The second annual Jasper Folk Music Festival kicks of Friday, Sept. 12 at Centennial Park. Tickets are still available at Coco's Cafe, Nutters, Tekarra Color Lab and the Jasper Legion, as well as at the Old Grind and Wild Orchid Liquor Store in Hinton and Three Ranges Brewing Company in Valemount.
They can also be purchased online at www.jasperfolkmusicfestival.ca.
Friday night headliner: SHRED KELLY
There’s nothing quite like gunshots firing overhead during a late night pee break on the side of a desolate highway—especially when those shots are coming from an unknown location and could be heading in any possible direction.
But, such is the life of a travelling band. If it’s not gunshots, it’s an albino moose greeting you from the side of the road.
At least that’s the case for Shred Kelly.
The “stoke folk” band from Fernie, B.C. has shared all kinds of adventures in its five years on the road, whether playing for sandwiches and beer or the big bucks at some of the country’s most popular festivals.
Back in 2009, when the musicians found each other at an open jam night, it wasn’t long before they had grand plans for a cross-country tour—despite having no name recognition or musical cred outside of their quaint mountain town.
“It was probably a bit naive of us to do as our first tour,” said the band’s lead vocalist and pianist, Sage McBride. “After that we learned to tour a little bit more intelligently—and not to take on the entire country as a band that no one knows.”
That tour, although not the most intelligent decision of the band’s career, did leave the members with some nuggets of wisdom, though, as well as a name for their hard-to-define genre.
“We were trying to come up with a name, because every time we showed up to a bar for the first time and no one had heard of us, they’d be like, ‘what kind of music do you play,’ and if we said folk, people would be kind of disappointed because they would be like, ‘that was much heavier than folk,’ if we said rock they would be like, ‘but, there’s a folk element.’
“So we were having a difficult time describing our sound and our friend was like, ‘it’s stoke folk, it’s folk music that gets you really stoked.’”
And that’s the genre that’s stuck, taking the band through its first two albums: Goodbye July and In the Hills.
Its third full length album is set to be released in early 2015. McBride said it’s full of the stoke folk tunes the band is known for, but there’s an electronic twist.
“There’s more synth on the album, but there’s still our high energy banjo rock—that’s pretty prevalent.”
Shred Kelly will bring its foot-stomping, clawhammer banjo riffs to Jasper this weekend, when it headlines the Jasper Folk Music Festival Friday night, taking the stage at 9:30 p.m.
Nicole Veerman
[email protected]
[accordion title="Saturday night headliner: BRIGHT LIGHT SOCIAL HOUR"]
Maybe you’ve heard the music of the Bright Light Social Hour before, and maybe you’ve struggled to piece together some kind of meaning in the lyrics that run under those upbeat, psychedelic rock riffs.
But if you take the band’s keyboardist, Jack O’Brien, at his word, you’ll probably never make sense of any of it. You see, a lot of those lyrics start out as complete gibberish. Some of them get refined from complete gibberish to slightly less gibberish-y prose, but not all of them.
In an interview Sept. 5 O’Brien explained that, when writing songs, a common technique the band uses is to sing nonsense over the licks they lay down in their practice sessions.
“If it sounds good, and it feels like there’s good emotion in that—even though there’s not any words being sung—I’ll take that and just try to transcribe words to it based on how it already sounds,” he explained.
Other times, O’Brien (a Spanish major who studied for a year in Madrid) will write something in Spanish and leave it for a while, before coming back and translating it to English. The result is often “very strange and interesting,” leading him to places he would never have gone if he wrote strictly in his native language.
Processes like these mean that the Bright Light Social Hour’s lyrics often end up ambiguous and slightly nonsensical, a fact O’Brien seems pleased with.
“[These processes] just take things to an unexpected place, and that can really open up a lot of doors,” he explained.
And in a lot of ways forging into new and slightly bizarre territory is the band’s M.O. They began as a hardcore experimental rock group (featuring screaming and odd time signatures), before reorganizing their lineup and writing “some really soft kind of post-rock stuff.”
Then there was a swing into a more classic-rock-inspired kick, before they settled into the sound most prominently featured on their upcoming album, which O’Brien said is a much more psychedelic and dance infused rock.
And how have their fans reacted to the band’s constantly changing identity?
“If they don’t like it, they don’t tell us,” O’Brien said.
Proof that they are doing something right came for the guys in 2011, when their debut album won a rare sweep of six awards at the SXSW 2011 Austin Music Awards, including Band of the Year, Album of the Year, and Song of the Year.
O’Brien said that with all the talent in Austin, the band had no expectations of winning anything, so they were thrilled at the outcome, especially since venues and promoters finally started answering the band’s emails.
Since then, Bright Light Social Hour has burst out of Austin, and this summer it has been on a festival blitz, playing several festivals in Western Canada, including the Jasper Folk Music Festival later this week, where they will headline Saturday night.
Trevor Nichols
[email protected]
[accordion title="The line-up"]
Friday night
5:30 HUNDRED MILES ACROSS
6:30 JENIE THAI
7:30 SAM SPADES
8:30 WILLHORSE
9:30 SHRED KELLY
Saturday
12 noon GUI BENOIT & MOCCASIN BLACK
1:00 THE ROCKIES
2:00 RAY ELLIOT BAND
3:00 DARKLARK
4:00 RANDAL SCOTT BAND
5:00 BREAK
5:30 THE PICK BROTHERS BAND
6:30 SWEET ALIBI
7:30 TIM VAUGHN
8:30 ROYAL STREETS
9:30 BRIGHT LIGHT SOCIAL HOUR
For bios of all the bands, check out the Fitzhugh's Folk Fest Cheat Sheet.
[accordion title="Getting around"]
