What started as a few friends playing live in the subway stations of Montreal to make a little extra cash soon rolled into the Aly Marguerite spearheaded project Old Time Honey. The band play old time New Orleans styled jazz music with a new age flair to it. The rest of the band includes the players: Tyler Parent, Valentina Piras and Olive Bestvater with guest appearances by Blanche Moisan Méthé and Suzanne Estirling.
The band’s latest record is called Love Songs for sick people and documents Marguerite’s struggles with love, abuse and mental illness. These are sensitive issues, but Marguerite and company treat each song with such a whole-hearted happiness that the record doesn’t come off as depressing but has the overall tone of someone who has at least an idea that wallowing is no real way to get through life’s predicaments. The opening track “The Fall” is saloon style player piano piece that sort of sets an opening tone and thematically ties in with their folk-jazz esthetic. From here we are ushered into the record’s second song, “Your Fool” which has a sort of burlesque style jazz feel to it. The female vocal harmonies are spot on as is the fiddle and banjo which is front and center. It’s derivative of this style of folk-jazz or New Orleans jazz or whatever one wants to call it. But if you’re into that style of music it certainly gets the job done. The same could be said of the next song “Blue” a funny and showy love song of sorts. The album picks up a little bit of flair with the off kilter, flamenco inspired “Ora so chie sei” a gem of a song both for its punchiness and its arrangements. I also found the gypsy-jazz styled piano lead instrumental “Alone” to be quite mesmerizing. “PTSD” calls on big things for a song with such a title. The next few songs leading to the album’s close, “My Good Side” and “Devil’s Daughter” are interchangeable with their jazz-folk banjo laden predecessors, which offers what the genre has become known for. Although Love Songs for sick people sticks to some of the standards of the genre, they showcase they are a group well-seasoned musicians.
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April 2024
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