Glen Hornblast in Roots Music Canada

Glen Hornblast: Once In A Blue Moon http://www.rootsmusic.ca/

October 26, 2012Author: Paul Corby

With a name as obstreperous as Glen Hornblast’s, you could be forgiven for expecting to hear a scallywag songster, full of roar and bombast. Longtime fans of traditional open stage circuits, however, know Glen as a compassionate and insightful songwriter, whose intensity resides in his careful phrasing and delivery, and in his dedication to song and to other song makers in both Toronto and Nashville.

His years of attention to the currencies of composition and melody that these communities trade in have resulted in his first song collection, released earlier this year at Winterfolk X. It’s entitled Once In A Blue Moon. The superlatives that apply to this record are not of the sort that usually invite hyperbole. Restraint, understatement, clarity: these tools, essential to communication, are hard to market in a world of instant opinion and supersized media appetites.

Even so, Hornblast has found big-time support in one of the most positive record reviews I’ve ever seen, in August’s issue of No Depression.

Sustained humility inherits wonders. As he sings, Glen Hornblast wears his vulnerability on both sleeves, but a penetrating nasal quality keeps a ridge of earnestness that delivers like an a.m. deejay, afloat upon David Baxter’s meticulous instrumental production. Even in speaking, his voice carries with it a measured tone of insistent and curious consideration. “What was the name of that award I won again?”

An urban rustic, Hornblast finds miracles and laments in the city’s darker streets. and especially in the characters stuck there on the cement. “Loretta,” “Homeless,” and “Mary” hinge on the risks of living too close to hard surfaces. He travels, to Paris in “Le Pont Des Arts,”, and to “Isla Mujeres,” and finds a universal home for his open-hearted empathy.

Hornblast’s approach to love songs is positively reverent as he exalts his beloved in the torchy “Evangeline” and on “River”, in which he confesses that the subject of his simile just “carries me away”.

Glen continues to explore the landscape of poetics and to develop new relationships within the world as a troubadour of compassion, romance and fellowship. His quest for the ringing moments of life recalls W.S. Merwin’s famous koan:

I will take with me the emptiness of my hands
What you do not have you find everywhere.

Between the jam and the high place

August 14, 2012Author: Paul Corby

Wherein we discover again where music comes from: backyards, kitchens, basements, parties, public places where goodwill is cultivated and coerced into an improved socio-musical consensus concerning what is good and better and best.

A waning August moon makes a decisive slice through the exhausted rainclouds; the Perseid meteor showers are scratching out their brief vectors in the sky; party animals, vegetables and minerals emerge into the rain-soaked backyards of fungus-coloured houses in nameless Toronto neighbourhoods.

We are into the pivotal double digits of the month and it’s summer’s perfect Saturday night. Dark, and sweet ozone in the atmosphere. There is a party at Kyle and Gavin’s.

Lots of food and brews; a barbecue bonfire; loud cussing bros and girls all with fresh nails; tarped-off platform at the back of the yard has a drum kit and red glowing amplifier lights ready.

Arbitrarily coincident musicians gather: a neighbor, a teacher, some folk and reggae players, and Adam Beer-Colacino, Toronto’s new guitar avatar, occupy the light with jokes and scales and then, abruptly, The Gogo Jam starts up. Weightless dancing, shouted adjustments of key and tempo, extended solos, audience air guitar, some singalongs and some old New Orleans masterpieces and “Will It Go Round In Circles“.

The surprise of perfection’s grace upon the odd tune leaves the band hopeful for a second set of magical potential.

After some libation salvation, Jerry Leger takes over for a few songs, pushing the group pulse into a deeper tightness. All Dressed, a full-on group with spontaneous keyboard combustion added on, brings a rocking 80’s surround sound fullness into the midnight.  As neighbours peer out of their brown-lit windows in wonder, two party goers look up and rock a minute, with icy blue faces unlocked from their hand-held devices for a spell.

And blocks away people are feeling the beat, finding it suddenly coming across the sky, mixed in with the bright happenstance of transient surface noise, a chance rhythm bite, insistent and  intimate over the distance, like the sight of a shared shooting star: epic glance to close friend: “Did you see that?” “Yes, but can you hear THAT?” Indicating the gist of existence without explanation.

And before one o’clock, the expected swoop of a police car parked out front, the sweating neighbor in his undershirt and pajama pants swearing in mumbles, and the dismantling of the sound, and the diminishing of the yard party, and the current of energy flowing off into taxis and transit and homeward trails. Lost — but not vanished — just until February when somebody rekindles a conversation with “Hey, do you remember that party at Gavin and Kyle’s? Tang Tang!”

The Grain of It: The Wheat Pool Call It Quits After 7 Years

Why do we love a band?

As soon as that question is asked, one’s heart rushes for that private image, the cover of your inner jewel-case.

You know who you love. Their flag is always there, waving, even when the air is calm and still elsewhere.

The circumstance of your first encounter with their music is radiant; the intoxication of sharing their masterpiece record, song by song, with an intimate friend is a forever moment of bliss; the evolution of their music into the theme music for an episode of your life is epic and lit with imagery.

I used Hauntario by The Wheat Pool to travel through the foggy Poconos to Manhattan, to survive a traumatic life crisis, and to build a small barn in my yard in 2009. It is a unified field of interconnected stories. Futility, loss, the big lonely of prairie melancholy, and a formula for escape all twine like sweetgrass through the eleven songs. Loser characters attempt to speak their selfish truths. It begins with an ending and ends with a beginning. It fixed me.

Now they are breaking up; the press release came early this year: “We would rather burn bright and burn out. We have admitted that we aren’t four guys in the same place anymore, and that makes it really hard to be a great band.”

Live at the Dakota in June 2010. Photo by Paul Corby

After seven years (a traditional biblical perimeter), the lads will be playing a final show in Edmonton on the same date as their first performance.

It’s a hard call: front men Mike and Robb Angus are brothers. Two assaults on Toronto at CMW and NXNE had proved encouraging. The second of these campaigns took place without sublime drummer Stephane Dagenais. The band’s combustion level was on eleven, fuelled by feverish percussion, strippers, hockey games, and the acclaim of Toronto music weenies. It resulted in a free online EP, featuring a magical version of Neil Young’s Helpless.

Then, a year of silence. Mike Angus showed up in this part of the continent last year, in a bright red car, touring an album of personal acoustic tunes called “Hymns”. It was the week that Jack Layton died, and the elegiac nature of his music was stirring, and fit the mood of the city elegantly.

“When I hear that a band’s breaking up, I just close the book and take a step away,” says a Successful Music Business Dude.

“The demise? Super sad. I’m sure it’s not the last we’ll hear of those boys as musicians though,” comments James Murdoch, producer of Hauntario.

I sure hope that you will be able to find that disk and listen someday. Its intaglio of razor guitar work by Glen Erickson, splashes of pedal steel and piano, feedback, lyrical detail, and charismatic, wounded harmonies is like nothing else but Canada. It’s alive on my constant inner playlist, filed next to The Band, The Blue Shadows and Stratochief, drifting through the paintings of William Kurelek, and echoing ironically in the context of this week’s Canadian Music Fest, when hundreds of bands again come to Toronto; “kids too eager to see clearly…falling over at the beauty of the world” (from The Wheat Pool’s “Nervous Bird“).

If you’re in Edmonton, go see what I mean on the 23rd.

I will be out in the Toronto bars for CMW that night too, looking for some new band to love. And when I get home, I might go sit in the barn for awhile.http://thewheatpool.com/lyrics