The Wilderness of Manitoba: someone call Simon Raymonde

Windmill
3 May 2010

In the back garden, Seamus, kindly providing charred things for everyone to eat, was protected from the cooling May breeze by his BBQ duties in outdoor conditions that WoM described as comparable to November in Canada, where, despite the bucolic nature of their name and music, they are in fact from urbane Toronto and not the untamed boonies.

Using a variety of instruments that included a little wooden owl whistle giving an authentic-sounding backwoods hoot, and two sizes of Tibetan singing bowl, WoM sit somewhere between Low Anthem and Fleet Foxes in style, which I appreciate is a fairly fine distinction when taking the broader view. There were harmonies a-plenty, and everything was beautifully crafted and delivered, although it was a little hard to find anything to get really excited about - until the set was drawing to a close, when a they played a crafty pair of aces to bring things nicely to a head.

Evening, written by lead singer Will Whitwham's late mother and reworked by the band, is a fine song indeed, with a touch more bite to it than their other songs, but the knock-me-down-with-a-feather cover of Timber Timbre's Demon Host was as if the Mamas & Papas had dropped out of the sky and landed on the slightly sticky floor of the Windmill. Stunning.

I hope that someone from Bella Union catches the band while they are here this week, as their roster is full of exactly this kind of thing.