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Top Roots Act Elliott Brood Friday Night at Bo’s

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5 minute read

For their fifth album,
Elliott Brood wanted to
break things.

We like this Elliot Brood video but don’t be fooled, this is no ukulele act.  They’re just having fun and making great music!

You are in for a treat on Friday night when Elliot Brood, one of Canada’s top Roots music acts, hit the stage at Bo’s Bar and Grill.

2008’s Mountain Meadows was shortlisted for the Polaris Prize, and the band’s last record, Days Into Years, won a 2011 Juno award for Roots Album of the Year, both co-produced with John Critchley. Now was the time to smash the precedents, break the mould. To withdraw to a farmhouse in Bath, Ontario, hammering out nine songs in two weeks.

For the first time, Elliott Brood decided to hand over the reins to a producer: Ian Blurton, who has helped make roaring records for the Weakerthans, Skydiggers and Cursed. And for the first time, the group’s two songwriters decided to mine the bare histories of their own lives: penning verses about the ends of relationships and the tests of adulthood, long drives, childhood retreating in a rear-view mirror. “Work and love will make a man out of you,” the Constantines sang; and so here is Elliott Brood’s Work and Love, their most personal album to date, the sound of a grown-up band searching their hearts for all they’ve lost and gained.

Casey Laforet, Mark Sasso and Stephen Pitkin recorded Work and Love in the cold spring of 2014, as the ice was coming apart on Lake Ontario. They deserted their families and holed up in the Tragically Hip‘s Bathhouse Studio, scarcely emerging – waking and playing and playing and playing, one song a day. The magic usually happened some time after midnight, when they were “just tired enough”. Blurton would come out and lure them into a new place: a different, even truer landscape. They called him “the Wizard”. Blurton the Wizard and engineer Nyles “the Mad Scientist” Spencer, filling the corners of songs with burred effects and tape loops. Elliott Brood had “played it safe” for four records, they claim: Blurton sharpened their sound, weathered and interrogated it, forced the three musicians to confront their own habits. And it made for a full-length that gestures toward the Hip and the Cons as much as it does to Richard Buckner and Whiskeytown. Adding dimension to select tracks on the album, the band is joined by Aaron Goldtein (City and Colour, Daniel Ramano) on Pedal Steel and John Dinsmore (Kathleen Edwards, Sarah Harmer) on bass (for “Each Other’s Kids”).

These songs are loud and quiet but mostly loud, and always reaching toward something. First loves, lost loves, fuck- ups and young men’s just desserts. Laforet has called Work and Love a “lament for youth”, but it’s also a eulogy for the moments that came just after, on the doorstep of manhood. It’s music of remembered abandon, new burdens, and those nights, years ago, when the moonlit fields seemed to go on forever. It’s Elliott Brood at their sheerest, facing forward and backward at the same time.

Formed in 2002, Elliott Brood (the name, a bastardized homage to the fem fatal character in the 1984 Baseball film The Natural) united teenage pals Sasso and Laforet over their grown-up love for Neil Young, The Band and the Flying Burrito Brothers. Pitkin was an accidental miracle: he fell into the group after working sound at one of their earliest concerts, offering to record their first EP. Tin Type was a college radio hit and soon this compact trio was making some big noise. Across five subsequent albums, sharing vocals and trading instruments – each of the band-members seems to play everything – Elliott Brood have become one of the premier acts in Canadian roots music. Work and Love is out October 21st, 2014 on Paper Bag Records.

Here’s a vintage piece of video from a performance at SXSW 09. This will be a great night of Canadian Roots music from one of our country’s finest.

 

To find out more about some of the great things going on at Bo’s Bar and Grill CLICK HERE.

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Donald Trump appoints Mel Gibson, Sylvester Stallone as special ambassadors to Hollywood

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From LifeSiteNews

In a surprise post on Truth Social, Trump announced, ‘It is my honor to announce Jon Voight, Mel Gibson, and Sylvester Stallone, to be Special Ambassadors to a great but very troubled place, Hollywood, California.’

In an unexpected move, U.S. President-elect Donald Trump has selected Mel Gibson, along with Sylvester Stallone and Jon Voight, to be “special ambassadors” to Hollywood in his next administration.

“It is my honor to announce Jon Voight, Mel Gibson, and Sylvester Stallone, to be Special Ambassadors to a great but very troubled place, Hollywood, California,” Trump announced on his social media platform Truth Social on Thursday.

Elaborating on his decision, Trump continued:

They will serve as Special Envoys to me for the purpose of bringing Hollywood, which has lost much business over the last four years to Foreign Countries, BACK—BIGGER, BETTER, AND STRONGER THAN EVER BEFORE!

These three very talented people will be my eyes and ears, and I will get done what they suggest. It will again be, like The United States of America itself, The Golden Age of Hollywood!

All three of the Hollywood stars are baptized Catholics and have, to varying degrees, professed and defended their beliefs both in God and in conservative principles more generally.

The appointments come just days after Gibson, who is well-known as an outspoken Catholic actor and director, appeared on the popular Joe Rogan Experience podcast, making headlines for defending the resurrection of Christtalking about the post-Vatican II crisis in the Catholic Church, and speaking candidly about the important role his faith has played in his life. Gibson’s house was also one of many to have burned down in the fires ravaging Los Angeles, describing it as a form of “purification.”

Similarly, Stallone, who talked about his return to Christianity in the early 2000s after drifting away in his younger years, was also in the news recently for saying for the first time publicly that he is the survivor of abortion.

As for Voight, he was raised Catholic and attended the Catholic University of America, and is well-known for holding conservative views and talking openly about his belief in God. He is also the father of famous actress Angelina Jolie.

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Censorship Industrial Complex

UNESCO’s New Mission: Train Influencers About Combatting Online “Misinformation”

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The UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) is now incorporating teaching influencers how to “fact check” into its activities.
UNESCO claims that influencers have become “primary sources of news and cultural information” around the world – which prompted it to carry out a survey into how these online personalities verify the “news” they present.

Related: World Leaders Sign New Censorship Declaration at UN Event While Secretary-General António Guterres Pushed for Increased Online Censorship

Citizens in UN member-countries may or may not be happy that this is how their taxpayer money funding the world organization is being spent these days. But UNESCO is not only conducting surveys; it is also developing a training course for said influencers (which are also interchangeably referred to as content creators in press releases).

It’s meant to teach them not only to “report misinformation, disinformation and hate speech” but also to collaborate with legacy media and these outlets’ journalists, in order to “amplify fact-based information.”

The survey, “Behind the screens,” was done together with researchers from the US Bowling Green State University. 500 influencers from 45 countries took part, and the key findings, UNESCO said, are that 63 percent of them “lack rigorous and systematic fact-checking protocols” – but also, that 73% said they “want to be trained.”

This UN agency also frames the results as showing that respondents are “struggling” with disinformation and hate speech and are “calling for more training.”

UNESCO is justifying its effort to teach influencers to “rigorously” check facts by referring to its media and information literacy mandate. The report laments that mainstream media has become “only the third most common source (36.9%) for content creators, after their own experience and their own research and interviews.”

It would seem content creators/influencers are driven by common sense, but UNESCO wants them to forge closer ties with journalists (specifically those from legacy, i.e., traditional media – UNESCO appears very eager to stress that multiple times.)

Related: United Nations Development Program Urges Governments to Push Digital ID

Under the guise of concern, the agency also essentially warns creators/influencers that they should be better aware of regulations and “international standards” that pertain to digital media – in order to avoid “legal uncertainty” that exposes them to “prosecution and conviction in some countries.”

And now, UNESCO and US-based Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas have launched a one-month course which is currently involving 9,000 people from 160 countries. The goal is to train them to “address disinformation and hate speech and provide them with a solid grounding in global human rights standards.”

The initiative looks like an attempt to get “traditional” journalists to influence the influencers, and try to prop up their outlets, that are experiencing an erosion in trust among their audiences.

If you’re tired of censorship and surveillance, subscribe to Reclaim The Net.

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