The pandemic has changed pretty much everything, including our interpersonal relationships. Thanks to Zoom meetings, we now spend more time with people half-way across the continent than we do with our next door neighbours and our old groups of friends and colleagues. That's actually eliminated certain borders and boundaries. We're working from anywhere, making friends from anywhere. Each day I work with people from Austin, Texas, London, England and P.E.I., and the two friends I currently talk to the most are in Montreal and Halifax.
Peterborough, ON.'s The Weber Brothers are about as organic as you can get in roots rock. They were founded on the spirit of The Band's The Last Waltz, musical colleagues and soul mates playing together for the love of the music, and that's how they've made their records, banding and bonding together. But Covid screwed with that, leaving them without gigs or audiences, and they couldn't even hang out with their band.
Unwilling and unable to stop making music, instead of being defeated by Covid instead took inspiration from the new Zoom reality. They got in touch with their oldest music pal, Timothy Bracken, from their old hometown of Westminster, MD. The trio began playing together in 1992, when they were still riding the bus to junior high. They formed a band, played in the basement, got some gigs, and spent their teen years making music. They never lost touch, and when split-screens became all the rage last spring, they had some fun making a song together. Then it was another and another, and soon it was an album, the Webers sending parts to Bracken in Baltimore and vice versa via Dropbox.
Since they shared musical DNA, it was painless and largely seamless, each of them trusting the other's instincts. They swapped instruments and roles, each one taking a share of lead vocals. And like other Weber projects, this turned into an adventure of styles and influences, the players showing they understand all the roots, all the sounds, all the engineering and production behind all the great rock 'n' roll. They also know how to make a great album; you need to mix up the moods, change the tempos, put in some surprises and keep the quality up on each song.
And that's what's here: Ballads, rockers, pop tunes, folk, a dirty electric blues, you just don't know what kind of song or instrument is going to come at you at any moment. By the third song though, you know whatever it is, you're going to like it. It helps that the three of them sound like they're having a ball making these tracks. "Listen" is full of Gene Clark-era Byrds pop, with its sitar sounds and close harmony vocals. "I Don't Know Why" has the joy, and the sound, of A Hard Day's Night Beatles (okay, it's a dead ringer for "Any Time At All"). The title cut is a dreamy psyche epic, and opener "Schoolin'" is a strutting country blues that Levon himself would have loved to jam on.
Look, I'm all for traditions and old-fashioned music values, and I believe in my heart that there's no better music than that created by players all on one stage or studio floor. But there's something even more powerful than that. It's the magic connection between certain musicians that time and distance can't break down.
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