Ontario trio to play Capital Complex on Nov. 10.

A8

Kyle Mullin

Stumble Upon

del.icio.us

Digg

Facebook

Print

Email

Speak Up

Out from under the pangs, Elliott Brood's twangy guitar picking flows a searing tone akin to yesteryear, but the members of the bluegrass trio insist they're reaching for far more than nostalgia with their weathered songs.

Enlarge Photo

Elliot Brood enjoys the raw sound that comes from playing a live venue.

"There's just something so sweet about something that's old," said Mark Sasso, front man of the Windsor, Ontario bred band. "It's like playing a worn guitar, one that's had a life before me, its own stories, and you can feel that when you play."

Sasso first began playing with Casey Laforet near the dawn of the decade, recording and releasing an EP entitled Tin Type as a duo before recruiting drummer Stephen Pitkin for their first tour. Pitkin nabbed a Samsonite Silhouette suitcase before joining his friends on the road, but rather than packing it with clothes he left it empty and banged out bass drum lines on it onstage. It was the only way he could mimic the stomps Sasso and Laforet made on their hardwood floor in the place of drumbeats for that debut disc, and frenzied fans would often offer him a new case to replace each one he'd bust to pieces by the end of each show.

"That served its purpose for awhile, but it's hard to find a new case after each show and sooner or later that had to come to an end," Sasso said. "I think Stephen (Pitkin) is more than happy to have stopped that now, it was the only thing reporters would ask him about in every interview, and it kind of became the bane of his existence."

The last suitcase that Pitkin pulverised currently hangs on the wall of the Moho Tavern in Peterborough, one of the band's favourite venues.

It's just one of many rooms the trio tend to leave their mark on - from the Healey Lake Lodge in MacTier, to the Wayne Town Hall in Wayne, to the Mount Robson Lodge in Valemount, Elliott Brood have taken every chance, recording in rooms with a variety of vibes.

"Often you can't create a certain sound or vibrancy unless you're in a certain room, each has its own distinct reverberation," he said. "When you add that reverberation in a studio it's manufactured and fake. We like to go with the real thing."

And that yearning for more authentic tones seeps into every corner of their songs - from the wild west style photographs accompanying the paper bag lining of Tin Type, to the titling of their second full length album after Utah's Mountain Meadows massacre in 1857. One of their most popular videos is The Bridge, a wispy black and white cartoon clip which, along with the songs' rollicking lyrics, depicts the history the Ambassador bridge that straddles the border between Detroit and Windsor - or at least their whimsical twist on that tale.

"We were driving across it one day wondering what (Windsor) would be like without it," he said. "Joseph Bower was the financier of that bridge way back when, and although he was apparently an eccentric character that turned a lot of people off, funding that bridge changed a lot of people's lives."

But the band forgoes a true depiction in that clip, instead favouring a fictionalized version where Bower is strangled by a stranger that assumes his identity just as the bridge opens, reaping all the rewards that follow.

"We like to play with history as opposed to regurgitating it," Sasso said. "He only died that way in our video, but his actual great granddaughter came up to us after a show to ask if that's what really happened. We're just playing around, and even people privy to the information don't know how to take it."

And as the band wraps up the last leg of their current tour, they've come to realize that the very name they play under has grown to be just as murky as their twisted take on history.

"At first it was simply a moniker to play under," Sasso said. "But now I feel like Elliott Brood is like a person we're trying to catch up to. We keep chasing songs, and he's the guy in the corner nodding along as we play.

"Not that we believe in ghosts, it's more like the band's haunted by me and my night terrors on the bus between the gigs we play," Sasso added. "But when we're truly jamming together it feels like we have that fourth member. Isn't that why you create music anyway, to tap into that other realm?"

Elliott Brood will perform at the Capitol Complex on November 10.