canadian arts -- on a neat-to-know basis...No11 march/april 2007

Thursday Night Café

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Root cause
By Bobbie Smith

Back in February, The Magpies and The McFlies brought a roots sound to a unique AIDS-support cause: helping a group of women in the dark continent who are burying their adult children and raising their grandchildren.

The root cause is HIV/AIDS, railing against the African continent with no mercy; the grandmothers are the only ones left to raise their children’s children. Thanks to Stephen Lewis, African grandmothers’ need for support in particular was hauled from the dark earth and given light for the first time the day before International Women’s Day last year (2006).

To read more about this foundation, visit:
http://www.stephenlewisfoundation.org/grandmothers.htm

The roots sound from The Magpies was led by a female singer with a dark voice with lots of vibration: a kind of Sean Colvin meets Emmylou Harris. Dark vocals and a rich, muddy sound came together to strike a cross between alt country and rock-a-billy. When you forget there’s a bass player or a drummer, you know you’re dealing with musician who play tight. My only dismay was that the young man singing harmony also had a dark voice. When he harmonized, I had to really concentrate on her voice or she’d be overshadowed. Usually the best blends are with dark and bright, but the outcome was by no means unpleasant. They are both great singers.

The lyrics that cut through for me were in the song Licence to Kill. It didn’t help that I was in standing room only in the back. The sound was almost too good musically to pay attention to the words.

The McFlies brought a roots sound to the synthetic, e-sound of the ’80s by using acoustic instruments such as blues harp, accordion, violin/fiddle, ukulele, acoustic guitar and congas. They picked up your fragile ’80s soul, put it in their capable, artistic hands and made it okay.

Classics like Safety Dance, Tainted Love and Quiet Riot’s, Come On Feel the Noise were rendered warm, smooth and alkaline in their delivery. There was no one in that room not enjoying these highly musical versions of all our favourites.

Lots of pics and sound bites on their website: http://mcflies.com/