Preview
THE HOUSE DOCTORS
Saturday, February 12
Polish Combatants Association Hall (1127 Kensington Road N.W.)
It’s 3 a.m. Cigar smoke stalks the next room and a diamond earring is left abandoned on the washroom floor. The scent of heartbreak swings like a noose in the air as you hear your best friend leaving with your sweetheart in your car.
Well, what’s left to do but have another shot of whisky? Drinking alone is so depressing, so while you’re at it pull out Fairytales and Poisons, the second album from The House Doctors, and soak up their music spun from dark whimsy.
"We’ve never had a bad experience with an audience," says violinist Tom Hamilton, who joined the band before their first album, 2002’s RX. "It’s always been a case of people talking to one another and bringing other people out. We end up meeting people and forming a personal experience with everyone we meet."
No wonder, when the group’s songs are a strangely familiar mix of stylish splashes of strings and words. They are openly inviting and laced with a mixture of urban romantic myth and the crunch of reality. Listen to a House Doctors song and you’ll be convinced you’ve heard it before, playing on some faded radio station set halfway between the weekend and your soul.
Hamilton, an Ontario native who cut his musical teeth playing up and down the wild Detroit-Windsor corridor when Motown was still anchored in the area, was drawn to working with The House Doctors because of the careful lyrical concoctions served up by founder Rob Ursel.
"I started writing poetry when I was about 17. It was quite obsessive and relentless with me – I was always writing," he says, hunching over his poetry book at Ironwood just before taking the stage to lend his violin talents to John Wort Hannam.
It was this search for poetic musical justice that led him to Ursel. "Rob is one of those dyed-in-the-wool midnight-to-3-a.m. writers," he says. "It seems to be inescapable, the nocturnal nature of that craft, and it shows in the lyrics.
"For me, a band has to have at least two out of three things present. There has to be someone writing really well lyrically and melodically. There has to be good players who handle their instruments in a way that’s capable of producing sublime effects. Then you have to have someone who can really sing. In our case, it’s at least two out of three and I don’t think I should say any more."
The move from being Rob Ursel and The House Doctors on the first album to The House Doctors for the second seems natural in light of the obvious musical mastery and contributions of all the members. Vocalist Emily Triggs lends her sweet pipes to several tracks as she did on the first album, and once again Michael McCafferty plays double bass.
"That was a decision that we made when we went over to the record label called Accidental. In the formation of something as intricate as that, you don’t want to dismiss the commitments of the various people. We had been together over a year and had done a good job of playing and promoting the first album, being true to what we had recorded so that people weren’t cheated when they bought the CD."
The band even explored their commitments to each other by hammering out a two-year contract in which music would come first. Such dedication got them billing and respect at the North by Northeast festival in Toronto, where the audience seemed surprised by the group’s non-urban cowboy style. According to Hamilton, living that contract requires mindful respect.
"A strong writer is his own centre of gravity who has very strong ideas about his songs and how he wants them to be," he says. "How to make that into everyone’s material is a job for the rest of us to hammer out." |
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