The Owl Acoustic Lounge hosted an international exhibition of folk, rock and heartfelt music on Sunday afternoon.
Folk Road Show graced the stage at The Owl, in the lounge’s first matinee show of the winter season.
The boisterous and honest foursome from Canada, Europe and New Zealand played a two-set show to an intimate crowd of around 30.
Touring their second album Gold, the band is making its way across Canada for the fourth time, since forming just four years ago.
The first set began with all four sharing vocal duties. Dom Fricot and Nicholas Petrowitch paired up as lead vocalists, with Olaf Caarls and Benjamin James Caldwell harmonized while playing bass and ukulele.
After several songs, Petrowitch retreated to the drum kit, while the others repeatedly swapped instruments as well as lead vocal duties.
The band’s versatility is a testament to the way they all met.
“Ben and Nick met while playing in Golden, B.C. together. Dom was touring and met both of them when he came through there to play a show and then Ben and I met when he came to Europe to tour with his other band,” explains Caarls. “We were this loose network of friends all connected by Ben and he had the idea to pair all of us songwriters up and form a band.”
The first set didn’t stray far from the bands’ folk roots, anchored by Dom’s memoriam of the death of his mother in What’s a Man and a two-part love song by Caarls titled Always the One.
After a short break, the band returned to the stage for a much faster and louder second set touching on all four members’ musical influences.
The differences in song-writing were clear throughout the second set with the band’s sound bordering more of a rock-and-roll vibe.
Crowd participation was abundant during a few songs of this set. Nearly all in attendance could be found clapping or singing along to the songs’ echo. What little real estate not taken up by chairs quickly became an impromptu dance floor.
After the end of the set, the band exited stage left and hid behind some empty chairs before emphatically returning for a one song encore, titled F*#% Your Cool.
The finale was a grand departure from everything the band played previous, taking on a grunge-rock feel.
“When we were rehearsing for this tour, we were playing in Nick’s parents’ garage and the sound was very garage rock,” Fricot says. “I had kicked around this idea of ‘f*#% your cool’ for a while… basically your brand of cool, your snobbery. Ben had a riff he had been sitting on for a while and we put it all together.”
The quartet has been no stranger to Lethbridge in the past, recording their debut self-titled album in the city and stopping through on every Canadian tour so far.
Steve Foord, owner of The Owl, says he met both Dom and Ben when they toured through Lethbridge in the past.
“They’re one of my favourite groups to ever come through here,” Foord says. “It’s a neat marriage of a bunch of folks who I all liked individually that came together and started playing together.”
Folk Road Show concludes their current tour at the end of the month in Oliver, B.C. Caarls says they hope to line up their next Canadian tour in 2019 with the warmer summer weather after heading over to Europe for a winter tour there.
