Spicy Tomato Music

Outside Thoughts by ManRayGun

Manraygun release their fourth studio album OUTSIDE THOUGHTS on Valentines Day, 2014. A release party will coincide with the band’s annual ‘Family Day Show’ at the Blue Chair Café on Saturday, February 15th. The show is a tradition for the band and has sold out 4 years in a row. Tickets are $15 with reservations recommended by calling 780.989.2861.

OUTSIDE THOUGHTS is Manraygun’s most patient collection of songs to date. The band used ‘time’ as a tool to its creative benefit... exploring variations, sculpting, and reflecting upon the music as it emerged from a handful of seemingly disparate lyrics. Themes began to unfold and eventually a loose narrative as well, although the band is quick to point out that “THIS IS NOT A CONCEPT ALBUM!”. But appearances are everything —with the band’s signature cinematic sound, an intriguing and mysterious prison-themed cover art, and the deliberate division of the songs into three “Acts”— one is left to wonder was the outcome a by-product of process or intent?

"After three rapid fire releases in as many years, I think the group needed to take a step back and let things unfold more organically. The songwriting for OUTSIDE THOUGHTS occurred over a three-year period. On Sunday afternoons we would get together to work on the new songs. Our sessions always started with strong coffee, followed by Italian sandwiches and chased by an afternoon beer. That was the routine. We worked on arrangements, practiced harmonies, figured out parts and argued about musical minutiae. Once the group hit the studio at the beginning of 2013, we were all pretty comfortable with where the songs were going and the recordings progressed quickly.” - Everett LaRoi

“From the start there was a collective desire to somehow weave the songs together through more than just the sound. Everyone in this band knows some times the best thing that we can do for a song is refrain from playing. OUTSIDE THOUGHTS is a collection of songs suggesting the reflective musings of an incarcerated soul.” – Steve Lenarduzzi

“When we stood back and took a good listen to what we had created —the title track arose from those ashes. It is a deceptively buoyant song with a veneer of good vibrations. But in typical Manraygun fashion, the music plays out like this: you’re walking along looking downward for the prettiest stones to collect, but when you pick one up... the underside is alive with creepy-crawlies scurrying to hide back in the muck.” – Dennis Lenarduzzi

"ManRayGun has been weaving one of the more interesting musical tapestries in this city over the last several years: the band is bent on exploring and twisting ideas into uncommon shapes, refusing to take the easy route with its songs. As the group prepares for its fourth annual show at the Blue Chair, singer/guitarist Everett LaRoi answered some questions about the band and its future."  read more...

"This debut album, released back in January, is a near-perfect collection. Her music is inescapably complex, bittersweet and catchy at the same time, with just enough experimentation to enrapture the listener. Her bevy of influences, from the end of a marriage to volunteering in Africa, is controlled and coalesced by Everett LaRoi, who recorded, mixed and produced the album, and who’s also been Alice’s guitar teacher since 2007. You can also catch the pair performing from time to time in Edmonton under the name Goldtop." 

manraygun.com

Manraygun has released three recordings, “TwilightSpeak” (2007), “Misfortune Telling” (2008), and “Everything is Temporary” (2009) to rave reviews and considerable airplay on college radio across Canada, CKUA and the CBC. The titles are available on iTunes.

Far from casual listening, the band’s most recent release, “Everything is Temporary” is an amalgam of folk, country-tinged rock, Alberta-centric Canadiana and a dash of New York art-school punk.

With five active songwriters, the band is presently in pre-production for it’s fourth full-length release —cabin-fevered stories of love, loss, outsiders and the salt-of-the earth truths that could only have been birthed on the prairies.

It may have taken close to two years for Alice Kos to finish her debut album You Missed It All, but this certainly wasn’t due to idleness or want for inspiration.

The 29-year-old, Edmonton- born singer-songwriter packed a lot of experiences into that time, including a four-month volunteer shift in Africa and the end of a five-year marriage to her high school sweetheart. Such events can’t help but mark a person. If her initial forays into songwriting showed

promise, the batch that tumbled

out during her life upheaval were kinetic with passion; because of this, You Missed It All is an elegiac debut that is suffused with regret, anger and tenderness.

Albums don’t just happen in a vacuum, however; Kos’s musical partner from the beginning has been Everett LaRoi (Idyl Tea, manraygun), her guitar teacher since 2007. The friendship that developed led to Kos showing her earliest songs to LaRoi. Eventually the two assembled a band of veterans (Tom Murray, bass; Mike Silverman, drums; Scott Zubot, violin), and began work on You Missed It All. The full-grown sound the five developed suited the melancholy nature of the album, with hymn-like organ drones seeping into ambient mutterings, clangorous, messy feedback rockers bumping against gentle acoustic reveries.

Idyl Tea - Song That's Not Finished Yet / The Unthology

There really are no rules in rock 'n' roll beyond the ones you impose on yourself.

If you've decided to take a break after putting in a great deal of touring and recording mileage there's no law that says your band has to call it quits. Especially when said band is Edmonton's Idyl Tea, who always saw their relationship as predicated as much on friendship as the business of music. The idea of friendship in rock 'n' roll is a romantic one that often doesn't bear scrutiny, but these groups do exist, and Idyl Tea's hiatus after a fruitful collaboration between 1984 and 1995 wasn't seen as the end of that friendship, much less their time in the music business.

From their beginnings as a respected band playing the Edmonton scene alongside such legendary acts as Jr. Gone Wild and SNFU to the later years signed to Attic Records, Idyl Tea accomplished a great deal. Three cross-country (and countless regional) tours as an indie act, two EPs (when releasing an indie EP was a big deal) and even a cassette single, one major label album plus the patronage of MuchMusic, who gave the fledging group support when they most needed it. That they called a halt due to the sort of life changes expected of three men who started playing together in their late teens and were now knocking on thirty shouldn't come as a surprise.