PROOF OF GHOSTS PLAY THE SILVER DOLLAR (486 SPADINA AV) MAR 7, 1AM.
On a passing listen this album sounds like your typical banjo-laden
folk-rock, but the path it treads is too shadowed and remote for that.
The voice of central spectre Steve Shoe is old before its time — like
Neil Young’s — and the production fittingly swathes it in
near-psychedelic levels of fuzzy fog. I wish it were shorter — the
world needed two parts of “Oshawa” about as much as it yearns for a
duplicate of the town itself. Still, the laments are always
unpredictable. When, say, the otherworldly synth line on “Saturday
Night in the Summertime” appears, it’s disquieting and arresting, as if
layers of moss had been scraped away to reveal something old and dead
underneath.