Silver Hearts
Peterborough, Ontario, Canada | Established. Jan 01, 2016
Music
Press
“Saturday’s Silver Hearts show at Tranzac – the band’s first Toronto show since they played the Dakota back in November – was a triumphantly fun whirlwind set to a packed crowd. So packed, in fact, that one audience member cleared away some tables for a dance floor.
Listening to the band’s albums, including No Place, Our Precious City and Dear Stranger (a 2006 collab with Andre Ethier), it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that the group are a musical freight train live, barrelling at you with their strange concoction of blues, folk, ragtime, jazz and Tin Pan Alley, peppered with creepy saw solos, and sometimes sounding (in the best possible way) like you are at a wake.
The group don’t take themselves too seriously – one of the songs they played was a soliloquy on the erotic life of Wookies, and by the end of the show the pianist/trumpet player was on the bar – but they aren’t just kitschy either: this is tear-in-your-beer bar music at its best.
Fronted by (the very tall) Trevor “Tiny” Davis, the Silver Hearts took turns singing the tunes, with accordionist Kelly Pineault singing Danny, and harmonica player Patrick Walsh taking lead on my personal favourite, Whiskey Talkin’.
And good news: the band is planning on making a new record (its first in eight years) this year.”
– Sarah Green, NOW Magazine Review, 2014 - NOW Magazine
“They meant to rehearse for a one-off gig, but instead taproom troubadour Andre Ethier and the Peterborough roots orchestra the Silver Hearts hungered down till a new album was born. It’s earthy, rough, tumble… the result wins the Honest Music blue ribbon for boozy laments and shambling rockers… Dear Stranger, you’re welcome any time.”
– Review of Dear Stranger by Brad Wheeler, The Globe and Mail - Globe & Mail
“I always knew there was something going on in Peterborough. Everyone I’ve ever met from that mid-Ontarian college town drinks way too much, makes tons of noise and has the ravenous look of circus folk in their eyes. God bless ’em every one.
“If all of the above generalizations ring true, then the Silver Hearts are Peterborough’s finest ambassadors. The three-year-old, thirteen-member outfit is a loud, jubilant celebration of everything beautiful and strange… First a fine point: Though the band may play with all the joy and enthusiasm of third graders, they are consummate musicians all.
“They just happen to be lucky enough to have a harmonica, accordion, dobro, thremin, fiddle, musical saw, sousaphone, trumpet, trombone, banjo, piano, electrical and acoustic guitars, a lap and pedal steel to play with – as well as a guitorgan. The vaudevillian cacophony is as brilliant and planned as it is boisterous and exhuberant.”
– Hour Montreal - Hour Montreal
The Silver Hearts ‘No Place’ voted best album of the year and the live CBC recorded show at Harbourfront voted best show of 2002 - CBC
Discography
Still working on that hot first release.
Photos
Feeling a bit camera shy
Bio
The Silver Hearts began as a duo of Charlie Glasspool and Trevor ‘Tiny’ Davis in early 2000. Within a few weeks they had evolved into a quintet. Ensconced as the house band at the ancient, ramshackle tavern The Montreal House, the band attracted old friends and grew into an anarchic horde of over a dozen players and singers by the time of their first album, Live at the Gordon Best (2001). Veterans of Peterborough’s folk, hard rock and experimental music scenes of the 1990s, the Hearts brought a dark, absurdist edge to their reworkings of blues, country and tin-pan-alley music, and tore into originals, standards and contemporary covers with equal ferocity and grim glee. Epic three-set shows turned the band into a powerhouse, loose-but-tight ensemble of archindividuals, and put the pressure on the band to master such arcane instruments as sousaphone and the musical saw and to always learn or write more timeless songs to fill out the set. The Silver Hearts reached their creative zenith on the albums No Place (2002; CBC Bandswidth album of the year) and Our Precious City (2004), adding another idiosyncratic chapter to the history of experimental folk music, and contributing a few otherworldly instrumentals, heartbreaking ballads and abstract dance numbers to the people’s songbook in the process. After releasing a full-album cover of Tom Waits’s Rain Dogs, the band went on hiatus, regrouping temporarily to make Dear Stranger (2006) with Andre Ethier. The band celebrated its tenth anniversary by resuming full activity and playing the Arabaki Rock Festival in Sendai, Japan in May 2010. They are currently working on an album of entirely original material - their first in nearly a decade.
Band Members
Links
