On Sunday February 10th,
WagonWheel Presents… welcomes Juno winning Canadian singer/songwriter
Amelia Curran back to
The Greystones. Amelia returns to the UK to promote brand new album Spectators as part of her European tour. Support comes from
The Listeners. Doors open 7.30pm for an 8pm start. Advance tickets priced at £7 are available from WeGotTickets (
http://www.wegottickets.com/event/191646) and from the venue. Entry on the night will be £9.
***AMELIA CURRAN***From the fathoms, the dark solitary deeps, comes Amelia Curran’s Spectators, her new album released on Six Shooter Records. A meditation on frailty, restlessness, time and its finitudes, Spectators is both storm and harbour.
The Juno winning artist has charted a course through longing and loss with lyrics that face life’s beauties and terrors with disconsolate urgency. With Spectators, Curran returns to the scene with ten tracks that yet raise the bar on her signature lyricism, but push beyond the folk boundaries that have defined her previous releases.
Produced by John Critchley, Spectators brings surprises, including brass, strings, piano, and rumbling percussion. “What Will You Be Building,” a downtrodden Dixieland dirge, distills existence into one essential question. “The Modern Man” is another standout track – Curran’s stark vision stands sharply against a dark, tense, shivering backdrop. Even, or perhaps especially, the love songs, cut through the bone. In particular, the earthquake heartache of “San Andreas Fault,” is as graceful as it is devastating.
The opening track, “Years,” strides forward with a dynamic deliberation undercut by repeated speculation about all the trouble’s worth. Ever cautious in her optimism, “Years” introduces the record’s measured truths in fine fashion.
Guest musicians and arrangers are a collection of Toronto and St. John’s notables, including The Once, Todor Kobakov, Bryden Baird, Selina Martin, Oh Susanna, and Martin Tielli.
“
One of this country’s finest singer-songwriters“
Montreal Gazettehttp://www.ameliacurran.com/ ***THE LISTENERS***“Tell them I came, and no one answered. That I kept my word”
From ‘The Listeners’, by Walter de la Mare.
The Listeners is Emma Thorpe – on her own or with her collaborators. She sings in cinematic detail from a small town on the North Nottinghamshire borders.
Thorpe was born into music – her mother taught her to finger-pick, introducing her to the music of PJ Harvey, Sandy Denny, Susan Vega, Roy Harper and Bob Dylan along the way; Her father Kevin was well respected on the blues scene for his albums with Out Of The Blue; And her aunt managed Welsh psychedelic legends Man.
Despite this heritage Thorpe has shaped her own evocative sound. Sometimes wilfully naive, sometimes considered and precise – her choice of chords is particular and unusual and her finger-picking weaves a strange atmosphere – the likes of which you’d more likely find in a Lynch film or a novel by Bolano than in the sculpted folk of her inspirations. And like those who inspire her – Nick Cave, Patti Smith, William Blake, she loves to muse on nature & religion: God, the devil, good and evil, and like the Pre Raphaelite Brotherhood she tries to tell it like it is – to reveal both the beauty and the devastation of life: Red Dust portrays human insignificance under darkening skies; Dinner For One traces the fading past of a destroyed relationship; You wouldn’t think that it took years for Thorpe to accept her own arresting voice and lyrical vision. Time well spent in distillation perhaps: This is music that is close to the source. These are songs, born of tradition, alive in the present day, revealing & fragile, excecuted spare and sharp.
“
The Listeners were f*cking brilliant last night”
Richard Hawley“
Alternately gentle and dramatic… like PJ Harvey pissed off, unplugged and wearing a kaftan.”
Music Mart“
Stirring stuff…like Nico back from the grave for an autumn night’s campfire singalong, while their hushed mid-set tracks recall “Ocean of Noise” Arcade Fire.”
This Cityhttp://listeners.tumblr.com/ Facebook Event page:
http://www.facebook.com/events/116225478547483Last.fm Event page:
http://www.last.fm/event/3472821http://www.wagonwheelmedia.co.uk