Royal Canoe +nash +Michael Mooney

Description en anglais seulement

Royal CanoePop / Electronic

"...risk-taking material..." - The Globe and Mail

"Oh my holy synthesizers, coupled with falsettos reminiscent of Beck from his Midnight Vultures days..." - Discorder

Royal Canoe is a group of musicians on a mission to construct ambitious, inventive music. The songs are thick with catchiness, rich in rhythm and are consistently pushing against the boundaries of pop music.

They spend almost every day in a shit-hole rehearsal space writing hooks, singing through effects pedals, scrawling lyrics on scraps of paper, and constructing heavy beats in odd time signatures. They create samples by running conventional sounds through unconventional pieces of gear, drumming on bathtubs and garbage cans, listening to Big Boi and manipulating bits of old records.

The band calls Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada home – the enigmatic prairie city, which has served artists as both an abundant, creative watering hole and a debilitating quagmire. The city's mood swings from euphoric summers spent biking with beers, fence-hopping residential pools and climbing abandoned roof-tops to harsh, bitter winters that are countered first with defiance, then self-loathing, then denial, then "you've got to be fucking kidding me." Royal Canoe's songs are, in part, an effort to make sense of the resentment and romanticism of the city's divergent identities.

Alternative / Rock

Though the suburban Montreal native is only just in his thirties, he’s already gone through more experiences, turmoil and hardships than a person twice his age. All of these experiences have shaped who he is today and are reflected in the eclectic and colourful musical landscapes he’s created for his The Death of Reason debut solo album for Shoreline Records/Fontana North.

Michael Mooney
Alt Rock / Singer-Songwriter

"The shock never really wears off", says Michael Mooney, unshaven and bundled against the winter's first minus 20 morning. "Each year I'm fucking flabbergasted."

It's the singer-songwriter's third winter in Montreal, and slowly but surely, this native of Jamberoo, Australia, (population 935), is adjusting. In 2008, Mooney met his wife to be, Anne, and decided to follow her here. And so he landed, at first plying his trade in the service of music for advertising, but all the while amassing a bundle of songs and connecting with like-minded collaborators to form the collective that has become the Mooney band.

There is definitely a sense of transformation and turmoil in the songs on Mooney's debut EP, Machine Made Hand, the inner workings of a human being finding his footing and confronting demons in a strange, new, cold place. And Mooney admits it -- "the next record won't be nearly as freaked out and miserable, I promise"

There is brutal honesty too, delivered with a dramatic showmanship that almost makes fun of itself. And in the sound, a marriage of rusty, folky instrumentation to dense electronic trickery. It's vulnerable and tough, obscure and direct --like the man himself, a little hard to read -- there's a wisecrack hiding behind the sensitive singer-songwriter mask.