Rae Spoon and Corwin Fox will be at the Masonic Hall in Cumberland Friday night, in conjunction with the launch of Spoon’s new CD, Armour.
Spoon has been called one of Canada’s best songwriters and the new album Armour does not disappoint. The 10 new songs hold all of the lyrical depth indicative of Spoon’s compositions while showcasing a distinctive voice. Armour’s self-produced enigmatic soundscapes blur the lines between organic and electronic instruments. Analogue synthesizers, electronic drum programming, drum kits, percussion, electric bass, cello and guitar carry the album through pop refrains and danceable beats. Released by Coax Records, the album is the result of collaboration with Calgary’s Lorrie Matheson at Arch Audio Studios and features electronic arrangements by Berlin’s Alexandre Decoupigny.
Armour, Spoon’s eighth solo album, is the highly anticipated follow-up to Polaris Prize-nominated My Prairie Home, a musical about Spoon’s fraught childhood in Alberta. As much as My Prairie Home was about Spoon’s upbringing as a queer youth in a Pentecostal household, Armour is about Spoon’s view of the future. Moments of reckoning with trauma and self-preservation mingle with messages of hope and survival.
Rae’s first book, First Spring Grass Fire, was published by Arsenal Pulp Press in 2012. The book was a finalist for a Lambda Award in the Transgender Fiction category and was shortlisted for an Expozine Alternative Press Award. In the spring of 2014, Rae was awarded an Honour of Distinction with the Dayne Ogilvie Prize, presented by the Writers’ Trust of Canada. Rae’s second book, co-written with Ivan E. Coyote and titled Gender Failure, was published in 2014. Gender Failure was on the 2015 Over The Rainbow Reading List and was translated into German.
Corwin Fox is a folksinger from Cumberland, but he does many other musical things as well. He has worked on over 200 albums (Shane Koyczan and the Short Story Long, PK Tessmann, Richard Reed Parry) and played many towns and countries over the last 20 years, either solo or with his bands Morlove or The Chimney Swallows. Although he spends most of his time working in his recording studio, he occasionally emerges to perform the strange folk songs he writes on banjo or guitar.
Doors open at 7:30 p.m. All ages welcome. $15 at the door, youth under 15 free.