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| James Irwin, Euro Tour and Music Video  Canadian Artist James Irwin will be on tour in europe from May 14 to May 30 2015. He will be crossing France and Italy.He also just released, in collaboration with italian magazine Indie-Eye a Music Video for his song "Did You Hear Who Shot Sam?" directed by Hannah Fleet. James Irwin's 2nd album Unreal signals a departure from the shuffling, lilting, acoustic sou of his 2012 debut Western Transport. While Western Transport delivered ten succinct folk songs almost whispered in your ear via blurry acoustic arrangements, Unreal is all about rubbery hooks, soap box vocals, and slow groove, with the nightclub vibes of a weird dream. The feel of Unreal is chilly and uneasy, melancholic but with tinges of absurdity and humour. The odd lyric, a saxophone, a French horn line seem to wink at you out of the fog. While embracing current pop fascinations like 80s synth pop it never slides into kitsch or irony. With songs like Everything Passed Me By and Face Value Irwin finds a form that supports a wilder, more ephemeral kind of sincerity. While tracks like Siberia/China and A Wave is a Wild Thing hinge on calm precision, space, and stillness, these dance floor songs carry urgency and spontaneity. The lyrics seem like monologues rattled off on a whim. The arrangements for Unreal were built and rebuilt layer by layer with Irwin either playing and engineering most everything, bit by tiny bit, or laying down bed tracks with his former band The Moment. It's a fiction, a studio-as-instrument album through and through, where the tired line between synthetic and organic is beside the point. It oscillates between maximal and minimal with choral layers of harmonies and synths a la Spiritualized giving way to sparse moments of focus and simplicity that channel Bill Callahan. Irwin is a songwriter putting on hats, narrating each song's imaginary landscape from a different perspective. He sounds at times like a crankier Paul Simon, a deflowered Sam Cooke, or a less cryptic Cass McCombs... JAMES IRWIN EUROPEAN TOUR DATES: May 14 | Paris - FR | Le Pop In (W/ The Still Tide) May 15 | Brest - FR | Cube à Ressort May 19 | Bordeaux - FR | TBA (W/ Galen Hartley) May 20 | Montpelier - FR | Atelier -1 (W/ Galen Hartley) May 21 | Lyon - FR | Kraspek Myzik (W/ Beauty Camp) May 22 | Dijon - FR | House Show May 23 | Brescia - IT | Home General Store May 24 | Padua - IT | TBA May 26 | Pordenone - IT | Amici di Bambi May 28 | Grenoble - FR | Bauhaus Bar (W/ Beauty Camp) May 30 | Nancy - FR | Off Kultur / Home Sweet Home Session May 31 | Paris - FR | House Show write your comments about the article :: © 2015 Jazz News :: home page |