WAX MANNEQUIN & KIM BARLOW ON TOUR MARCH 2019
Wax Mannequin and Kim Barlow are hitting stages in eastern Canada, from Chester NS to Hamilton ON and points between. These are two indie heroes with many albums and tours to their names. Both released striking new records this year. Have a New Name (WM) is a captivating collection of surreal folk and experimental pop songs. How To Let Go (KB) contains folk-pop grandeur about domestic minutiae, electronic egressions, and a wild slant on traditional Maritime tunes.
Wax Mannequin is known - and cultishly followed - for his weird, folk-punk anthems and his live performances full of fraught beauty. His songs are dark and thoughtful at times, pounding and ridiculous at others…or all of these things at once. Songsmith, performance-art provocateur and self-sabotologist, Wax Mannequin continues indefinitely to carve a deep, indelible groove across the face of the modern music underground.
Kim Barlow is an accomplished guitarist and clawhammer banjoist whose songwriting tends to be sweetly off-kilter. She was a CBC darling in the early aughts and struck a tenuous balance between her exploratory tendencies and her folky inclinations. She stopped playing solo for several years to tour with other bands, including a wry banjo-ukulele duo with Mathias Kom of the Burning Hell, and to raise a (second) batch of children - twins, now age five. She is reemerging, work-hardened, bossy and musically braver.
Wax and Barlow have crossed paths before: A troubled weekend in Whitehorse during the Frostbite Music Festival; overlapping tours in Berlin where they survived night-biking with guitars, and co-wrote a song for their host; a blurry folk music conference in Mississauga. There is chemistry here that has not been tapped, and this run of shows will likely be the musical powder-keg. Expect two sets and hope for overlap, atonal solos and two wildly different voices singing in unison.