articles
North Island Gazette (Port Hardy, BC) - April 3, 2008
There's no dust on these musicians (Live Review)
Dust Poets were a hit for North Island Concert Society.
PORT HARDY - The Dust Poets may have been paying tribute to their prairie origins when they took the name for their band, but there was no dust on this well-polished quintet as they performed Saturday at Port Hardy Civic Centre. Blending a unique combination of instruments with the even more eclectic lyrics of singer-songwriter Murray Evans, the Dust Poets regaled the audience with songs that borrowed from country, pop, jazz, blues and even Mexican music as part of the North Island Concert Society's season series. The group, formed around veteran Manitoba folk-rocker Evans in 2001, includes Karla Ferguson on accordion, Corey Ticknor on mandolin, Gord Mowatt on double bass and Sean McManus on both clarinet and one of the world's smallest drum kits.
The show began pleasantly enough, with the group playing and the crowd politely applauding a pair of country-tinged folkies from the Poets' 2006 release Lovesick Town - Good Enough for Me and the title track. But when McManus closed out third number, the Spanish-influenced Mariachi Song, with a blistering clarinet solo, the first whoops came from the audience and the connection between stage and floor was locked in for the night. With Mowatt and Evans providing rhythm on bass and acoustic guitar, Ferguson, Ticknor and McManus carried most of the solos and melodies while making effective use of the combination of accordion, mandolin and clarinet. Evans, McManus and Ferguson each took vocal solos - Ferguson giving a yearning, torch treatment to Lonesome - but the group often sang in clean, four-part harmonies.
Band members took turns introducing numbers with brief background stories. And while Evans claimed the group's sound and words are both informed by its prairie roots, he ranged far afield lyrically to target all manner of human behaviour in words often humourous, occasionally pithy, and nearly always upbeat. In Borrowing Faith, Evans took on extremists who use religion for evil instead of good, with the line, "Don't give him a name, don't give him a face, don't give him love he's gotta blow up someplace."
Evans also took on the contrast between urban wealth and poverty in It's a Big World, one of several new songs the group plans to begin recording next month for a CD they hope to release this fall. He skewered consumer culture in both Money, from the Poets' debut CD one night in Berlin, and in the vigorous country-rocker Walk Away, about the proliferation of big-box stores. He took on computers in Skeletons in your Inbox, and motivational seminars in another Mexican-fused number, Hotel Paradiso. McManus, who rested his chops periodically with percussion stints on a kit made up of only a snare drum, high-hat and single cymbal, sang the Woody Guthrie/Billy Bragg folkie Way Down Yonder in a Minor Key, and the group played an upbeat cover of Elvis Costello's Veronica.
But the music always drifted back to Evans, who reached back to his solo touring days and strapped on a neck brace harmonica for the encore number, 4 More Meals, a heartfelt ballad about life in motel rooms with the line, "There's a picture of my face in the mirror as I'm washing my mind out with soap."
This was another solid choice by the North Island Concert Society, which will close out its 2007-08 season.