The Wilderness Of Manitoba - When You Left The Fire

The Wilder­ness of Man­i­toba
When You Left The Fire
tinyO­GRE; 2011

Guest Con­trib­u­tor: Michael Dal­las Miller

Hap­pi­ness is won and lost on the bat­tle­field that can exist between room­mates. This has always been true. For Toronto’s folk ensem­ble and up-​town house­mates, The Wilder­ness of Man­i­toba, this bat­tle was fought for Hap­pi­ness and Suc­cess and Really Good Music. And when the smoked cleared and the bod­ies were counted, the last thing stand­ing was a debut full-​length called When You Left the Fire. And its glory marches on.

Every­thing about this album, every intri­cate har­mony and bit of wail­ing pedal steel, calmly calls for an appre­ci­a­tion of being together. When You Left the Fire tells the story of four men and a lovely young lady liv­ing and singing and play­ing music together while imag­in­ing them­selves out­side the con­fines of the Toronto city grid. The pop-​folk opener “Orono Park” builds a foun­da­tion of nat­ural sounds and riverbed rhythms, all with a unique level of depth and tex­ture unseen in most debut LPs. Fol­low­ing with “Novem­ber” and the waltz­ing lament “Her­mit,” the albums con­tin­ues to build a musi­cal cabin-​in-​the-​woods, just in time for the break­ing sun.

“Harsh Acres” con­tains a piv­otal line that almost says per­fectly why this album is great. After a few hop-​scotching verses, a dark cloud comes over the song and the band sings together, “We’re on fire. We’re on fire.” There is a strong sense that this band and this record are caught between two worlds — the nat­ural world and the mod­ern world. And it is that ten­sion to which every lis­tener can relate and that gives the record such a sub­lime tex­ture. It is this feel­ing that causes the band to wish for fire even though it may hurt, sim­ply because it comes from the earth and it can’t be con­trolled or cap­tured, much less blogged about. It is this desire for fire with the addi­tion of an urban base­ment stu­dio along­side the togeth­er­ness of the group itself that makes The Wilder­ness Of Man­i­toba more than another hip folk group with a grow­ing col­lec­tion of instruments.

Mean­der­ing tunes like “Sea Song,” the banjo-​led “In The Fam­ily,” and the build­ing and crash­ing bal­lad “”White Water,” will make a per­son believe that thought­ful music can make the world a lit­tle bit bet­ter place to be. Melissa Dalton’s hum­ble har­monies sound more like wind than con­ven­tion and play per­fectly with Scott Bowmeester’s vocals, Ste­fan Benjevic’s cello, banjo, and slide gui­tar, Wil Whitwham’s whirling keys, and Sean Lancaric’s unpre­dictable per­cus­sion. To per­fectly illus­trate the beau­ti­ful ten­sion between Nature and Moder­nity, the record fin­ishes with “Rever­ies En Couleurs,” a thir­teen minute post-​rock dance between acoustic sounds and sky­scraper dreams of the world Out There.

There are no typ­i­cal “hits” on When You Left the Fire, but that’s the beauty of the music cre­ated by The Wilder­ness Of Man­i­toba. As grand as these songs can be, their majesty and intrigue are as sim­ple and self-​contained as the rocks and streams about which the band sings.