In a land of mirrored houses and empty roads; sitting by a pond at the end of the train line listening to ( ) can reprieve isolation. This is The Lonesome Crowded West, though there it is said with more shrewd callings and less sensationalism.
I lived in Calgary for eight years, and it started with snow. Like perpetual dusk, it is a season that takes the city and what it possesses and builds it to become something torpid and molecular. Beneath packed snow and the c-train tracks that run like arteries to her residential buroughs, the city often buzzes only notches above hibernation. Through blue light and the fear of becoming completely latent, it fights, for six months or more, through wasted space and desolate fairgrounds.
During my time as an inhabitant, Calgary housed a stuffy scene. It was tightly woven as it punched like a relentless business agenda, locking itself from innovation with its linear punk ideals. But a week ago, I trekked to my local tavern in my two-year home of Victoria to find something that shattered this stigma.
The group accountable was Calgary's Azeda Booth, and they altered the air of the room like a cell phone signal sparked by a gas tank. It was as though they had resurrected the dirt [the gravel, the salt] I had shuffled my feet over again and again. Reassembling that which had left me jaded, I was convinced: they've survived nuclear winter; they've seen it, they know.
Though their EP, Mysterious Body, is composed of tracks that date back to when the band was only Jordon and Morgan; these recorded songs have grown live into their current six member incarnation.
Jordon's erratic falsetto held the nucleus, embellished by a web of members rotating instruments as they fused bewildering and elastic heroics. It was not post-anything, with the hearse heading to one climactic destination; but a collective of people in a snowstorm, drift struck and sincere.
There is something to them that is sordid, and so pungently serious; yet they build a force that is empowering and as strong as their unanimous trust. So much so, they may structure an isle of bells and drumsticks in the audience as an offering, and may I suggest to take up the oppurtunity.
Fusing nostalgia for a place I abandoned from exhaustion, maybe too easily; they reamained and caught fire. Oh, Azeda - you made it. Now we wait in a poised penchant for you to record.
Azeda Booth - Dead Girls
[MySpace]
In summer 2008, may they reach the island.
-Tara
