Quebecois band recommendations: Les Charbonniers de l’Enfer!

The Charbonniers stand out very, VERY strongly against the rest of my Quebec boys on the grounds that they specialize in the two big things that I love the most about Quebecois traditional music: the mouth reels, and the podorythmie! They are entirely a cappella, and so this is ALL these guys do. It’s like they are a concentrated blast of French Canadian AWESOME.

We’ve got five gentlemen here, a bit on the older side but all with very, very strong voices. Their two (and they have TWO!) podorythmie guys, Michel Bordeleau and André Marchand, have the distinction of being former members of La Bottine Souriante–and Michel in particular has a distinctive enough voice that I’ve pegged him now on earlier La Bottine tracks. All five of the Charbonniers take turns singing lead, so all of them get a chance to show off the character of their voices, though.

I’m a big fan of M. Bordeleau’s footwork, but I’ve got to say that of the various gents’ voices, I’m favouring Jean-Claude Mirandette’s the most. He’s got a beautiful tenor voice that is shown off to great advantage on several of the tracks on their live album, which I’m about to get to now!

Hands down and no contest, their live album, En personne, is my favorite of their work. They’re good in the studio and I have several of their tracks on repeat play, but they are an order of magnitude more vigorous in the live album’s performance. I’ve been playing the hell (AHEH–you did translate their name, didn’t you?) out of this album for weeks now, and they’ve been leading the charge in getting me more interested in translating Quebecois French lyrics so that I can try to understand them myself, as proper words rather than ‘pretty noises the nice men are making’, and sing along.

Three very excellent live vids from this performance are up on the LinkTV site: “Yes Very Well” (see previous commentary re: M. Mirandette, who takes lead on this one, and also note M. Bordeleau on the left making with DANGEROUS footstomping), “Sur La Vignelon” (where I believe Monsieur Normand Miron is taking the lead on this, and he too has a very distinctive voice), and last but MOST DEFINITELY not least, “Les Turlutes”, where the boys tear right through one gigantic chain of turluttes. XD I’ve posted about this last vid before–look in particular for the podorythmie stomp-off in the middle!

All three of those songs are among my repeat plays off of En personne, but the Turlutes track is very, VERY high on the list just because of how much the Charbonniers are getting into the performance in that video. They’re clearly having such great fun that I cannot help but enjoy watching them–and you can see glimpses of the audience really getting into it too!

I’m given to understand that the physical CD of this concert comes with a DVD, and I plan to order this ASAP. The album IS available electronically on iTunes, but it’s not on Amazon MP3–and I’d recommend you order the CD anyway so that you can get the DVD too, if at all possible!

The rest of the Charbonniers’ discography does also appear to be available on iTunes, though. Most of the tracks on En personne come off the album called Wô, and you can really tell, comparing them, how much more vigorous the live album is. So while that album certainly isn’t bad, if you wanted to get a studio Charbonniers album instead I’d recommend either À la grâce de Dieu or their most recent one, Nouvelles fréquentations. The more recent one is notable for having less of a trad emphasis; in fact, according to this link that went up on Facebook earlier today, it’s actually up for an award for Best Contempary for the 2011 Canadian Folk Music Awards! I like the other studio album better just because it has more of a trad bent, but this one’s good too; it very much reminded me of the Nylons, who y’all remember were the group that did that awesome a cappella version of “Kiss Him Goodbye” many years ago. Bonus LOLs on this album for having a French version of “In the Jailhouse Now”, which I know from the movie O Brother Where Art Thou?.

The Charbonniers’ site does NOT have links off to buy their albums that I can see, so if you want to order physical copies, your best bets are probably going to be Archambault.ca or Amazon.ca or Amazon.com.

Mirrored from annathepiper.org.

Quebecois band recommendations: De Temps Antan!

These guys are the newest of the (male) Quebec bands I’ve picked up, both in terms of how long they’ve been active as a trio and how long I’ve been aware of them. They are also proof of my newly learned truth that any Quebec band with a Beaudry in it will have my IMMEDIATE AND UNDIVIDED attention! Because once I realized that Éric Beaudry, the brother of the lovely Simon, is himself an awesome bouzouki player, I was all over pulling these guys’ albums down from iTunes.

Monsieur Beaudry is the main draw for me here, just because of my fondness for the bouzouki, and it’s great fun to hear one used as a primary rhythm instrument in a trio. But that said, the other two boys in the band, lead singer Pierre-Luc Dupuis and fiddler André Brunet, are not to be discounted either. M. Dupuis has a nice full, rich voice, and M. Brunet (who, I note, is the brother of Réjean over in Le Vent!) rocks him some fiddle.

Since there are only three members of the band, the instrumentation is accordingly sparser than the other groups I’ve been listening to, but this doesn’t mean there’s less vigor. In addition to M. Beaudry’s bouzouki, M. Dupuis apparently likes him some harmonica, and the combo of those with the fiddle works very well.

Like with this YouTube vid of their song “La turlutte du rotoculteur”, which is the first one of theirs that I seized on. The layering in of their vocals, then the footwork, and finally M. Beaudry going at it on the zouk, I said? SIGN ME UP.

De Temps Antan have only two albums available so far, À l’année and their newer one, Les habits de papier. Both are available on iTunes and Amazon MP3 downloads, and good news for those of you who are fond of buying from indie sites–the newer album is also available on CD Baby! Amazon.com, Amazon.ca, and Archambault.ca all have the newer album in physical form, but between Amazon.com having it at import prices and the likelihood of big shipping charges if you’re not in Canada, I’d personally vote for CD Baby first out of these.

Or! De Temps’ own site sells both albums directly, so really, you should try them first. :D (And oooh, they have T-shirts. This may well be Relevant to My Interests!)

Since there are only two albums to choose from, if you want only one, go with Les habits des papiers. That’s the one with the aforementioned “La turlutte du rotoculteur” on it, which I’ve been playing a lot. I also like “Pétipétan” (good showcase of M. Dupuis’ voice) and “Grand Amuseur du Filles” (good showcase of M. Beaudry taking the lead vocals) from that album.

There’s good stuff on the other one too, though. On that album, “Chère Léonore”, “Intrinifor”, “Duvons, Mes Chers Amis Buvons”, and “Les Pissenlits Bricoleurs” are my repeat play tracks.

Last but not least, recent Googling let me discover that De Temps were actually in Seattle last year! To which I say AUGH, if I had ONLY KNOWN. However, this raises the hope that they might come back sometime soon. If they do, I am THERE.

Mirrored from annathepiper.org.

Quebecois band recommendations: Galant, Tu Perds Ton Temps!

It gives me ridiculous amounts of glee that a (mostly) female group has dived into the male-dominated Quebecois trad genre, and this is exactly what you get with Galant, Tu Perds Ton Temps! I tend to listen to male groups in general just because I’m a sucker for the sound of several guys singing in full round harmony, a thing of mine that goes clear back to Elvis and the Jordannaires–but if you give me a bunch of women doing the same thing, oh my yes, I’m there.

The Galant group is technically not 100% female–they do have one male member of the group, Jean-Francois Berthiaume, who does their footwork and other general percussion. However, he doesn’t sing–so all the vocals are in fact female. And yeah, the Galant girls meet and match their male colleagues in this genre with some kickass vigorous harmonies! I haven’t identified which girl is which yet in terms of ranges sung, but whoever’s got the lower ranges in particular is delivering some great contralto/tenor lines, and whoever’s got the highest soprano is notable as well.

They’ve got only two albums available to date, Fais-toi pas d’illusions and the self-titled Galant, tu perds ton temps, which is actually the newer of the two albums. To further confuse matters, the band gets its name from a song of the same name, and that song appears on the earlier album! “Galant, tu perds ton temps” translates roughly to “Suitor/lover, you waste your time”, which is another thing that makes me giggle and giggle. Especially given that my boys over in La Volée d’Castors have also covered this song.

So which album should you get? That’s a bit of a hard call. I’ve got a LOT of tracks off the newer one on my Favorites list, and that one does have the selling point of being a double CD so you get a lot of music for the money. On the other hand, the three tracks I’ve marked as favorites on the other album are in fact the ones I’ve recently played more often. So really, it becomes a question of which one you can find, and which one you feel like paying money for.

YouTube has a lot of videos of them up, though, so if you search for “galant tu perds ton temps”, you should be able to find them. Here’s one of them doing “Mary of the Wild Moor” in English, and the video quality is good, so you can get an excellent idea of their overall vocal style. And here’s a partial vid of them doing “Les promesses du galant”, which is one of my favorites off the newer album, and I’m desperate to find proper lyrics for it because I’m FAIRLY SURE they aren’t actually singing “Monsieur Pants” in there. XD This one is “Faites-moi un homme sans tête / Reel Bergerville”, which I like off the newer album as well!

They’ve got no links to buy on their site, so your only option (that I know of) is iTunes if you want their music electronically and you’re outside Canada. Archambault.ca has only the second, larger album available for download, and their downloads are only for Canadian customers. For physical CDs, Amazon.com, Amazon.ca, and Archambault.ca all have those, but as with my earlier rec posts, if you’re not actually in Canada, be on the lookout for large shipping charges and be prepared to double up your purchases to qualify for free shipping if necessary! Or, if you are so inclined, recruit a Canadian friend to buy albums for you and ship them to you!

Out of all the Quebec groups I’m following, in some ways I’m most delighted by this one because, well, girls. And I heartily encourage checking them out in particular, if nothing else to encourage them to put out more albums–and to encourage other female groups to jump in on this genre as well. Because I’ll totally buy them, if they are this awesome!

Mirrored from annathepiper.org.

Book Log #15: So Cold the River, by Michael Koryta

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I read Michael Koryta’s So Cold the River as a library checkout, since I’d never encountered the author before yet was in the mood to try a suspense-oriented horror thriller. And while I found it competently done in some ways, in others, it was ultimately kind of disappointing. This was an uncommon instance of a book I read and wound up not actually wanting to buy.

Eric Shaw was once an up-and-coming filmmaker, and now he’s slogging through his days by filming memorials for funerals while he avoids dealing with how he’s walked out on his wife Claire. A wealthy socialite, Alyssa Bradford, hires him to do a documentary about her father-in-law–and when Eric agrees to take the job, he comes to a town full of the obligatory layers upon layers of disturbing secrets. At the heart of them all lurks something evil, something Eric begins to see in visions once he starts taking drinks from an old bottle of Pluto Water.

At its core the plot wasn’t bad, I’ll happily give it that, yet some aspects of its execution rubbed me the wrong way. One big one was that while you initially are led to believe that drinking this old mineral water is what’s causing Eric to have visions, it comes up at one point that he has this ability anyway–and his wife actually has to remind him of an incident where he’d exhibited precognition. That yanked me RIGHT out of the story, because I found it impossible to believe that a person could forget something like that.

The other thing that bugged me was that a good deal of time is spent in the POV of the primary mortal antagonist. I acknowledge that this was necessary for the development of his character, and you do ultimately see where his character is going. But that said, more than once I found that character repugnant enough that I was almost driven away from the book.

On the good side, there were several genuinely creepy passages, and I had no issues with anything about Koryta’s prose; more, my quibbles were with aspects of his characterization and plot. In the end, though, this book didn’t seize me well enough to make it permanently into my collection. I’d recommend it as a library read, or if you need something to read on a trip, but nothing more than that. Two stars.

Mirrored from annathepiper.org.

Quebecois band recommendations: La Bottine Souriante!

Last but OH MY definitely not least in the slightest, we come to La Bottine Souriante!

Of all the groups I’ve been getting into, La Bottine is the oldest, and as near as I can tell they are pretty much the modern Quebecois trad version of the Chieftains. They’ve been around since the late 70′s, and became famous for taking the folk melodies and slapping a lively horn section on top of them. That, combined with the showmanship of lead singer Yves Lambert, made La Bottine a phenomenal live band during their earlier heyday. As I’ve posted before, I had the fortune of seeing them perform at the same Celtic concert where I first saw Great Big Sea, and I’m here to tell you–they WERE awesome. Monsieur Lambert had an amazing rich, round voice that hit my ears like 900-calorie cheesecake, and their horn section was laying down a wall of sound that steamrollered the audience.

So yeah, when it comes to modern Quebecois trad, La Bottine are the giants on whose shoulders everyone else after them are standing. If you want to get into this music at all, you cannot do wrong at all if you start with La Bottine. Even their name, “The Smiling Boots”, sums up why I love this music so much–not only because of the podorythmie, but because of the lively, upbeat energy. Well, that, and the aforementioned wall of sound from the horns, which do yea and verily ROCK.

Be aware that since La Bottine has been around for so long, they have gone through a huge number of membership changes over the years. This will therefore impact what level of awesome you get from one of their albums, depending on where in the discography you’re looking. I have only five of their many albums myself, and all of them are in the earlier stretch of La Bottine’s long range of activity: Chic & Swell, En Spectacle, Jusqu’aux P’tites Heures, Les Épousailles, and Rock & Reel (which has the distinction of being the only La Bottine album released in the States). Of these albums, I would most recommend either Rock & Reel or En Spectacle, which is a live album–either of these will give you an excellent introduction to the band’s canonical sound.

A big difficulty here though is that La Bottine’s albums are hard to find. Since Rock & Reel is the only one that was ever released in the States, and since a lot of the places that historically have sold music have been losing out to online distribution sources, even that one will be hard to find outside Canada. And very few La Bottine tracks, sadly, are available electronically! The US iTunes store, for example, has only a small number of La Bottine tracks, and all of them are single tracks on compilation albums. None of them are on the band’s own works.

The one electronic recommendation I can make is that La Bottine appears on the Chieftains collaboration Fire in the Kitchen. Great Big Sea fans will know this album well, since it’s got a GBS track on it, a take of “Lukey”. However, the La Bottine track on it, “Le Lys Vert” is very strong. This album IS on iTunes, and you should get it if you can–not only because of GBS and La Bottine being on it, but also because it’s a great overview of Canadian folk.

If though you want to find their albums, Amazon.com has them all (I think all, anyway) here. Amazon.ca represents over here. Archambault.ca, here (and they DO have La Bottine available as MP3 downloads, but again–only for Canadian customers).

YouTube-wise, there are a LOT of La Bottine vids of various quality, and most of them appear to be either older songs with static images, or else live performances involving the current-day members. Of these:

This one is the studio version of “Le ziguezon zinzon”, which goes clear back to the early album Chic & Swell, which is early enough that André Marchand–now over in the Charbonniers–is still in the band! And I think this may in fact be M. Marchand singing lead on this track; I’m not quite sure.

From Rock & Reel, I give you YoYo Verret, which is arguably one of the very first La Bottine ditties I ever fell in love with. The vid is static images only, and includes several of the modern lineup of members–so keep in mind that this is actually an older La Bottine song. I’m pretty sure that Michel Bordeleau, the other former La Bottine member now in the Charbonniers, has the lead here. And listen for the shiver-inducing deep harmony at the very end of the vocal section!

Off of En spectacle, here is “La Grand’ Côte”, one of the best tracks in the performance. There’s a stunning footwork solo towards the end–where the feet are flying fast enough that it sounds like machine-gun fire!

By contrast, if you search for “la bottine souriante 2011″ on YouTube, you should be able to find several videos of the current lineup of the group. This one unfortunately has clipping issues on the sound, but you CAN see Éric Beaudry over on the side making with the footwork with a guitar in his lap, and the guys with the horns kick in fairly quickly. Of note as well is the dancer on the stage, Sandy Silva, whose primary function in the group does in fact appear to be dancing. This one is notable because I recognize what they’re playing–it’s “Landslide Village Medley”, a.k.a. “Medley des Éboulements” from Rock & Reel! And, this one is only a partial, but again there’s M. Beaudry there on the side, and Sandy Silva dancing all over the stage.

La Bottine remains an active band, although that’s a bit hard to glean from their website–the YouTube search is a much better indicator. AND! AND! I am seeing rumblings on their Facebook page that they do have a new album on the way. So I’d recommend keeping an eye on their site, and if you are Facebook-inclined, they have a group right over here as well as an actual fan page!

It’s greatly comforting to see that the band’s current lineup is continuing its long and proud tradition, and here’s hoping that the new album will enjoy some electronic release!

Mirrored from annathepiper.org.