Selected Press for The Barmitzvah Brothers
Barmitzvah Brothers "Let's Express Our Motives" (3outof5)
Globe and Mail - Robert Everett-Green - Nov 6th, 2007
Guelph's Barmitzvah Brothers have subtitled this disc "an album of under-appreciated job songs" The 19 tuneful, goofy, insightful songs include a ukulele ditty about filling dental casts and wondering about the faces. The lack of complaint and the understated punchline ("in my spare time I silk-screen shirts and make movies") make this a great song about forbearance. A song about piano tuning features an upright that badly needs it and a rapid-fire technical summary of how the job is done. An old-world polka for a job in a rendering plant gives a nosey tang to the line: "They say it doesn't sink, but it isn't sweet." Both words and music have a home-crafted feeling about them, and are never more then exactly life-sized.
"(...)The Barmitzvah Brothers' music, a distinctive and initially intractable amalgam of klezmer, folk, art-noise and indie rock, earns them a spot in a group of artists whose creative path is more difficult than most(...) Mr. Bones is an encouraging development for The Barmitzvah Brothers. Jenny Mitchell's vocals are as unpolished as ever, but the songs behind them are more structured, more succinct, more...musical(...) If you're tired of the standard guitar/bass/drums setup, Mr. Bones' Walk-In Closet will be your new favorite record." - George Zahora, Splendid E-zine, 24 February 2004. (Link to article...)
"the Guelph trio's eclectic and potent mix of homespun folk and art rock has caught the ear of critics and indie music fans throughout Southern Ontario. Dominated by strong songwriting and fascinating instrumentation..." - Shawn Despres, "The Barmitzvah Brothers Bring Their Skeletons Out Of The Closet," ChartAttack.com, 9 January 2004. (Link to article...)
"The band's charm lies in the unaffected whimsy of their songwriting..." - Sarah Liss, "The Barmitzvah Brothers" cover story, NOW Toronto, 12 February 2004, cover + p. 46-7. (Link to article...)
"Although they're almost all still in high school, these mini-musicians have wowed the jaded T-dot with their oddball thrift-store-orchestra indie pop..." - Sarah Liss "10 Teens Taking Over," NOW Toronto cover story, 24 July 2003. (Link to article...)
"The Barmitzvah Brothers charm resides in their combination of strong musical abilities, funny lyrics and quirky honesty. Look out for more from these religiously incorrect kooks in the future..." - Zhaleh Afshar, "No Holds Barred," The McGill Daily, 13 February 2003. (Link to article...)
"...The part that's difficult to get over is how good (The Night of the Party) actually is - it's smart, too smart; it's catchy, too catchy; and it's unprecedentedly original too... Tim Gane and Jim O'Rourke - hang your heads in shame." - BP, Wavelength zine, July 2003.
"A huge breath of fresh air... very quirky music, very new, very unique, very refreshing." - BR, Echo Magazine
"High Llamas-esque analog pop, punctuated by kitschy keyboards and squeezebox dirges" - eye weekly, 23 May 2003
http://www.americana-uk.com, February 2004
The Barmitzvah Brothers "Mr Bones' Walk-in Closet" (Weewerk 2003)
Available: Now (4/5 stars)
What's going on in Canada? Here from Guelph (home of the excellent Royal City) are three teenagers making experimental music using a variety of toy and actual instruments and skipping between genres like 20 year jazz veterans improvising off of a blues riff. Starting with a simple cheesy klezmer elliptical groove and quickly moving on to Martha and the Muffins for 'The Commute' before really finding their feet. 'A Song for Grant,' the cheap toy instruments, xylophone and buzzing keyboard, and the Naif Gamine vocals can't quite obscure the subtlety of the song within. How good it is to hear a clear voice untainted by technology - last time it was Mirah, this time it is Jenny Mitchell. There's actually a resemblance between the Washington scene, with K records and bands like the Microphones and this, a similar disdain for the mainstream, willingness to use whatever is at hand and allowing ambition to outrun ability. 'Show Promoter Dan' builds a song on just simple keyboard drones and Jenny's voice which follows the programmed chord changes like a duckling behind its mother. As the record progresses it settles into more recognizable patterns; 'Agatha Read' has a nursery rhyme quality, 'We Didn't Clap When This Man Played (and Neither Did That Lady)' in addition to winning best title award is an almost straightforward country song with fiddles butterflying around the vocals - you start to think this is what Stereolab would sound like if they relaxed the studiousness. '10.30 a.m.' starts indolently before the keyboards rouse themselves to retreat and go for reinforcements, arriving in time for 'Barclay,' a mandolin introducing a gingham clad country song with sadness and hope in equal measure in the vocals and showing just how good they could become. Promise continues in 'Mercury' that has a more folky feel with banjo and plunking percussion, open honest vocals; a female East River Pipe, the melodies as simple as crying - can you feel sad for a whole planet? You just might after this, especially after the song winds down like a robot losing power. There's a fuller band sound on 'Little Bird' banjo, drums, bass and keyboards surrounding the voice holding it aloft. In an age when the exceptional (both bad and good) are being sliced away, it's good to hear a band that makes best use of what is at their disposal that doesn't aim for the middle ground. Drums clatter and keyboards play tag like clowns in big shoes carrying paint cans down cellar steps on the closing 'Song for the Lonely Day' until violins arrive to soak up any spillage and usher us away, and the record finishes, until I press play again. Well worth tracking down - try www.weewerk.com DC
eye - 11.13.03 - http://www.eye.net/eye/issue/issue_11.13.03/music/hrg.html
HOLIDAY RECORD GUIDE - INDIE
THE BARMITZVAH BROTHERS
(4 stars) Mr. Bones' Walk-in Closet weewerk
Ah, kids are so impressionable. Luckily these three high-schoolers have their hairless fingers on the right pulses. The second delightful album from Jenny, Geordie and Johnny once again finds them using their youthful innocence to their advantage (by keeping it simple, stupid!), but trades in their sugary art-punk licks for rugged butt-folk arrangements (and wildly impressive lyrics) that sound a helluva lot like their weathered friends, Royal City. Admittedly, it's a bit strange to hear chirpy teenagers singing downtrodden existential laments, but this oddness only adds to the album's overall appeal. Mr. Bones exhibits worldly intuition and musical skill far beyond the Brothers' years; whether or not they stole it doesn't matter. The Barmitzvah Brothers have crashed the right party. KH (Kevin Hainey)
NOW Magazine Online Edition, VOL. 23 NO. 11, Nov 13 - 19, 2003
Copyright © 2003 NOW Communications Inc.
story link: http://www.nowtoronto.com/issues/2003-11-13/music_discs.php
THE BARMITZVAH BROTHERS
New and Notable Releases
By SARAH LISS
Anyone pining for the days when Liz Phair dazzled as a caustic indie rock storyteller with a deadpan, gravelly monotone should leap on the weewerk debut by these Guelph thrift-store pop kidlets. Singer Jenny Mitchell relates twisted, naively affected anecdotes in a charming, toneless lilt that recalls Guyville-era Phair, over tin-can percussion, plunking bass lines, carnivalesque melodica, vintage organ blurts and some lovely string sections that sound like they came from a Suzuki class. It's delightfully whimsical, as lo-fi indie as they come. Plus, there are wonderful nuggets for anyone immersed in the local music scene, like tracks in tribute to music scribe and Neutron Star Michael Barclay and everyone's favourite promoter/lunatic, Dan Burke. You need to hear it.
The Barmitzvah Brothers are joined by controller.controller and the Great Lake Swimmers at the Rivoli tonight (Thursday, November 13).
Montreal Mirror, Feb 5-11.2004, Vol. 19 No. 33
Bar Mitzvah Brothers - Mr. Bones' Walk-in Closet (WeeWerk)
A co-ed trio of talented teens from Guelph, Ontario, barely out of high school, the Bar Mitzvah Brothers could be called out as the Muppet Babies version of Camper Van Beethoven. As much a matter of dirge-driven folk, palooka-centric polka, kindertronics and tickle-trunk innovation as it is a neo-na•ve indie pop exercise, Mr. Bones' Walk-in Closet can't be faulted for uniformity, nor for lyrical opacity or self-conscious cool. On the other hand, it's really a kids' record for ex-kids and as such it runs the risk, particularly if coupled with such mitigating factors as, oh, a hangover, of getting on your tits so bad you want to strangle a baby harp seal or something. 7/10 (Rupert Bottenberg)
Discorder (Vancovuer), February 2004, p. 21
The Barmitzvah Brothers - Mr. Bones' Walk-in Closet
(weewerk Records)
I think I should really start telling people I'm from Guelph, Ontario (home town of the Constantines, Royal City, and King Cobb Steelie to name a few), because maybe they'll finally start taking my music seriously. Or will they? The Barmitzvah Brothers are three teenagers from Guelph whose musical style can only be described as grab-bag. This means that they occasionally sing in Hebrew (for the fun of it), and choose to root their songs in bizarre sounding household items and synths rather than the more popular guitar. Furthermore, it seems that they're a group that actively avoids pigeon holing, since none of them are Jewish, one is a girl, and no one really knows if the songs are to be take as serious or not. As a result it almost seems too easy to label tham a teenage novelty band, trying to garner attention based on their birthplace and unique sounds, but their musical virutosity and songwriting skills are simply too great to be case aside so easily. They really have to be admired for their fun-loving approach to song writing, not to mention their storytelling lyrics which often come off both intimate and innocent. In the end, Mr. Bones' Walk-in Closet is an endearing album, but I have a feeling that it's going to be overshadowed by the subsequent recordings the Barmitzvah Brothers put out. - Soren Brothers
The Toronto Star, Nov. 13, 2003. www.torontostar.com
Young, talented and strangely skewed Barmitzvah Brothers are odd Songs cover nerd pop to klezmer
BEN RAYNER - POP MUSIC CRITIC
The trouble with being a member of a wise-beyond-its-years art project is that you're going to be wise beyond your years.
For the three young musicians of Guelph's ingeniously skewed Barmitzvah Brothers, this means knowing some members of the audience will regard them as an amusing curiosity rather than a "serious" band.
"I don't always trust people who say they do like us," observes eldest Brother Jenny Mitchell, 19. "But I've always found that I feel there must be some people out there who really, honestly like it, and all I need is for one or two of those people to be there - people who like it for the reasons I like it.
"We overheard a person saying one time that we made them wanna rip out their eyeballs, which is awesome. I'm kinda mean sometimes, so if I know there's somebody who really hates us in the crowd, then I'll play, like, the most Barmitzvah Brothers set ever ... Sometimes finding out what you can do to make people hate you gives you some focus."
The Barmitzvah Brothers are an odd proposition and possessed of a warped, thoroughly deadpan sense of humour, but a novelty act they are not. There's simply too much raw talent and fearless, convention-defying artistry at work in their music - a lilting, ramshackle mash-up of arcane nerd-pop, scratchy folk and country stylings, psychedelic whimsy, carnivalesque atmosphere and, yes, occasionally klezmer - for it to be dismissed as a joke or a gimmick, even if sometimes, by the Brothers' own admission, their music can indeed be jokey and gimmicky.
Brothers Mitchell, Geordie Gordon and John Merritt can really play, too. On their beguilingly scattered second album, Mr. Bones' Walk-In Closet - released this week on local indie Weewerk Records - the three high-school chums turn out bittersweet songs about birds, "Hockey Ghosts," pathologically screwed-up Toronto promoters, friends who've moved to Montreal and the lure of life in the big city composed on unlikely instrumentation that includes bass, drums, violin, organ, trumpet, banjo, Omnichord, oil drum and "hockey stick with chains," but rarely guitar.
"I'm constantly excited about songwriting because our songs keep turning into things I never could have thought of myself," says Mitchell. "We've all become fairly competent. We always know what we want to do now. We can sort of hear a song in our heads and recreate it, but it's still got this miscellaneousness of input coming from so many different places within the band. If one of us has a song idea, the other people who play it just completely change it so it becomes its own thing ... It never comes out at all remotely how any one of us could have imagined it. We all work really well together, but we have completely different inclinations when we're playing instruments."
Miitchell formed the first incarnation of the Barmitzvah Brothers with friend Gillian Manford as a droll keyboard act nearly three years ago "so there'd be a band with girls in it" in a high-school variety show. A crew of friends - Gordon, now 17, and Merritt, now 16, among them - was drafted to come up with sufficient material for a half-hour set and to cover their musical shortcomings with noise, but what began as a laugh gradually turned into a legitimate endeavour as gigs and songs kept materializing.
By the time the Brothers - who frequently perform with an expanded line-up that includes a cellist, a pair of trumpeters, an accordion player, a guitarist and a pair of dour-looking female multi-instrumentalists dubbed The Lethargians - recorded their debut album, the splattery The Night Of The Party, in 2002, their youth, the exciting unfamiliarity of their oeuvre and a few well-placed champions in the press had turned them into a bubbling-under indie phenomenon. Helping matters, too, was their association with Guelph, which at that moment was first starting to gain notoriety nationwide as the point of origin for the Three Gut Records posse (Royal City, Jim Guthrie, the Constantines et al.).
The Barmitzvah Brothers' musical roots in Guelph, however, run far deeper than the recent indie-rock past. Gordon's father is celebrated Canadian folk singer James Gordon, while his brother, Evan, is a local scene gadabout who's played with the Constantines, among others. Merritt's dad is singer/songwriter and sometime producer Scott Merritt (he helped out behind the boards for a few tracks on Mr. Bones). Mitchell's dad, meanwhile, owns the second-hand shop from whence the nascent Brothers first began pilfering their extraordinary instrumental arsenal.
"We came out of the same place as all these other people, but totally not with them, too," says Mitchell. "The huge block of them that moved to Toronto, the whole Three Gut crowd, they're all a good 10 years older than me - and I'm the oldest Barmitzvah Brother.
"It was this little circle of friends who all played together. And it was weird because you'd go to shows and you'd realize that everybody there was either in the bands or best friends with someone in a band. But then, Geordie and John and I weren't. I felt inspired to start playing music, to a degree, just so I could feel as justified in being there."
The Globe and Mail - www.globeandmail.com
Thursday, Nov. 13, 2003, page R4
Music in tune with the new city
By CARL WILSON
What point were you happiest to hear made in new Toronto mayor David Miller's campaign? Mine was that the fixation on taxes and garbage in local politics is based on the same misconception as the image of Toronto as an also-ran New York -- that a city is something to consume.
The resulting story is that government is a janitorial service to hire on the cheap, while the rest of urban life is an arcade of goods and experiences in a quaint array of colours. It's easy to fall into talking that way: Nearly everything takes money, and money has a way of making itself the point.
This week's vote expressed how sick we are of that story. At heart, a city is just somewhere people gather, doing stuff. The myth that "Toronto" means "meeting place" may not be accurate (the Huron word translates closer to "where trees stand in water," which reads depressingly like "stick-in-the-mud") but it's the kind of error that sticks around because we like it. We finally have a leader who understands that, but it remains up to us to act it out.
Two people who do are Phil Klygo, the Mohawk-adorned head of Teenage USA records and Canadian Music Week, and artist-curator Germaine Koh. For the past year, the young couple has been holding events in their apartment on Queen Street West under the punning title, Weewerk. In these monthly salons, bands perform, artists show, and there's playfully vital conversation on themes such as uncertainty, art and morality, humour (I judged a "bad-joke contest" one very silly night this summer) or guerrilla gardening.
It runs on the same resolve you find in all kinds of Toronto events now -- house concerts, amateur variety shows, the mayoral race itself -- that we stop standing on the sidelines staring into the display case, and plunge in to be part of the action. It has spun off a Weewerk record label, which first released the local-landmark-littered songs of Tony Dekker as Great Lake Swimmers, and is now putting out the second CD by one of Ontario's most enchanting bands, Guelph's Barmitzvah Brothers.
Tonight at the Rivoli, Weewerk leaves home to celebrate that new disc, Mr. Bones' Walk-In Closet, as well as the anniversary of the series. Dekker will be on hand, and so will promising local new-no-wave unit Controller.Controller.The Guelphites will prove the spirit is not confined to the big city.
All in their late teens -- though one's female and none is Jewish -- the Barmitzvah Brothers formed half by accident in high school, and preserve that thrown-together, what-the-heck feel. Singer Jenny Mitchell's lyrics are deceptively transparent, either manifestos on mundane subjects -- camping, security passes, reading -- or daily diaries of routines and aper¨us. Her characters fight, then tentatively make up; they are often lazy or sleepy, but seldom bored. Yet a post-Simpsons sardonic sense hides between the lines.
The songs are also full of local detail:The Commute is a harsh rebuke to musicians who leave Guelph for Toronto (with allusions to lyrics by ex-Guelph band Royal City), and Show Promoter Dan is an open letter to a notorious Toronto booking agent ("You're already lying before you speak") that ends with a sympathetic twist ("Somewhere inside I think you're okay/ But people can't tell from first sight").
A bit insider-ish, but why not? And the barbs help pull the group out of the cute-kid corral to which patronizing elders might consign them. If they sometimes slide through too easily on youthful charm, the music ensures you don't begrudge it.
Using a trunk-load of junk-shop castoffs, vintage keyboards and fiddles and drums, Mitchell and her companions (Geordie Gordon and "Little John" Jemeson Merritt, son of well-known songwriter-producer Scott Merritt) achieve an improbably full handmade sound in which behind-the-beat rhythms slip through the ears like trick-or-treaters skidding, down a greased wooden slide, into the basement of a haunted mansion.
Montreal's Les Georges Leningrad work in a similar intensively amateur realm of homespun imagination. Made up of two married couples and, they say, a "horny ghost" named Georges who was conjured up one night around the Ouija board, their show is a decadent cabaret of masks, rag dolls, mutant puppets, gruesome makeup and semi-nudity. Les Georges' chunky, Euro-trash "petroleum rock" sets the stage for the feminist electro-pop of Le Tigre at the Phoenix in Toronto on Monday.
Another place to find city-dwellers doing it for themselves is in the ever-shifting landscape of improvised-music loft shows. Like Weewerk, the New Work Studio at 319 Spadina Ave. is a live-in space. This Monday and next, it hosts the last two instalments of bassist Rob Clutton and guitarist Tim Posgate's annual Festival of Autumnal Happiness.
This week, it's the outlandishly beautiful music of composer Martin Arnold and an improv set by Clutton, Doug Tielli and Brodie West; on Nov. 24, Plunderphonics inventor and CCMC member John Oswald playing solo sax and Clutton and Posgate in duet.
Meanwhile, tomorrow in the rough-and-ready ArrayMusic studio (60 Atlantic Ave., Suite 218) pianist Marilyn Lerner plays with Ken Aldcroft and Joe Sorbara, the Ryan Driver Quartet will perform and drummer Sorbara will lead his Pickle Juice Orchestra in a round of John Zorn's Cobra, a maddeningly clever instant-composition exercise that Sorbara has begun to organize regularly, like a weekend pickup baseball game.
With its new mayor and all these enterprising happenings, Toronto is on its way out of shopping-centre syndrome. All it needs now is a thousand more.
cwilson@globeandmail.ca
© 2003 Bell Globemedia Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Ottawa Sun - Wed, December 24, 2003
Musings of the high school set
By Allan WIGNEY
The vocals are occasionally flat; the musicianship less than consummate. At times, The Barmitzvah Brothers' sophomore CD release, Mr. Bones' Walk-in Closet, sounds like the work of high school kids let loose in dad's band room.
Which, the recent high school graduation of vocalist Jenny Mitchell notwithstanding, is what these unrelated, gentile Brothers are: Geordie Gordon's dad is stalwart Canadian folkie James Gordon; Johnny Merritt is the son of veteran producer/singer-songwriter Scott Merritt; and Mitchell's old man runs a second-hand store in the band's hometown of Guelph.
Hence, the unique, utterly charming DIY sounds of The Barmitzvah Brothers incorporate a dizzying array of borrowed, bought and homemade instruments. Keyboards, bass and drums ultimately rule, but the Brothers will augment their bare-bones pop with violin, mandolin, glockenspiel, spoons, trumpet or Ukrainian whistle.
When that's not enough, they can turn to ringers The Lethargians -- Sister Caitlin and Sylvie -- who fill out the live sound with background vocals and such unlikely sources of percussion as an oil canister and a hockey stick.
If it all sounds a bit too artsy and precious, the songs are grounded by Mitchell's lyrics, which dwell on such real-world concerns as the exodus of artists to Toronto from Guelph, experiences with shady characters and love for a (recently departed) pet bird.
And whether it's the faux-Ghost Riders in the Sky country of Hockey Ghosts or the Gypsy delirium of We Didn't Clap When This Man Played, there is ultimately something so damn likeable about The Barmitzvah Brothers that one cannot turn away.
Besides, Mitchell insists, these Brothers aren't pretentious; they're silly. I mean, Hockey Ghosts? That's pretty silly. Right?
"It is," Mitchell says. "And we have new songs that in my mind are easily as silly. We don't want to lose that quality. Like, Little Bird is a pretty ridiculous recording. But we also really wanted the pretty ones to be even prettier on this album.
"The prettiest songs on the first album (The Night of the Party) were poorly recorded. For the second one (produced, in part, by Merritt's's dad), if there was a sad song we wanted it to be really sad and really full."
Moreover, Mitchell says, they wanted an album that reflects the many musical facets of this promising young combo.
"I think of the first CDs I bought," Mitchell reflects, "like Counting Crows and stuff, and there'd be one or two songs that everybody liked and a lot of filler.
"I don't ever want to be a band that just fills their album for the sake of putting out an album. And when you're in high school you don't really have any reason to do that.
"We've got a lot of time on our hands, a lot of time to do stuff. It seems worth it to wait to let every song happen by itself. I'm happier that we could put out a CD where each one of the songs could potentially be somebody's favourite song -- even if nobody'll like all of them."
There's actually a lot to like on Mr. Bones' Walk-in Closet, not least the enormous potential inherent in this band. Wise beyond their years and steeped in musical tradition -- Mitchell also sings in a 15-piece choir that specializes in old-time country music -- it's hard to imagine we won't be hearing much, much more from The Barmitzvah Brothers. Even if Mitchell laughs at the notion of ever having a "hit." Or, as they prepare for their first trip to Ottawa, of forsaking studies for touring.
"Basically, we can play on weekends," she reminds us. "Or, occasionally, we'll go to Toronto on a Thursday night, but John and Geordie have to get permission first.
"It doesn't make a lot of sense to hope for a lot of shows when you'll have to turn most of them down. I'm hoping we'll have a slow build and have people that like us in different places. Then every summer, when the boys get out of school, we'll be able to go on a tour of places where we've talked to people over the years.
"If I rushed it right now I don't even know what I'd be rushing into."
Of course, it can be argued the holidays are no time for plunging into something new. And if you're looking to stoke those memories, that can be arranged as well.
Bingo Jet International, the little inside joke that grew into a local phenomenon, will be resurrected at Barrymore's on Friday. Expect an evening of mayhem, destruction, humiliation and fabulous prizes. And next Tuesday, one-time local scene fixture Johnny Ballistic returns to the stage for a show at Babylon.
DJs will be looking back as well, at events like Helsinki's Boxing Day Rewind. But in that regard, Suite 34 warrants special mention for an evening billed as Fusion 101, taking place in the Byward Market club this Sunday. There'll be old-school soul and R&B from DJ Chestney "Chocolate" Grant, as well as live old-school R&B from veteran soulman Frank Lindo and his seven-piece band.
Lindo, who assembled his Soul Review two years ago following the demise of Stone Soul Picnic, has been on the scene since 1969, spreading the R&B word to towns throughout Ontario and Quebec. Sunday, he'll be leading his Review through two sets of tried-and-true soul.
"I'm doing the Motown and more mellow Philadelphia style," Lindo promises. "All the songs I do, you hear them in commercials, on TV, on the radio. I like that, because they are more singalong-oriented. I sing My Girl and everybody knows it."
MORE MUSIC MORE MUSIC ... The Candidates rock the Dominion Tavern ON Saturday while former Killjoy Mike Trebilcock does likewise at Zaphod's ... Ray Montford and Alex Houghton bring guitar artistry to the Black Sheep on Sunday afternoon ... Sunday evening Bernard Stepien leads his trio through Monk for a winter's evening at the Bayou.
THE BARMITZVAH BROTHERS WITH RADIODAZED & STEVE ST. PIERRE
- Where: Zaphod Beeblebrox
8 January 2004, View magazine, Hamilton
THE BARMITZVAH BROTHERS
By Sean Palmerston
In fact, one of them is female and all of them are still in their teens. Despite this, the band has recently released two albums of exquisite, experimental indie pop that either (a) foreshadows even greater things to come or (b) finds the trio at the top of their game before two of the band members have even graduated high school. The band self-released their debut album The Night Of The Party and sold out of it almost immediately before Montreal's Robosapien label asked to re-release it nationally, something which happened in October, 2003. Less than a month later, the band launched another album, Mr. Bones Walk In Closet, on the new Toronto-based weewerk imprint. Not bad for a trio formed for a high school talent show less than three years previous.
Jenny Mitchell has become the band's spokesperson, perhaps because she is the oldest at nineteen, but most likely because she is the band's primary vocalist. As the one original member left, the band also includes 16-year-old Little Johnny Merritt (son of musician Scott Merritt) and 18-year-old Geordie Gordon (brother of former Constantines organist Evan Gordon), Mitchell sees a decided progression from their first album to new one. "There is a lot more thought behind this one, it is a lot more personal to us".
"When we recorded the first record, we were a bunch of kids wanting to record songs. The songs that made it onto the CD were the ones we remembered-we had other songs that we would forget how to play! "The first CD we just made for ourselves, we wouldn't have been surprised if it had failed, we just let it go. And when things happen with it, when a music director calls us from Iowa City about it, we just have to go 'oh yeah, that record!'" While their debut had a fervish punk-edged feel to it, the band has matured and become much more musical in the past two years, something which shows on their newer disc. Mr Bones... finds the trio heading in a slightly more folkish direction, although arguably there is even less guitar on the album than their debut. Handmade instruments and household items are used as often in songs as traditional instrumentation and add to the charm of the musical creations, which the band took a more serious outlook towards this timeout. They even recorded it in a proper studio with Andy Magoffin (Constantines, Two-Minute Miracles) and Scott Merritt handling production chores.
"We really wanted to make an effort to make an album this time around, we wanted the pretty songs to be prettier and we wanted the silly songs to be sillier, if possible." V
THE BARMITZVAH BROTHERS
with THE ARCADE FIRE
Sunday, January 11
THE UNDERGROUND
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