by Jim Kelly

Who: Greg MacPherson Band
What: Raw, lean rock with intelligence, conscience and soul
Where: Winnipeg, MB
To Contact: (204) 943-8419, The G7 Welcoming Committee, PO Box 27006, 360 Main Street Concourse, Winnipeg, MB, R3C 4T3 (204) 947-2002, FAX (204) 947-3202, greg_macpherson@hotmail.com, www.gregmacpherson.com; www.g7welcomingcommittee.com.

When your stock-in-trade is gritty, unblinking observations from life’s dustier corners and rougher edges, and your songs are populated by everyday folks desperately riding stillborn dreams, and when you serve up gutsy guitar rock with a bit of muscle, perhaps the Bruce Springsteen comparisons are inevitable. But that’s okay, because Greg MacPherson wears it well, which is to say that he has the writing chops and the talent to stand on his own. Released this past March, the Winnipegger’s second album, Good Times Coming Back Again, has reviewers raving. With Steve Bates (Bulletproof Nothing, XOXO) on guitar and Jason Tait (The Weakerthans) on drums, MacPherson creates a lean and sparse sound that’s a perfect vehicle for his incisive and intelligent lyrics. Being tagged ‘socially conscious guy in Winnipeg’ doesn’t necessarily bother MacPherson. “But I’m kind of all over the place too,” he says. “There are tunes that are stories and tunes that are more snapshots. It can go in lots of different directions.” So you get the hard driving rock of “The Day The Water Dried Up From The Tap”, the gloomy, haunted soundscape of “Remote Control”, the jaunty apathy anthem “Numbers”, a faded diorama of lives lived in numb stasis, and the lead-off track, “Good Times”, which MacPherson infuses with such a sense of menace that it begs the question: good times for whom? The band hopes to be touring Eastern Canada by late summer. If you’re looking for the future of Canadian rock ‘n’ roll, take a gander at the Greg MacPherson Band.

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