Alt-country party pack Elliott Brood kick-off an amazing series of shows at the Biltmore Theatre over the month of February, (yay Joel Plaskett and Godspeed You Black Emperor!) The Biltmore Theatre show on Wednesday Feb 7 2024 is the first date on the Brood’s tour of Northern Ontario, should be a good way to begin as the Windsor, ON., trio are no strangers to the ShwaRawk City. As well as playing gigs in this city over the past two decades, they have also filmed videos here and of course there’s a certain kinship in playing a style of music, Black Grass, which is somewhat the go-to for Shwakats.
Elliott Brood are touring their latest album, ‘Town’, the first half of a two album project with the other half titled ‘Country’. ‘Town” came out in November, no date for ‘Country’ yet.
The album, weighing in at under 30 minutes, begins with a tribute to the hometown, ‘Rose City’, Windsor’s nickname. (Oshawa is the Dirty Shwa, Windsor is the city of roses, maybe they are not so alike after all.) Anyways it’s a chunky truck ride on byways at dusk type of a plucking strings track. Of the eight tracks there are a couple of standouts, the swishing ‘Evelyn’, but not the Hip’s ‘Evelyn, and the clappity clap rattley ‘Dried Up’, and there’s a cover of Jenny Lewis’ ‘Rise Up Your Fists’, not Godspeed’s ‘Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven’, and anyways they’ve a lot of songs and I hope they play the awesomeness that is ‘Northern Air’.
Jerry Leger is opening for the Brood and he is a very welcome opening act. Jerry is a very fine singer/songwriter from TO, very much in the tradition of The Band and Dylan, but with an all encompassing love of music. He explores this love over the dozen or so albums he has released. His latest is ‘Donlands’ on which he worked with the moody producer Mark Howard so expect atmospherics and buoyancy in the ten songs. ‘Three Hours of Midnight’ is very much in the aforementioned tradition of Band/Dylan, leaning into Robbie Robertson. Lovely stuff. ‘The Flower and the Dirt’ is not, I think, a love song from Oshawa to Windsor, “You were always the flower and I was always the dirt” but you know who knows - could be. The closer is ‘Slow Night in Nowhere Town’ hopefully not some omen for Wednesday night in Oshawa but that's up to you. I’ll be there.
