Good evening friends,

This is kind of like a part two of a post I wrote in July because I only gave you a little taste of AroarA’s first album In The Pines, but I grabbed a digital download a while back and thought… wow…

The concept behind the album is what captured me the most to be honest. If you’re interested in the arts then you’ll really enjoy this because the married Montreal duo, Ariel Engle and Andrew Whiteman (Broken Social Scene/Apostle of Hustle) have taken Alice Notley‘s avant-garde style of writing poetry and actually adapted her book of 14 poems into their 14 song album.

The album starts with song #14 (each track is titled a different number). As for the numerical titles I’m going to choose to love it because it’s different and I’ve never seen it before. I’ve seen bands that name albums after numbers or simply one song in the album, but never this… I digress. If you’d like my thoughts on this you can read my previous review here.

In between beginning and end there is use of guitars and keyboards with a foreign tone which makes everything sound more electric and compliments Ariel Engle’s harsh but angelic vocals. There are some upbeat moments and some serious funky vibes; this album is just as avant-garde as the poet it’s inspired by. In The Pines sure feels like a roller coaster of emotions due to each song being inspired by a different poem by Notley’s poem book, In The Pines, conveniently titled the same thing. It’s rough and raw for a reason though, the entire book of poems is written about drug treatment for Hepatitis C, and versus of the poems have been given a beat and sung beautifully by Engle.

It totally sounds crazy, but this team makes it work. They’ll be bootin’ around Southern Ontario and a bit more of Canada for a bit… do them a flavour and check ’em out.

Tour Itinerary