The thing is, nobody likes jam bands

Madeleine Hayles
Contributer
“I guess I think that the singer-songwriter-slash-folky thing is just sort of boring,” said Nathan Lawr, frontman of Minotaurs. “I felt I’d sort of exhausted it.”
Unfortunately, Lawr’s valiant attempt to shake off the folk genre falls a little flat.
Lawr’s newest album, The Thing, is a definite genre switch. As a drummer for a num- ber of the folksiest of Canadian acts, including the Fembots, Feist and Jim Guthrie, Lawr is pretty familiar with the strumming, softly sung, guitar-heavy genre.
Cutting-and-running from the genre that Canadian music journalists have shown an almost terrifying appetite for is a nice idea. There was a time when I was quite fond of the notion of flannel-shirted men fondly caressing acoustic guitars in wooded settings, their fulsome beards tousled by the gentle winds of the forest, but I think it’s safe to say – for me, anyway – this image has lost its lustre.
Minotaurs’ sophomore album is a Fela Kuti-inspired shoutout to the afrobeat genre, full of horns, funk and socially conscious lyrics. The band itself is a mishmash of laudable Canadian musicians with whom Lawr has collaborated before, including members of bands like Holy Fuck, the Hylozoists and the Constantines.
Lawr himself claims elements of funk, jazz and afrobeat have always invaded his music, but this time around, he went further in that direction.
“The other forays into that world before were sort of tempered by the folky thing, but I feel like it’s the opposite this time,” he said.
Despite this strong backing and refreshing new genre, The Thing is surprisingly unmemorable.
Perhaps because Lawr was working with many of the same people, or perhaps because he’s left traces of the afrobeat style in his music before, The Thing doesn’t sound like anything new.
Lawr spoke of his work as a protest album, a stark display of his opinions and beliefs: “I think I want to say things that actually have some weight and have some meaning.” But Lawr’s lyrics seem too vague and too open to interpretation to be protest music.
As Lawr himself noted, “it’s hard to walk the line between saying something about the current state of affairs in the world and not appearing preachy or flaky.”
As a middle-class white dude with a cushyish life in small town Ontario, Lawr was perhaps walking an unfamiliar line.

The Thing is, above anything else, inoffensive. It lacks any real hooks, many of the songs lose their direction with drawn out, horn-driven jam sessions and Lawr’s vocals sound depressingly folksy, plodding and sometimes even melancholy; however, the album is altogether listenable, and Lawr manages to maintain his identity as a musician within the slinky, jazzy beats.
When I went to the Horseshoe Tavern to see Minotaurs play some danceable tunes on a chilly late October evening, I was expecting something innocuously pleasant. What I did learn about Minotaurs is that their music is so close to cool, but somehow just isn’t. It’s not quite jazz, it’s not quite funk and it’s not quite folk. The result seems to be a jam band- like live show where the songs that felt a bit long-winded on the album were pushed into the free-for-all zone.
The lower-case-“t” thing is, everybody fucking hates jam bands – or, at least, everybody who doesn’t smoke an insane amount of weed. It’s the kind of music that can only be enjoyed when the sharp edge of horribly drawn-out solos and a lack of discernible melodies is dulled by the haze of marijuana, and you’d think that a group of seasoned musicians like Minotaurs would know it.
The Thing was released on August 17. Minotaurs will be playing at The Great Hall on Friday Nov. 5 for the launch of the Nu Jazz Festival.