Review: Timber Timbre brought their cinematic doom-rock to a sold-out Le National

Timber Timbre
Le National
September 10, 2015
Note: Photographers were not admitted to this show. 

What does a Timber Timbre album sound like?

Forget musical technicalities, here’s how I would describe it: imagine you’re in a creaking house, in an empty field. Outside there is a rusty Ford whose mechanical guts have been ripped out. Inside there is darkness and stillness. You wander in. You pause in front of a closet whose doorknob rusts off in your hands, and you drag out the dusty, half-mummified body that had been concealed inside. You lean and press your ear to the hole where its mouth once was.

“Tell me why you were murdered. In song, please.”

Macabre? Yes. The band’s official website describes it as “connecting arid western to plodding horror with the pomp of Hollywood phantasm”. Their last two albums, Hot Dreams and Creep On Creepin’ On, are packed with the slow-building dread of a Stanley Kubrick movie. Set to a jolting drumbeat and overlaid with piano notes, lead singer Taylor Kirk croaks out lines like: “We heard crimes often and softly/ a mystery mist, new systems shift/ things recognized from television channels.” Although Canadian in origin, the band exploits the space and tone of mid-century gothic Americana. Kirk has mentioned in interviews that Hot Dreams was inspired by a trip to the Grand Canyon. Certainly the lyrics bring to mind bad things in muggy heat, cracked cement and polyester carpeting, sweating through heavy funeral suits. If I were a director, I would play it over an establishing shot of a seedy motel at night.

Live at Le National, Timber Timbre gives off a different energy. Gothic folk gets a new gloss – more rock n’ roll, more revitalised. On stage, the saxophonist shines, weaving in and out between the guitars with a Rolling Stones-esque confidence. No longer a corpse crooning out his secrets, this is a dead man celebrating his last night on Earth. This time, you ask: “Tell me why you will get murdered.”And then suddenly a haunting synth strikes up, the saxophone begins wailing, and the skeleton fingers out a flourish of bluesy chords.

Taylor Kirk looks like a mad country preacher giving a sermon. He wears a creased leather vest that he takes off later because it was too hot. He drinks from a green beer bottle that glows under the stage light. When he moves, he moves in short, abortive jerks: he stretches out his hands, swivels his knees, gestures continuously at the sound techs to turn the volume up, higher, higher. “I’m deaf, I can’t hear anything,” he says at one point. The audience laughs along.

The staging has no backdrop and uses only lighting. Directed by Kirk’s eerie growl, it’s still enough to transport us somewhere else, somewhere more rural and wild. For the background, someone chose mottled patterns that resemble hunting camo, or ripples in puddles, or moths. As Timber Timbre blasts past lines like “These are coarse imaginings/ Where cannibal inspectors thrive/ On delirious ramblings,” you can’t help but picture murky pools, dead things in water. Even when it reverts to simpler area lighting or spotlights, the colours maintain the atmosphere. The red looks like shabby strip clubs. The blue like twilight. Spotlights made me think of smashed windows in attics.

The audience drank it all up. Le National was packed, and in the dark strangers swayed next to strangers.

But here’s what I liked best about the show: despite the folk-gothic material, Timber Timbre doesn’t take itself too seriously. During one of the last songs, someone in the audience tried to whistle and failed, producing only an extended spluttering sound that sailed embarrassingly over Kirk’s low, melancholy guitar. Nonplussed, he kept strumming as he waited for the crowd’s giggling to die down.

“You’re fired,” he deadpanned, before launching back into a song about death and magic and mountains.

But when the audience broke our silence once again, laughing and cheering, he smiled.

Timber Timbre play Le National on September 12. Tickets are available here.