Thursday, May 15, 2008

Folk rock on!

Spirit of the West and Great Big Sea are both playing free concerts in Buffalo this summer!

4 comments:

SunflowerP said...

Heh - those are the two, out of the several acts mentioned, that I'd have been most excited about, too - though Spirit of the West kinda lost me when they dropped a lot of the Celtic influence. (I've no idea how much that still applies; it's been years since I was really aware of what they were up to.)

Sunflower

jfpbookworm said...

They did? Awww... (I only know them from a few songs.)

GBS, on the other hand - I've seen them live several times back when I lived in NYC, and they always give an amazing performance, but I've never seen the new lineup.

lyndsay said...

I am 150km from Buffalo says google maps and I LOVE GBS! Of course I don't have a car so it would take over 4h to get there by greyhound but still, good to know the possibility to see them is there. And it's free? Cool. I've seen GBS twice and would love a third time.

SunflowerP said...

Looking at the Wikipedia article on SotW, I can't even pin down for sure when the change was - I might be talking about the early-'90s shift to a harder alt-rock style that the article refers to, but I think more likely I'm talking about something that happened with their (according to the article) mainstream breakthrough album Political, because how I'd describe the change now is "less pennywhistle and bodhran, more political messagey-ness". (I could have stood preachy-with-bodhrans, 'cause I'm a sucker for a bodhran, or less-Celt-more-pop, but not both.)

I don't have the knowledge base to add more "early years" info to the article, but that's the SotW I know - I'd have called Tripping Up the Stairs the breakthrough album (mainstream radio airplay, and being known among non-folk-fans). OTOH, I have a locational bias; it may have put them in the western Canadian mainstream, but the rest of the country (and especially Toronto - as usual) might still have been oblivious.

Me, I discovered them at Expo '86 in Vancouver - I looked at the daily program flyer, spotted the "Celtic Rock" description, and thought, "Hmm, that might just work as a combo; in any case, I gotta find out if it does." (It sounds odd, now, to say it that way, but at the time it wasn't something that was really being done.)

Sunflower