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2014 PERFORMER – THE STRUMBELLAS

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Hopeful lyrics play across the sweeping bluegrass-inspired indie rock music in The Strumbellas’ new single In This Life, from their upcoming October 22nd album, We Still Move On Dance Floors. Full of hand claps and gang-vocal harmonies, the song stays true to The Strumbellas’ roots, while giving off a feeling that something new is on the horizon. For their sophomore album, the Lindsay, Ontario band headed to the woods of the pacific north west, settling in at Bear Creek Studio just outside of Seattle to record with Grammy nominated producer, Ryan Hadlock (Metric, Gossip, Moondoggies, The Lumineers). It seemed a natural progression for the band, whose dark lyrics about death and solitude crop up amongst beautiful lyrical mindscapes of trees and lakes and home.

“The Strumbellas conjure an alt-country Canadian landscape in which home is a beacon, the graveyard looms large, and it all ends with a piano dirge to carry a body and bury it slowly” – THE STAR PHOENIX

Since the release of The Strumbellas’ eponymous 2009 EP, which was peppered with accolades from Toronto weeklies and prompted a proclamation from the CBC that they are a “band to watch,” the six-piece group has been slogging it out, earning their stripes through residencies at The Cameron House and most recently a month of SOLD OUT Home.Sweet.Home Tuesdays at The Dakota Tavern. The band also left the proverbial nest in 2012, making new fans with cross-country tours as well as playing a plethora of festivals including CMW, NXNE, Pop Montreal, Eaglewood and Hillside in Guelph, which by all accounts was the equivalent of their cotillion ball.

“The album is full of high energy, earnest folk music, coupled with darker-tinged gothic folk” – EXCLAIM! MAGAZINE

The Strumbellas’ 2012 JUNO nominated debut album, My Father And The Hunter, offers a beautiful, harmonious dichotomy between melancholy heartbreak and blow-the-barn-doors-off spunk. The album, produced by Cone McCaslin and recorded at Blue Rodeo’s coveted Woodshed Studio, is the harvest of talented friends, some whisky and a few rounds of euchre. Harmonies, stomps, hollers, claps and gang vocals unabashedly abound as the songs weave compelling stories throughout the entire album. Check out the mini-doc for The Bird That Follows Me in-studio recording here.

“It takes something special to make a room shaped something like a laundry chute, feel like a theatre. The Strumbellas are a band that seems to know what that special quality is, because from their first song to their last, they transformed the small Railway Club into a blazing amphitheatre” – VANCOUVERWEEKLY.COM

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