After over ten years of reviewing albums, there aren’t many artists that have been in the collection over that time that haven’t been randomly selected at least once. Yet that’s what happened for this next artist, who has been gracing the CD shelves since before I started the Odyssey with multiple records, but only just had their number called.
Disc 1666 is…Steel City Trawler
Artist: Luke Doucet and the White Falcon
Year of Release: 2010
What’s up with the Cover? White print on a black background, and a vaguely heraldic falcon in the centre.
This is the kind of simple design that makes for a good concert t-shirt. Bands that insist on putting their giant faces on their concert tees, please consider this approach instead.
How I Came To Know It: We heard Luke Doucet for the first time when he opened for Blue Rodeo somewhere in the mid-oughts. I forget the exact date, but a long time ago. We started buying his records at the same time, and by the time “Steel City Trawler” came out I was buying it just because it was the latest release.
How It Stacks Up: Not counting his later work in the band Whitehorse we have three of Luke Doucet’s solo albums. Of those three, “Steel City Trawler” comes in at #1.
Rating: 4 stars
Luke Doucet is ground zero for Canadian rock and roll. There’s something about made-in-Canada rock that makes you think vaguely of…folk. It isn’t folk, but it has a kind of folk vibe. Maybe its all those big rural spaces bands have to traverse in vans before becoming famous.
“Steel City Trawler” is Luke Doucet’s fourth and final album as a solo artist (he’s been Whitehorse with wife Melissa McLelland since then, the lucky bastard). It is his best work from that early period and shows his growth both as a singer and a songwriter. As for guitar, he’s always been good at that.
My favourite thing about “Steel City Trawler” is the range of styles Doucet incorporates into the record. “Hey Now” is a good example. It has an Archies fifties feel to it, mixed with a folksy guitar strum that has no business being in an Archies band. This is indie folk-rock at a time the genre was still finding its legs.
Doucet had found his legs long before, and there is a confidence in his songwriting and arrangements. It gives the album a bravado and helps it punch above its weight.
The album isn’t overly serious, and Doucet has plenty of fun as he ranges around the various facets of Canadiana rock. My favourite tune is “Dirty Dirty Blonde” which is a playful tune about a blonde woman who dies her hair as a brunette. Doucet turns all the tropes of blondes having more fun on their head. I love the riff on this tune, and the hook as well, but mostly I love how Doucet knows he’s onto something catchy and refuses to wait to launch into it. Forget lengthy A and B sections, he’s into the chorus within a couple of bars and back and forth we go from there. The song also has some delightfully “yoo hoo!” falsetto backing vocals which I strongly suspect are Doucet doing overdubs.
Showing his full Canadian credentials, Doucet also offers up a cover of the Gordon Lightfoot classic, “Sundown”. Having heard people genre-bust Gord in truly horrible, unconscionable ways (Stars on 54 covering “If You Could Read My Mind” being the worst of the worst) I was nervous about someone rocking up their Lightfoot. Fear not, gentle reader, Luke Doucet does Gord proud, with some smoky reverb reverie the Tragically Hip would be proud of, and a solid rock song constructed with the right amount of deference to the bones of the original.
Listening to as much new music as I do, it was a shock to the system to find this old friend on the CD shelf. I used to play this record a LOT, and revisiting it reminded me why. It is great stuff, and while I tend to reach for Whitehorse when I’m in the mood for Doucet’s guitar, “Steel City Trawler” is a reminder that he was already an established musician years before that whole scene ever happened.
Best tracks: Hey Now, Ballad of Ian Curtis, Sundown, Dirty Dirty Blonde, Love and a Steady Hand
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