Express and Company

Peterborough, Ontario, is a place that has contributed more musicians than one might be aware. Some notable names include Emily Haines of Metric as well as Ronnie Hawkins. It’s also the home to a fairly new folk-rock band, perhaps hoping to bring more pride to “the gateway to the Kawarthas.” That band is Dylan Ireland’s project Express and Company.

With an album named after his home province, Ireland’s songwriting centres largely on “home” as a grand theme. There’s a song about feeling like the place he’s living isn’t home anymore. There’s another about looking for a new place to call his own. There’s yet another about someone he loves moving somewhere else.

These are all issues that we deal with on a daily basis. When can someone truly say they’re home? What makes a home, anyway?

Express and Company augment the traditional instrument setup with some fiddles, accordion and banjo. All pretty typical instruments in this genre, but they don’t dominate the songs as some other bands let them, and thus they mingle well with the guitars, bass and drums.

The “home” theme is driven home in the opener and one of the album’s standouts, “Carry Me Along.” With a powerful fiddle intro, Ireland (with some excellent backing vocals from Melissa Payne) begins singing lines like “I don’t think we plan on ever coming home.”

The album’s title track clearly means the most to Ireland, and it’s a nice, upbeat rootsy tribute to the province with the highest population in Canada. Home really stirs up memories of things you did and people you knew and this song might just do that for you.

The album gets a little more melancholy as it moves on through its tracks, hitting a note of real longing with “Montreal”: “When you get to Montreal, won’t you write me a long letter?” Ireland sings.

“Out by the Trees” picks up the energy a little bit, making it a clear singalong song with its use of repetition. And the album ends on a suitably quiet note with “Where Will You Bury Me?” - Michael Thomas

Hailing from the thriving musical community of Peterborough Ontario, Express and Company is the band led by singer-songwriter Dylan Ireland, and their debut album, Ontario, is one of the most instantly lovable genre entries I’ve heard in years. Listing roots-rich influences that know a thing or two about rapturous harmonizing (The Band , The Sadies) and counting Peterborough as a towering inspiration upon the band’s songs, Express and Company (Ireland on guitars/vocals, Melissa Payne on fiddle/vocals, Benj Rowland on banjo, Liam Wilson on bass and Joe Hay on drums) have crafted eight delightful songs with a fine-tuned ease capable of warming hearts, lifting spirits and encouraging community with none of the usual gimmickry that often tempts lesser bands.

On Ontario, Ireland is a loyal student of one of the most time-honored laws of great writing - whether of song or literary: write what you know. It just so happens, most acts of the genre (whether you wish to call it Americana, country-folk, country-rock, roots music or alt-country) embrace themes of love, love lost, family and the open road. However, the best of the bunch – and Express and Company deserve the honor of being included in the upper ranks with these eight songs – paint honest scenes that appeal to sentimentality without being hammy, tug heartstrings without yanking off the chain, and craft rural prose that doesn’t strike the listener as hopelessly antiquated. Yes, Ireland sings of birds overhead, green grass, families by trees, women in faded jeans, beer, wine, a bay and tall, tall trees, but it comes across loud and clear with a burning 21st Century heart and earnest, adult emotions.
Just as Ireland rises above the mistakes of lesser songwriters while treading similar terrain, Express and Company incorporate banjo, accordion and fiddle in with their guitars, bass and drums, but they consciously avoid the conceit of absent-mindedly resting on any of those genre staples as cheap gimmicks. They haven’t traded in their drum kit for an overreliance on banjo and overwrought verses as is fashionable these days. No, they use their instruments as organic parts of a whole, and Express and Company’s songs are richer than so many of their ubiquitous peers for that very reason.

With that said, it’s not far-fetched to imagine the millions of fans who adore Mumford and Sons’ Babel and Sigh No More finding plenty to love on Ontario... should they ever come across this little Canadian export. There’s no “Little Lion Man,” ‘Ho Hey,” or American Idol-belted “Home” here, but that doesn’t mean Express and Company couldn’t turn heads and get some airplay under the most serendipitous circumstances. To my ears, each of the eight songs of Ontario possess a caliber of superior harmonies, playing and songwriting that would make it a travesty should Express and Company never find Mumford-level airplay.

The truth is this little gem is sublimely melodic without beating its chest, elegant without being virtuosic, down-home without being a hoedown - country without being COUNTRY. In fact, in addition to the band’s stated influences, the act I conjure most when listening to Express and Company is the incomparable Whiskeytown (with a side of Jay Farrar for good measure). That comparison is so fitting and representative of the youthful excellence on display here that I’ll go on record to say Ontario is the finest front-to-back record of its kind I’ve heard since Whiskeytown’s Pneumonia. (For the record, even though Ryan Adam’s Heartbreaker – one of my all-time favorites is very much of the same genre, it sits it a different quadrant from Pneumonia and Ontario.)

From the rollicking chug of standout single “Carry Me Along,” powered by Ireland’s most Ryan Adams-esque vocal delivery alongside a phenomenal fiddle groove and the tight-as-hell bottom half, to the album’s poignant final line (If I die today / Where will you me bury me / under a tree or down by the bay? / Where will you bury me?), Ontario is heavy on heart and winsome hits. Two moments that most bring Ireland’s songwriting excellence and the band’s prodigious hooks to life come in the album’s title track and the penultimate beauty, “Out by the Trees.”

On the former, Ireland strums an acoustic guitar and chronicles the ups and downs of his hometown life as rooted in Ontario. The opening line “Another couple cold years and I’ll be done / with all this messing around in the northern sun” sets the scene, and the hook finds Ireland singing, “I’ve never been one for the telephone / unless you’re calling me up to tell me you don’t want me to go / Ontario” to exquisite effect.

“Out by the Trees” finds the band joyous from the outset, embracing the many of life’s simplest pleasures (family, music, spirits and sunshine) in total celebration of a modest life well-lived in a place called home. Ireland and Payne harmonize beautifully, singing “All my family / they sing harmony / they sing harmony out by the tree - Justin Wesley

Led by Dylan Ireland, the brand-new project called The Express & Co. features Melissa Payne on violin and backing vocals, Liam Wilson on bass, and Joe Hay on drums. The Express & Co. sound like an indie-rock equivalent to the Band, merging a knack for lyrical storytelling with unparalleled musicianship. I first had the pleasure of seeing this band in late August and was taken aback by how easy they made their first show look. Although most bands’ first show is an exercise in stutters and starts, The Express & Co look and sound like road-weary veterans, and are ready to tell you stories you’ve never heard before. - Nick Ferrio - Arthur Magazine

Led by Dylan Ireland, the brand-new project called The Express & Co. features Melissa Payne on violin and backing vocals, Liam Wilson on bass, and Joe Hay on drums. The Express & Co. sound like an indie-rock equivalent to the Band, merging a knack for lyrical storytelling with unparalleled musicianship. I first had the pleasure of seeing this band in late August and was taken aback by how easy they made their first show look. Although most bands’ first show is an exercise in stutters and starts, The Express & Co look and sound like road-weary veterans, and are ready to tell you stories you’ve never heard before. - Nick Ferrio - Arthur Magazine

Continuing the Top 5’s, this time we take a look at my Top 5 Peterborough and area bands to watch out for in 2012. All of the bands on this list have made an appearance on the 5 Minutes of New Rock in the past year. So with each one I won’t spend much time explaining why they are on the list. Click the link below each entry to hear more about the band and some of their music.

Express and Co. #2

Melissa Payne and Dylan Ireland, otherwise known as Express and Co., are tons of fun to watch and listen too. Their contemporary take on tradition roots music is going to continue to build them a devote following of fans. Even the most causal of music fan will be won over by their sound. I hope to see them hitting the road in 2012 and building their presence across the country. - Vince Bierworth The Wof 101.5FM