(Indie / Rock / Alternative) The Silver Hearts - Play Rain Dogs - 2005, FLAC (tracks), lossless

The Silver Hearts are a large musical ensemble from Peterborough, Ontario. The band is a collection of talented and seasoned musicians playing a dizzying array of instruments including piano, guitars, horns, strings, accordion, theremin and percussion. The band plays mostly original music and features several singers. Currently ranging from 8-10 members, we have played countless concerts and festivals across Canada, including the Winnipeg Folk Festival, Calgary Folk Festival, Vancouver Folk Festival, Toronto Harbourfront Centre, Peterborough Folk Festival, Ottawa Bluesfest, Mariposa, Toronto Jazz Festival, Canadian Music Week, Pop Montreal, NXNE and Mariposa-in-the-City. The band has recorded five albums and received repeated acclaim for our memorable live performances. The band has been the subject of numerous documentaries and articles in national newspapers and music magazines. Our album “No Place” received CBC Bandwidth’s Album of the Year AND garnered the same radio show’s Live Performance of the Year. The Silver Hearts also won the 2006 Toronto Independent Music Award for Best Blues Artist.
2010 was a special year for The Silver Hearts. It was our 10th anniversary and we were one of only two Canadian acts to be invited to play at the prestigious Arabaki Festival in Sendai, Japan in May. In 2011, we are revisiting some old and forgotten material for a recording this coming fall. We want to continue playing interesting concerts and festivals and sharing our music and our show with the people!

A track-for-track interpretation of Tom Waits' ground-breaking record.
Prepare to be amazed as The Silver Hearts guide you through their interpretation of Tom Waits' Rain Dogs. Be mesmerized by bawdy burlesque and macabre cabaret. Visit carnivals, jailhouses, honky tonks and meet the characters who inhabit them. Please remain in your seats, ladies and gentlemen, this is a dark ride. Welcome to the absurd world of Rain Dogs through the eyes of The Silver Hearts.
Originally released in 1985, Waits' Rain Dogs plays like a lost photo album, depicting what Greil Marcus coined as the "Weird America." Each of Rain Dogs' 19 vignettes holds the same quality of a hanging painting: You can experience the piece in its entirety, or focus on one tiny corner for hours. Cemetery Polka, for example, can be a portrait of a grumpy group of uncles and aunties, or one could concentrate on Uncle Phil, his meds, and what the side effects may be. It all depends on what time of day you listen to it.
The songs on Rain Dogs are perfect by classic measures. Enhanced by the trademark Waits growl, and side of the road instrumentation, Rain Dogs is a record of characters and their tall tales. Two decades since its debut, Rain Dogs set a new bench mark for a generation of songwriters, storytellers, and performers.
Enter The Silver Hearts, a 12 piece brothel blues orchestra from the small town of Peterborough, Ontario. The Hearts started making word-of-mouth waves outside of their hometown, when they toured Canada in support of their first full length release, No Place.
Once No Place got passed from hand to hand, the record became an instant favourite among the Canadian music media. The gospel of The Silver Hearts traveled fast, gaining four & five star reviews. Not only was the music fantastic, but the visual of the band was like nothing else in the country.
A Silver Hearts show is inevitably on a tiny stage, with four chairs lined in the front, while the remaining eight members would stand for the performance. It looked pretty crowded up there.
The expected instrumentation is present; piano, guitars, drums, bass. This is not even half of the entire Hearts line up. Add to the mix a sousaphone player, a devoted harmonica player, accordion, trombone, and a weird looking antenna kind of thing (Theremin). Ladies and Gentlemen, The Silver Hearts.
The Silver Hearts do not rest on the laurels of their membership and bizarre instrumentation. A Hearts show is usually three hours long, with the whole band shouting, hollering, stomping and looking their audience right in the eye. This is the only show on earth where Harry Smith's Anthology of Folk Music meets with The Muppets.
Banbury Park Records approached The Silver Hearts to run a track-for-track interpretation of Rain Dogs in anticipation of the album's 20th anniversary. By this time, the band had added a sophomore critically acclaimed record to their canon, the Bob Lanois produced, Our Precious City. We were thrilled when they accepted our invitation and challenge - here was a band that had their own body of work to support, and now they were about reconstruct nineteen Tom Waits tracks.
Like a group of mad scientists, The Silver Hearts brought Rain Dogs to life in front of a live audience. The interpretation was track-for-track, but certainly not note for note.
The Rain Dogs premiere performance was at The Rivoli club in Toronto. Each member of The Hearts took a stand at the lead vocal mic, lending their own character to the song. Wyatt Burton gave a blistering Richard-hell-esque version of Big Black Mariah, and returned later in the set to de-rodstewarfy Downtown Train. Drummer, Jay Peters, in his army shorts and mohawk, gave the most heart wrenching version of the album's signature ballad, Time. Kelly Pineault delivered Diamonds & Gold, blurring the lines between a funeral march and a wedding dance. Jessie Pilgrim married the Velvets with Ronnettes as he lamented Hang Down Your Head.
A few songs from the first Rivoli performance are included on this record. You can hear the crowd playing off the band, charging beer bottles, and just going plain mad.
The Rain Dogs show was repeated later in the year at Toronto's Annex Theatre. This venue showed a different side of Waits' Rain Dogs. A grand, wide open wooden play house housing ghosts of ventriloquist dummies and Kurt Weill character. The theatre show gave a powerful platform to Trevor Davis' commanding version of the title track and Brian Sanderson's Vaudeville spitting of Cemetary Polka. For the album's closing, Anywhere I Lay My Head, the lazy brass filled the room, leaving the impression that The Silver hearts were the ducklings left behind by the Salvation Army.
At Banbury Park, we weren't sure about labeling The Silver Hearts version of Rain Dogs as a "tribute record." It's kind of like calling the London Philharmonic a cover band. This is a recording of an exceptional group playing well-crafted music from our generation. We hope that these songs stick with you anywhere you lay your head, for The Silver Hearts are Rain Dogs too."
-James Greenspan, Banbury Park Records, 2005.

THE SILVER HEARS ARE:
Charlie Glasspool--founder, songwriter, singer, piano player, trumpet player
Trevor Davis—founder, singer, acoustic guitar, songwriter
Wyatt Burton—founder, electric guitar, singer, songwriter
Patrick Walsh—harmonica, singer, songwriter
Tom Reader—trombone, singer
Kelly Pineault—accordion, singer, songwriter
Jay Peters--percussion
Brian Sanderson—sousaphone, violin, horns, singer
David Tough—banjo, singer, songwriter
Jesse Pilgrim—theremin
Gerry Gregg—bass