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TORONTO -- It was standing-room-only for the FemBots' recent late-night set at Canadian Music Week.
Packed like lemmings into Bloor Street's legendary Lee's Palace, fans got to hear selections from last year's critically-acclaimed "The City," and previous discs, "Mucho Cuidado" and "Small Town Murder Scene." What they didn't realize, though, was that they had front row seats to one of the acts that is helping pilot Toronto's recent indie-music craze.
Taking a break from rehearsals, singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist/producer Dave Mackinnon reckons it's a good time for homegrown talent. "It's hard not to be awed at how much great music is coming out of this city at the moment," he says.
"We went through the last Toronto indie music boom in the early '90s when the Barenaked Ladies broke out and the Lowest of the Low went, relatively, Canadian huge," he says. "I think the big difference between then and now, is that nowadays local bands, and Canadian bands in general, are covering every possible spectrum of music and they're all really good."
Born from the ashes of a traditional rock group that was on its last legs, the FemBots came together after MacKinnon and longtime friend, Brian Poirier, started writing music on their own. Recording songs at their own leisurely pace, the pair released "Mucho Cuidado" in 2000. Considered part of the new avant folk, the edgy record was a true home recording, with power tools, children's toys and dime-store instruments accompanying the pair's grainy vocal collage.
Buoyed by the album's local success, the duo decided to aim for a roomier sound on their sophomore release. So they invited some of their friends to help out on 2003's "Small Town Murder Scene."
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Liking the collaborative angle a little more, MacKinnon and Poirier took one more step towards full-on bandom with last fall's, "The City," tapping over a dozen extra players to help realize the pair's long-overdue love letter to their hometown.
Calling it the fastest album they've ever made, MacKinnon says "The City" is the first FemBots release that wasn't recorded piecemeal. "What we had before we started recording was the songs in their most skeletal form," he recalls. "We really left it up to the band to turn the bare bones of those ideas into what they are."
Not a bad decision. The resulting ten tracks have helped craft the pair's most musically accessible record to-date.
Mining the same territory as alt-country stars My Morning Jacket and Wilco, on the album's title track, we hear MacKinnon and Poirier's keyboards wheeze over Lawrence Nichols' down-on-your-luck harmonica, and drummer Jason Tait's steady stomp, with Kingston's Krista Muir (Lederhosen Lucil) adding her own sumptuous background vocals.
Backed by Tait's crisp percussion, horn blasts give "Gilded Age" an uplifting feel, while violinist Julie Penner (Broken Social Scene) adds wispy accents to the record's first single, "History Remade," a glockenspiel-laden ballad.
Other slow songs - like the violin-specked "Demolition Waltz," featuring a chorus of voices that captures the track's requiem for a lost neighbourhood - take the duo's modest country stylings and infuse them with solid Neil Young-like twangs that are sure to ignite a fire under any hippie's tush.
"More than any of our other albums, this is the most live-band record we've done," says MacKinnon. "Very frequently we'd only give the backing band recordings of the songs a couple of days before heading into the studio because we didn't want to have the song's thought out too much. We really wanted to try and capture the spark of everybody getting the song right for the first time."
And because it was recorded as a band, the latest live incarnation of the FemBots has been the simplest to manage. "Taking this record out on the road has been a smooth transition," he says. "Since a lot of the players that are on the record are out on the road with us, this has been the easiest record to take from the studio to the stage."
Though it might seem that the pair are ready to welcome their loyal backing musicians into the fold for good, MacKinnon isn't so sure the quartet-collective is the best thing for him and Poirier. "It just seems to work better with the two of us calling the shots," he laughs. "The problem with larger groups is, the bigger the group the more lowest-common-denominator it can become.
"It's much easier with the two of us. Brian and I have worked together for so long, we don't have to be polite to one another."
But make no mistake; the musicians MacKinnon and Poirier choose to collaborate with, share the pair's love for country-flecked ballads. "The people we play with, we trust implicitly," he says. "As long as it's works, we're pretty willing to let people do whatever they want with our songs."
Even with this weekend's Juno Awards on the horizon, and America's minor love affair with Canadian groups like Arcade Fire, Broken Down Social Scene and Metric getting people's musical antennas pointing northward bound, MacKinnon says he and Poirier have always liked swimming up-current.
"One of the big developing factors in the Canadian music scene has been people have stopped thinking that there's even a remote chance that they're going to get played on the radio," MacKinnon says. "And because of that thinking so many bands have become the interesting, weird, somewhat non-traditional bands that they are."
Lucky for them; even luckier for us.
Here are dates for the FemBots' current Canadian tour:
Fri 03/31/06 Victoria, BC Lucky Bar
Sat 04/01/06 Courtenay, BC The Waverley
Thu 04/06/06 Lethbridge, AB Tongue 'n' Groove
Fri 04/07/06 Calgary, AB SAIT (The Gate)
Sat 04/08/06 Regina, SK The Exchange
Fri 04/21/06 Kingston, ON The Grad Club
Sat 04/22/06 Wakefield, QC Black Sheep Inn
Thu 04/27/06 Fredericton, NB Capital Bar
Fri 04/28/06 Halifax, NS The Attic
Sat 04/29/06 Moncton, NB Manhattan
Sun 04/30/06 Quebec City, QC Rouje Arts