It’s early in the day yet. Maybe you’re still a little sleepy-eyed, and can’t wait for the weekend to come. Got some fun plans? Going to see some shows, maybe?
Speaking of shows: we’re three weeks away from MEGAN LANE! Yea, only one of Canada’s best guitarists toting her new album Sounding the Animal as she stops in Victoria to blast the shit out of Festival of Health Research at our Thursday night showcase.
Yea, Sounding the Animal‘s pretty amazing. I’d tell you about it, but Bill Robertson from Saskatoon’s Star Phoenix has already done a pretty bang up job, and if it’s too early for reading, just watch the music video for “Someday We Will Leave This Town” again. I know you want to…
Bill Robertson everybody!
Well, Dorothy, we’re not in Bud’s anymore.
Since Megan Lane moved to Montreal, had an intimate moment with a coyote/wolf on a Quebec island on New Year’s Eve and got together with Hawksley Workman to produce and play on a new album, her music has undergone a transformation. She’s sounding like the animal she met in the woods, but more importantly like the one she has inside herself. This woman moves by instinct.
Mind you, instinct is all fine and dandy as long as you have the chops to fall back on, and that’s where the hours at Bud’s and in some corner practising for many more hours help to ground the new sound in musical basics and some terrific playing.
The album opens with a blast, wild guitars escorting Whiskey to Remember, another of the anesthetics we use when we suffer for love. In Cabin in the Woods, Lane exploits the juxtaposition of the subject matter and the pulsing keys of the dance music beat. Someday We Will Leave This Town has a boingy boingy beat as well, compliments of the synths of Mr. Workman.
But before you think that this dance beat and synths are what this new animal is all about, take a listen to Lane’s guitar on Someday, as well as on Make Me an Animal and Never Easy, just to give a couple of examples. She tears it up. Then on the album’s longest track, Coyote/Wolf, she goes for the simplicity of a well-strummed acoustic guitar, as she does on What These Walls Hold.
Underneath the synths, the new beats, the stellar guitar work, and some just plain good songwriting, there’s an ethos here of you and me against the world: we leave this town, we know what these walls hold, “you are the coyote, I am the wolf,” neither loved by society at large, but an entity unto themselves. This is an album of fierce love for the animal on the margins.
Megan Lane will be performing during RELEASE! on Thursday, October 16th, at Victoria Event Centre, starting at 11:00 PM.
This fall Megan Lane released Sounding the Animal, a punchy riff-rock album produced by Hawksley Workman. Her music career began in the blues circuit at age 12, and she hasn’t put down a guitar or mic since. It’s not all bleeding guitar solos, Megan also crafts memorable songs and lyrics. Originally from Saskatoon, Megan competed on the city’s first two poetry slam teams at Festival of Health Research 2009 & 2010. More at meganlane.com.