Krief and the Receivers

There’s is a lovely and excellent little venue here in Montreal called O Patro Vys; where the stage faces the sound board in just such a way it can make soundlovers love again, so I’m told. It’s upstairs-sister to the equally odd, awesome and ostrich-eyed Bily Kun, on Mount Royal west of St. Denis. Last week I mosey’d in there to see my lovely buddies the Receivers and to finally get to see Patrick Krief do his solo thing after many years of Dears’ing and, more recently, reading as other Indyish ed’s fall hard for him. It also turned out to be O Patro Vys’s Birthday. Aw.

Receivers pull together with crackles and driving sweetness and smiles. The edges honed, a mutual musical love is settling between them, and when the conditions are right as they were that night they are lifting into moving reveries which are undergirded, not bored or diminished, by the musicians’ evident expertise. Adorable, dreamy, pop-eyed pop by some of the best studio musicians in town, fronted by a gem of a gal, my pal Marzinotto.

For Those About to Love… We Salut You played next and seeeeemed sincere… but like they were maybe trying to do too much all at once. I think they said it was their first show though, so in that case, congrats! I bopped.

Krief, on the other hand, is sincerity left spent on the floor. The excellent, rare match of wild skill and happy-go-lucky lack of pretense ooozes from his tunes.

Between his incendiary, joyful guitar; the laughing intense kid-like engagement he has with the other musicians on stage; his dad beaming and telling stories ’bout “his baby;” plus the way he blushed when I told him what his dad had been whispering to me, Krief may be the most sincere musician in Montreal.

Sort of kidding and anec-doting here, but the music he makes does have a sound that walks this phantom line between being for the musician’s pleasure versus being for the audience, and staying in that sweetspot is generous and joyful: it triggers love and defines the difference between art and other things, I think. And I hope Krief always keeps it.