though the band’s signature female choir was maybe four members slimmer since the last time I saw them (and the last time they recorded), and of whose four members two were performing live for the first time that night, their heightened presence in the evening solidified the exhilarating drama of their music.

Better still, the band gave the audience a glimpse of new material, which saw them not only digging more deeply into the darkness of North American folk music, but also rhythmic explorations into African tribal music and even hints of gamelan.

Of course the best part of all of this was getting to ask the band reasonably inane questions about their future plans afterward. The band mentioned that after a brief return to Toronto they will be embarking on a short tour of the east coast of Canada (look out, Vancouver! etc) and that they hope to get to the US and even Europe in the next year or so (music fans, we have a job to do). More exciting to me was the chance to ask them about their forthcoming sophomore LP, which guitarist and lead singer Neil Haverty says they hope to have out by next September, or maybe August “with some luck.” When asked about the direction of the new material, Neil was only able to tell me that it “is definitely getting darker” and that he feels the songs from their debut have become easy, and he prefers the music to be a challenge, and so they are experimenting with polyrhythms, shifting time signatures, and other things musicians do when they try to challenge themselves. When prodded further, Neil said that he “didn’t want to tell me anything more about it” because he thinks that “doing what people expect” is not “what [he] thinks bands should do,” and so he wanted me (and, I presume by extension, the rest of you) to be surprised when they heard it. He did say that he plans to preproduce the next album much more than the first, in hopes of maintaining the narrative feel of the material and having the sound of it much more solidly nailed down before the music is committed to tape. He also compared the band’s concept of the next album like the different rooms of a house, and the songs representing the many functions that rooms in a house can have (”your room where you go to play, and your room where you go to study… so there are gonna be some kickers, and… you know”). Frustration and excitement: oil and water. I guess I’ll survive.

Guitarist Matt Cully was no less mysterious, but was able to relate that the band usually takes a really long time to put new songs fully together, and that at the moment the band currently have several parts of songs that they hope to finish between their upcoming performances on the east coast. In the meantime, the band currently have available a 7″ featuring Bruce Peninsula’s strikingly unique renditions of American folk songs from the Lomax archives that they are selling at their shows (!) and through their website. Caverty also alluded to a stopgap EP featuring an ambitious fifteen-minute suite of narratively continuous music that should hopefully be seeing the light of day within the next few months.

Steamroller by Bruce Peninsula
Crabapples by Bruce Peninsula

(Ed. note photo taken from their myspace from a show at Lee’s Palace.)