If you’ve been waiting for just the right combination of classical music and pop to come along, you’re in luck.
Plumes, a Montreal five-piece, plays Wild Flour Bakery in Banff, May 31 at 7:30 p.m.
Plumes, originally founded as Flotilla by Veronica Charnley (vocals, guitar), hubby Geof Holbrook (guitar) and Eveline Gregoire-Rousseau (harp), will be joined by Louise Campbell (clarinet) and Preston Beebe (percussion). Plumes is a hybrid classical/pop blend with indie rock credentials.
For Charnley, the band’s western tour from Saskatoon to Victoria offers a chance to reconnect with Banff, where she enjoyed a Banff Centre residency in 2009.
“I’m really excited about being back there. I had a self-directed songwriting residencey there, with a performance at the end. I wrote a lot of songs and some of the ones we’re playing on this tour were written there (“Kalimba Mountain Song” among them). I found the mountains really inspiring and I mention them in song.”
The three began performing as Flotilla in 2004 and released the debut album Disaster Poetry, in 2006. In 2009, the band released One Hundred Words for Water, which became the fourth most played album on Canadian community/campus radio.
As Flotilla, the trio performed nationally at festivals and made New York a second home while Holbrook studied at Columbia.
In 2011, though, the trio decided to move in a new direction and decided a new name would be in keeping with the change.
“We were aiming for a crossover between pop and classical,” said Charnley. “In New York, there’s a big movement with it. Eveline plays with the Montreal Symphony Orchestra, Geof has a doctorate from Columbia in composition Everyone but me is classically trained.
Charnley, though, is the songwriter of the group, and the main vocalist. “My songs aren’t really genre-specific,” she said, “they’re just life experiences of mine. Geof does most of the arrangement and players always have room to improvise.
“Geof and I got together in 2004, about the same time we started doing music, then got married in 2008.”
The band’s tour is to support its latest, self-titled, 10-track album. Kicking off with a chamber music festival in Saskatoon, where the band will offer up some Bartok, Luciano Berio and Arvo Pärt. Things will move toward the pop side, though, as Plumes continues westward to the coast playing clubs.
Recently arriving back in Canada from an eight-month songwriting stint in Paris, “where people are excited to hear you’re in a band from Canada,” Charnley said her stint in the City of Light and in Europe was one to remember and one which will generate more material.
“We had a few really magical shows there,” she said. “On one university campus we followed a very loud band. We were quite quiet and I was a little worried, but people were right there with us and the promoter came out with Jager shots for everybody. It was a special night in Mainz (Germany).”
Charnley studied creative writing at Concordia University and said she, “writes outside my comfort zone. My songs are about my life, but it’s not like they’re from my diary.”
“Messy Love” combines a melody about the unhappy marriage of Charnley’s aunt with some blistering shards of viola courtesy of Pemi Paull, founder of the postmodern chamber ensemble, Warhol Dervish. “The Holdup” is an ethereal love song inspired by witnessing an actual hold-up in New Jersey while “Away From Home” is a catchy number inspired by Charnley and Holbrook’s decade of moves from Montreal to New York to Guelph to Paris… so far.
Tickets for Plumes are $10 and available at the door.
