The Barr Brothers

***PARTIAL STANDING ROOM ONLY*** There will be very limited seating at this event, only 40 chairs will be set up in the hall and the rest will be standing room, please email us at neatmusicandcoffee@gmail.com to secure a seat Dinner is not included with ticket price. Unfortunately we cannot refund tickets unless we or the artist cancel the show, but please check in with us as many times we have a waiting list of guests who want to come to the show and could not get tickets. We can get you in contact with them!! Show Time is 8pm. You can select "Ticket Only" which ensures you are on the guest list for the show only, you can arrive anytime after 7pm. Alternatively you can use the drop down menu to select "Ticket with Dinner Reservation", this option secures a table for dinning that night and also ensures you are on the guest list for the show. For dinner you are welcome anytime in between 530 and 645, if you are interested in the back end specials it is always wise to show up and 6 or before since they tend to sell out first. Our seated shows are not assigned seating, the benefit of joining us for dinner allows you to get first dibs on seating! We have started to present Standing Room Only and Partially Seated shows as well. Our standing room shows will be identified with "STO" in the event description, our partially seated shows will be identified with "PSTO" in the event description. Events with no identifier are seated shows. neatmusicandcoffee@gmail.com 613-433-9960 Come have fun at Neat! THE BARR BROTHERS PLAY VIDEO - IT CAME TO ME PLAY VIDEO - HALF CRAZY PLAY VIDEO - LORD, I JUST CAN'T KEEP FROM CRYING The Barr Brothers To begin their third album, The Barr Brothers weren't writing any songs. For the first time, the distractions, no preconceptions. No friends or strangers, label reps or engineers, no cellphone trills or city sound. No partners. No children. Not even any notebooks of lyrics - verses, choruses, chords preconsidered and plotted out. For the first time the band's three members - namesake siblings Brad and Andrew Barr, harpist Sarah Pagé - would go songless into studio. Empty-handed, whole-hearted, down miles of snowy road to a cabin on a frozen lake, a place full of windows and microphones and starlight and sunshine, with amplifiers in the bedrooms, their volumes turned up loud. They spent a whole week playing. These were improvisations lasting hours at a time - noons and midnights, dusks and dawns, a chance to remember who they were and who they were becoming. Some of this was groove: patterns inspired by India, West Africa and 808 drum machines, deeper and heavier than what they'd tried before. Some of it came from Pagé's new inventions: humbuckers, Kleenex-box signal-splitters, hacks to make her harp into a versatile, sub-bass-booming noisemaker. But there was also plain old guitar - songs opened up by that big electric sound. Brad had asked, "How do we make music when there is no song?" The answer was this roaming, three-dimensional music, filled with nostalgia and experiments and rolling space, found on the fringes of Saint Zenon, Québec (pop. 1,1150). The stakes felt high. The success of 2014's Sleeping Operator had taken the band from Montreal to Nashville to Milan, from the Newport Folk Festival to The Late Show with David Letterman. By now everyone knew the story of the American brothers who had decamped for Canada; how they had discovered Pagé by hearing her harp through a shared apartment wall. LP3 would be brought into a world where Trump was president. Where both Barrs were fathers. And where thousands of fans were waiting for the band's next volley. Queens of the Breakers was born in three sessions at that cabin in the country, a place called the Wild Studio. Brad took those first free sounds and distilled them into tidal, seeking songs - stories of the way lovers and companions fall in and out of sync. More recording followed at Studio Mixart, in Montreal, and at the group's own boiler-room of a practice space. The result is this: 11 tracks of blazing courage and failing resolve; music suffused with low grooves and darting melodies, subtle breakages, the Barr Brothers' wide-open sense of the blues. Some of this album takes place in the past. "Song That I Heard", with its memories of Brad's arrival in Montreal, the different ways he fell in love. Or Queens' title track, which revisits the Barrs' misspent youth - a gang of friends rambling through Rhode Island mansions, dressed in their mothers' dresses, wreaking small havocs. How many of our old friends do we still see? How many of those dreams came true? At times the sound's all twinkling, the score for a lost John Hughes film; at other times it's whetted, searching, like the stuff of Lhasa de Sela or Led Zeppelin's III. The rawest reminder of Queens' first jams appears on "Kompromat", which bristles with rattle and riff, Pagé's kora-like harp. "I think we're in love with your abuse," Brad snarls at his homeland. "You got one hand on the driver's wheel / in the other a noose." On Queens of the Breakers' magnificent opening cut, "Defibrillation", the reckoning is softer - but not necessarily kinder. "Defibrillation" was built atop a drumbeat, something Andrew found at a hospital one Christmas night. Sitting with his mother, holding her hand - she had fallen, needed stitches - he observed a pair of heart monitors, each connected to a different, unseen person's pulse. They were beating together, then not, and not: parting and crisscrossing. He tried to memorize the pattern. Later, at home, he learned to play it on bass-drum and snare and tom. When he sent the beat to his brother, Brad sent back the beginnings of this: a song like a letter from a father to his son. "I just thought I'd save you some time," he offers, "straighten it out here / make it rhyme." Still, the singer's not peddling fake wisdom . For all its striving, "Defibrillation" is a letter without answers, a gesture into space, a lament for the dither that exists between every human being. It's this tension, this dither, that lives at the centre of Queens of the Breakers. Three players - friends, comrades, music-makers, all of them trying to play in sync. Three bandmates - each of them fumbling, remembering, trying to invent something together. A band still playing, even occasionally reimagining, their rock'n'roll.