 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|
Lighthousekeepers have been providing perceptive, open pop-folk music to growing audiences in Ottawa, Toronto, and Montréal since May 2002. Featuring the wide-ranging songwriting of Neil Gerster, and colliding his cooly expressive tenor against the emotional flute onslaught of Rozalind MacPhail, Lighthousekeepers create soundscapes from ambient drowning songs to peppy toetappers. ArtGirl (aka Maureen Adams) provides the backbeat on a djembe often augmented with surprising delay effects. The band also usually has a bassist around somewhere, and has at times added a French horn, a second flute, a violin, a keyboard, a drum kit, vocal harmonies and junkyard percussion on stage to round out its sound(s?). Even in their standard guitar-flute-djembe-bass configuration, the group's sound can not be mistaken for anyone else's. In April, 2003, the group released its first CD, "Good Kissing School," in Ottawa and Toronto. The disc includes songs like the raw and dynamic "Over Weeping Sounds," which sets to music the same poem Osama bin Laden quoted in celebration of al Qaida's Sept 11 attacks, along with Neil's own words, which try to set the poem in the context of ordinary Afghans oppressed by the Taliban, to reclaim the poem for good. At the other end of the spectrum, "Mosh Song" and "A Song for Oscar" both combine the theme of drowning with ambient, ambling, aquatic music. "Mosh Song" equates drowning with a crowd-surfing accident; "Oscar" borrows the scene from the last chapter of Peter Carey's book "Oscar and Lucinda," in which the title character drowns to death in a glass church as it sinks. Lighthousekeepers have graced stages at the Tulip Festival and Zaphod Beeblebrox in Ottawa, the Black Sheep Inn in Wakefield and the Free Times Café and Café May in Toronto. They have become favourites on Ottawa's morning television program "Breakfast @ the New RO," and have been featured on CKCU radio, in the Ottawa Citizen, and the Ottawa Sun. Check out the artist's website: http://lighthousekeepers.ca Track List: 1. Land of Plenty 2. Outaouais Love Song 3. Over Weeping Sounds 4. a Song for Oscar 5. Fool's Gold Compass 6. Good Kissing School 7. Insincere 8. Janice Hall's Songs 9. the Seven Deadly Sins 10. Mosh Song 11. Morning Love Suggested CDs:Other Genres:
|