Regina super-group drops new full-length LP McKruski
Having started the band as an outlet for his more psychedelic leanings, Christopher Sleightholm of Regina’s The Lonesome Weekends released the first Snake River album, Songs No One’ll Hear, as a solo act. Since then, the band has become something of a Regina supergroup, and includes members of The Spoils, Geronimo and one of the founding members of The Besnard Lakes. The band has also been featured alongside Queen City instrumental group The Lazy MKs as part of their ongoing Sunset Sessions series.
The band has just released their second full-length record, McKruski, which draws on more fuzzed out guitar and lyrics that detail the fictional town of Snake River Mountain and the characters that inhabit the town. The LP culminates with the main character, fictional author Reginald McKruski, losing his mind in at a town hall meeting.
“The new full-length is definitely going to be a little bit weirder,” says Sleightholm. “The songs came out of various pieces of music that I had recorded on my own. But there is still more of a band feel to a lot of it.”
And McKruski, the album, contains plenty of said weirdness. Slithery, countrified guitar lines cascade and crash amidst fuzzy, ethereal-sounding keyboard atmospherics and hazy vocal melodies that simmer just below layers of reverb and delay. And rather than turning his back on his work with The Lonesome Weekends, Sleightholm instead gives nods to the country act – McKruski is likely too noisy and/or blissed-out for the folk scene, but those elements meld nicely with the meandering psych rock meltdowns.
Catch Snake River at MoSoFest on Friday, June 13 at Vangelis!
– Photo courtesy of Snake River / Credit: Peter Scoular Photography