Psychedelic rock of The Highest Order
To those of you who love music – especially live music – but have lost the ambition, know-how or the nerve to go to the city for a late night hot-spot concert, the show is coming to you.
Toronto’s The Highest Order is performing in Creemore later this month, presented by other and equally “Bored Creemorians”.
The band is made up of Simone Schmidt, Paul Mortimer, Kyle Porter and Simone TB. Their 2016 album Still Holding was recently named the top Toronto album of 2016 by Now Magazine. According to their label, Idée Fixe Records, if their debut was a work of cosmic country, the band has doubled down on the cosmic.
Lauded for her Joplinesque singing style, Schmidt is also known as Fiver and in the past, played with Mortimer and Porter under the moniker of One Hundred Dollars. As The Highest Order, they have teamed up with drummer Simone Tisshaw-Baril.
“We follow the traditions of bands like Grateful Dead and The Byrds where there is a lot of live jamming so there’s an interplay between the live instruments and it’s different every night. The anchor is the song and we’re playing in the way that we feel the songs in those moments.”
Taking original music written in a traditional style, some that Schmidt has recorded for other projects, The Highest Order collectively arranges it into “extremely psychedelic songs”.
“I think it follows in the traditions of country rock, like with The Byrds, or Gene Clark, you would have had these people who were very well versed in the traditional songs and then they got electric guitars and got into psychedelic music so they started arranging them with that kind of instrumentation and now that we are alive in the 2000s we have access to all that music and we can play around in this self contained way.”
The Highest Order will be playing two sets – some great country covers for people who are into more traditional country, like Waylon Jennings and Tom T. Hall and a lot of original songs that deal with the tensions of living in today’s society.
The concert is Saturday, Jan. 28 at Creemore Legion lounge, at 27 Wellington St. W.
Doors open at 7:30 p.m. The show is at 8:30 p.m.
Tickets cost $10 in advance, available online at www.ticketscene.ca/events/16775/ and at The Creemore Echo, 3 Caroline St. W. Tickets cost $15 at the door.
There will be a meat draw too.
Next month, Bored Creemorians present Grey Lands, a side project of Cuff The Duke’s frontman Wayne Petti, at the Creemore Legion on Feb. 25. Tickets: www.ticketscene.ca/events/16776/.
