Halifax Music: The First Foray

Well, it was sort of my first foray into the Halifax scene. While I’d gone to a couple of the Halifax Pop Explosion shows, this was the first time I’d gone and checked out some of the local acts in their natural habitats.

First off, Halifax has a lot of café’s where people perform acoustic stuff, possibly because folk music is pretty big out on the East Coast. So, Saturday morning I decided I’d go check out a cool guy here named Ben Caplan play a set at the Ouro Preto Café which is pretty close to where I live.

So, at around 2:00 PM Ben started his solo set, which was pretty solid. Ben’s got some nice singing and playing technique, better than your average dude with a guitar, and his songs are pretty good. Some are fun, some are serious, some are a little bit of both. He also played two solid covers: the first was Bob Dylan’s “A Simple Twist of Fate” off Blood on the Tracks, the second was Wilco’s “Poor Places” off Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. For the later, he had some kind of pedal that, at the end of the song, made it sound like a jet airplane was falling apart overhead. It was pretty cool.

I went out to try and get enough money for a second hot chocolate but alas, my checking account has no more money left in it (I’m trying to find a job at the moment…waiting for some call backs…any day now).

So I came back and Ben had a nice little three piece going on, with some dude on bass and this King’s girl named Fey playing violin. And man, Fey was rocking that fucking violin: bitch can play! Er, um, respectable young woman can play, really. Her violin actually really spiced up the whole set-up and so Ben delivered another nice little set.

In the evening I went out to see this show at North St. Church. The point of the show was to send this kid Sam to Ethiopia…where he will effectively save Ethiopia. Or something like that.

The first band I saw was The Lamp Shades (at least I think it was The Lamp Shades), which was two chicks and two dudes doing their own little pop thing. None of them were post-high school and they looked even younger. Still, they weren’t bad, they had the right idea, and that counts more than anything.

Then came The Gamma Gamma Rays, who were actually pretty good. They had a nice little indie-pop thing going with keyboards and the guitars and the girl playing mandolin and such. It was good stuff.

Tags: a helpful diagram, ben caplan, ben caplan and the casual smokers, halifax, the gamma gamma rays, the lamp shades