Band Details

From the Promoter

Vogue Theatre can accommodate patrons with special mobility needs. Please note that accessible seating is located on the main floor only. The entire main floor is wheelchair accessible. Access to the upper level is by stairs only. Please call us at 604-688-1975 or email us at info@voguetheatre.com to reserve accessible seating for reserved seated shows only - there is no need to make arrangements for General Admission shows.

THE MILK CARTON KIDS

Grammy-nominated harmony duo The Milk Carton Kids have announced the May 19, 2015 release of their third album, Monterey. A refreshing alternative to the foot-stomping grandeur of the so-called "folk revival," an understated virtuosity defines The Milk Carton Kids and their new album. The two years since the release of their last album, The Ash & Clay, have been significant ones for the group. In addition to a Grammy nomination for Best Folk Album, The Milk Carton Kids won Duo/Group of the Year at the Americana Music Awards in 2014. Their featured performances and interviews in T Bone Burnett & the Coen Brothers' concert documentary, "Another Day/Another Time," brought the band its widest audience and their 55-city North American tour last year sold out months in advance. Cultural purveyors from Garrison Keillor to T Bone Burnett to Billy Bragg have hailed the duo's importance among a group of new folk bands, both expanding and contradicting the rich tradition that precedes them. Yet while some of the band's many accolades reference a specific genre, the duo quickly transcends those tags with clear inflections of jazz, classical, even the dark lyricism of modern "alternative." This past year, The Milk Carton Kids were asked to pay tribute to Johnny Cash and Emmylou Harris — Cash on the Joe Henry-produced remake of "Bitter Tears," and Harris with their standing ovation performance at the tribute concert "The Life & Songs of Emmylou Harris," among luminaries including Kris Kristofferson, Mavis Staples, Alison Kraus, Iron & Wine, and Harris herself. If Cash and Harris taught us that American music is meant to be taken at its expansive word, without confines or borders, The Milk Carton Kids appear to have taken the lesson to heart.

THE BARR BROTHERS

To begin their third album, The Barr Brothers weren't writing any songs. For the first time, the Montreal outfit's three members - namesake siblings Brad and Andrew Barr, harpist Sarah Pagé - went empty-handed into the studio. No plans or preconceptions, no books of lyrics or sheets of chords - they went down miles of snowy road to a cabin on a frozen lake, a place full of windows and microphones and starlight and sunshine, with amplifiers in the bedrooms, their volumes turned up loud. On the fringes of Saint Zenon, Québec (pop. 1,1150), a 30-minute snowmobile ride to the nearest grocery store, the band spent seven days making things up. Improvisations that lasted hours at a time - noons and midnights, dusks and dawns, with grooves inspired by India, West Africa and 808s; by Brad's scorching electric guitar; and by Pagé's new inventions, hacks to turn her harp into a versatile, sub-bass-booming noisemaker.

Queens of the Breakers was born at that cabin in the country. Then the band took that racket and distilled it into songs: 11 tracks of blazing courage and failing resolve; suffused with groove, melody and the Barr Brothers' wide-open sense of the blues. At times the sound's all twinkling, the score for a lost John Hughes film; at other times it's whetted, searching, like the stuff of Lhasa de Sela or Led Zeppelin's III. These are tales of teenagers prowling through Rhode Island mansions (the title track), coming to Montreal and falling in love ("Song That I Heard"), tattered patriotism and clenching fists ("Kompromat", "Ready for War"). There's also "Defibrillation", a mournful letter from a father to his son, inspired by the broken rhythm of a pair of hospital heart monitors - and a drumbeat based on that dither.

It's this tension, this dither, that lives at the centre of Queens of the Breakers. Three players - friends, comrades, music-makers, all of them trying to play in sync. Three bandmates - each of them fumbling, remembering, trying to invent something together. A band still playing, even occasionally reimagining, their rock'n'roll.

Promoter