with support from LA FORCE
Gates: 6:30pm
Doors: 7:30pm
Show: 8:00pm
Reserved Seating: $45
Standing Room: $30
Tickets are non-refundable and non-transferrable. Read our Ticket Policy.
Barnburner Pre-Sale:
Tue 6/15 10am
Public On-Sale:
Fri 6/18 10am
LEIF VOLLEBEKK
New Ways is a new album by Montreal’s Leif Vollebekk, his hotly anticipated follow-up to the Polaris Prize finalist Twin Solitude. It’s a record that lives between the kick and the snare, in that instant of feeling before the backbeat.
“The way that it was is the way it should be,” Vollebekk sings on “Phaedrus”—a line that’s a memory and a wish. New Ways is that too: the sound of desire in its unfolding. Two years ago, things were changing so fast, and the songwriter didn’t want to forget. “I often think of Leonard Cohen’s line, ‘I hope you’re keeping some kind of record,’” he says. “So I did.” It was like he was pretending you can compose a soundtrack to your own life (which perhaps you can).
In the end, New Ways is a document of everything Vollebekk felt, the way each moment arrived and moved through him. Whereas Twin Solitude was about self-reflection, New Ways is about engaging and changing, touching and being touched. It’s a physical record, with louder and tighter grooves, and the rawest lyrics the musician has ever recorded. A portrait of beauty, desire, longing, risk, remembrance—without an instant of regret. “She’s my woman and she loved me so fine,” goes the chorus to one tune. “She’ll never be back.”
“Anything that I wouldn’t ever want to tell anyone—I just put it on the record,” Vollebekk says: tenderness and violence, sex and rebirth, Plato and Julie Delpy. A story told through details—“the sun through my eyelids,” “a sign on the highway covered in rain.” The songs came fast—recorded a week here, a week there, initially just Leif and a drummer. “After each take, we’d go into the control room and listen back and see how it felt,” he says. “If it didn’t feel right we’d do it again, or switch from piano to guitar, or change the drum sound, or the microphones.” Once they got it, he’d move on. Never at rest, always in movement: 10 different tracks for 10 states of motion—each with its own pulse, drawing the listener in.
There’s the heat of the night and the cool blue of morning, hints of Prince and Bill Withers, the limbo of a lover’s transatlantic flight. “Hot Tears” is all hot-blooded memory. “Apalachee Plain” is a clamorous goodbye. “I’m Not Your Lover” would be a perfect love-song were it not for its chorus—a song that lets two opposites be true at once. “That last record I made for me,” Vollebekk admits. “This one is for someone else.”
Imagine the singer at the end of last September, performing at midnight in one of Montreal’s rarest and most intimate venues—a century-old porno theatre called Cinema L’Amour, a temple to the true and the carnal. He was sitting at a piano. The chords were moving like shadows on a wall. “She’s my woman and she loved me so fine!” Leif cried, singing to the rafters. “She’ll never be back.”
When everything was finally over—when the mixes were perfect and the masters cued up—Leif says listening to the album was like re-watching a film. “Now I knew what was going to happen,” he remembers. “Now the moments didn’t feel fleeting—they felt eternal, almost fated. The songs spoke to me differently, but they hadn’t changed. I just heard them in New Ways.”
LA FORCE
La Force is Ariel Engle, vocalist and newest member of Broken Social Scene. The music of La Force is nocturnal electronic pop, featuring Engle's enchanting vocals over dynamic production.Her presence resounds throughout Broken Social Scene’s 2017 album, Hug Of Thunder, lending fluid, commanding lead vocals to the oblique anthem “Stay Happy” and the soaring "Gonna Get Better," leaving an indelible mark on the collective’s rousing performances. Stepping up to the role first helmed by the immeasurable talents Leslie Feist, Emily Haines (of Metric), and Amy Millan (of Stars), Engle brings La Force's singularity to the familial energy of Broken Social Scene.Born out of the culmination of AroarA – her musical project with husband and Broken Social Scene bandmate Andrew Whiteman – La Force is a deep reflection on the magic and dismantlement of motherhood; the never-ending tightrope walk of life, and death; and the re-discovery of self.First single “You Amaze Me” layers seductive melodies over restrained electronics. A love song to Whiteman, “You Amaze Me” defines the tender but powerful essence of La Force. Shaped with Warren Spicer of Plants & Animals, and featuring members of Suuns, Patrick Watson, and Broken Social Scene, "You Amaze Me" crystallizes the reverent, spiritual tone of Engle's musical being.Borrowing its identity from the tarot card representing Strength, La Force captures the bold creative spirit of an undeniable voice.