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The Trews

Presented by 12th and Porter at 12th and Porter

December 5, 2011

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By the beginning of 2010, the Trews were feeling a little lost.

The band had been on an upwardly mobile streak since “Not Ready to Go” first came pumping out of Canadian radio back in 2003. They wasted no time piling success on top of success, watching their stature grow with multiple hit singles and an incomparable live show, courting exhaustion while they fanned out across the world and carved an eccentric and stubborn path through an industry demanding that they always “compete.”

The tensions were audible on 2008’s No Time for Later. The band’s third album was its most accomplished and satisfying. But as a formal exercise in broadening their songwriting chops while making a hermetically perfect studio recording – all while shoveling enough hits into the mouth of the beast – it emerged uptight and dark, maybe even a little claustrophobic. Not insignificantly, the second single was called “Paranoid Freak”.

As the first leg of touring wrapped up on their sidelong 2009 Acoustic – Friends & Total Strangers retrospective, for the first time in years the Trews found themselves facing time off and a blank canvas. As Colin MacDonald bluntly puts it, “We didn’t really know what to do.” The rest of the tour was months away. The band had forward momentum but nowhere to go.

Enter Gord Sinclair. The Tragically Hip bassist surfaced amidst this rare period of suspended animation and offered the Trews a little shelter at the Hip’s fabled Bathouse Recording Studio. He said they could cool their jets, make some demos. “And I’ll hang out for a couple days, drink some beer, and listen to what you guys have got going on,” he suggested. It sounded like a holiday to John-Angus MacDonald.

And so bassist Jack Syperek, drummer Sean Dalton, and the two MacDonald brothers faded into the bucolic splendor of Bath, Ontario, where they had so much fun and fucked so many consequences that a couple months later, the Trews had a new album – Hope and Ruin. Or maybe it should be called Order Out of Chaos.

Also performing: The Cadillac Black, Jason Childs, and A Thousand Horses