Thursday, August 3
The Beige goes for a haunted vibe at St. Paul's Anglican Church
St. Paul's Anglican Church on Jervis gets a visit from the Exterminating Angel this weekend. Less cryptically, the Gothic Revival church plays host to acclaimed local band the Beige when it debuts its new album, El Angel Exterminador, on Saturday (January 23).
The moody, jazz-pop five-piece commandeered a similarly offbeat venue in 2006, celebrating the release of its first album, 01, at the H.R. MacMillan Space Centre. "01 was kind of a dream-like record," vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Rick Maddocks told the Straight. "So we thought it would be nice to do it at the planetarium using-not lasers, God forbid, but the starscape and constellations. And we played in the pitch black, which was a little difficult."
The band felt that St. Paul's was a good match for the more "unsettling" feel of El Angel Exterminador. "St Paul's is a really intimate, haunting venue, and we thought it would reflect the music pretty well," Maddocks said, adding that one of the few conditions set by the church was an early finish. Accordingly, the show begins at 7:30 p.m.
Ironically, the Beige toyed with the idea of not letting patrons depart at all-ever. The album title comes from a Luis Buñuel film in which a group of wealthy people find it impossible to leave a dinner party. "We thought of finding an upper-crust kind of venue and playing with that idea," Maddocks said, "but there were too many complications."
- Adrian Mack
« Back