The full moon guided me to the Spill last night. I was greeted by the sound of a Sustainability Studies grad student wailing sweet soulful 90’s pop covers on her guitar in her stocking covered feet. Next I found myself signing a petition not to stop the Northern Gateway Pipeline but to urge Canada to simply take a non-positive, neutral stance. I knew I had arrived at the folky reggae party and when the real ska sound began to play from the crackly PA, I knew that Elk the Moose would be on soon.
Gnarly shredders, folkies, hippy chicks, skankin’ scenesters, and antlers lined the long, bouncing acoustics of the skinny room. With a flick of his wrist, a skiff of the riff, front man Kyle Chivers grounded the scene by playing the more eerie than irie dub jam “Into the Wallows.” “Here’s hopin’ that Babylon will fall right down to the ground,” he cries out, the call ringing down the hall like a loon on a lake.
Chivers is like a Cree Bob Marley, with his guitar strap adorned with a medicine wheel and held together with a pan-African shoelace, he tells us that “humility is key.” The humble will never stumble, so it is unlikely that you’ll catch Kyle talking about his Presidential role within TUNA (Trent University Native Association), or his hour and a half of uniquely blissed out selections on his weekly Trent Radio program The One Drop (Fridays at 7pm on 92.7fm), named after the most famous of Carlton Barrett (of the Wailers) rim shot based reggae drum beats. It has got to be difficult when you have ladies yelling “Go Kyle!” at you.
The Bob Marley influence became more than a subtle layer to the show when they played the refreshingly rare “She’s Gone” from the man’s songbook to honour his birth. After the band shredded the selection, Kyle gave a sweet little “thanks” to Bob in the end.
After a drum and bass interlude with some funky ‘wikka wikka wik’ guitar stylings, the reverb was turned up for the scorchin’ “Something I Recognize.” Elk the Moose have material for many moods though: the rhythmic ruminations and gentle guitar licks bring it back down to foreground Kyle’s self reflexive ballads of beauty, pain, sorrow, and sweetness. “There’s a lot of pain to take in this life,” he sings from his heart, not his diaphragm. Within some of these deeply personal songs we find equally deep truths about politics, race, class, colonization, and identity: “Not just a Cree man, not just a white man, not just a Canadian... it’s about the love in my heart.”
At this point the cut on his finger he got chopping veggies at the Spoon is starting to annoy him so he says “I guess I’ll pick it up a little bit.” He looks like a mighty lion when he wails out “Rebel’s Cry,” and “Rainbow Crow” got everyone who wasn’t already chair groovin’, full on out onto the floor shufflin’, skankin’, weepin’, and a-wailin’ along to the very singable harmonies. The encore needed to mellow everyone out again, so Kyle played a selection from one of his heroes:Mason Jennings.
Be sure to keep an eye out for the next Elk the Moose show, and their forthcoming EP. You can listen to the concert on Trent Radio during the Anth co dub-Station, Friday February 17 at 4:00pm.
