After being chosen to play The Band in Todd Haynes' Dylan biopic I'm Not There, touring briefly with The Stills, and being invited by the Manuel family to play with Ronnie Hawkins at a celebration of the life and passing of former Band member Richard Manuel, the break up of Montreal's beloved underground roots rockers The Royal Mountain Band was an unexpected blow to the city. Looking for inspiration former mountaineer Tavis Triance headed west to assemble another band with which to render a collection of apocalyptic visions. Spoon River songs spring from a sense of the world's vast amoral blankness and are shot through with a pseudo biblical warning of the persistent evil present in everyday things. The songs paint a landscape that is populated by the cruel, the befuddled, the destitute and the forlorn. They drum forth a sense of the terror and grandeur of human existence invoking both fear and longing. The words illustrate and accentuate the tensions of which we are daily subjects: modernity and timelessness, simplicity and complexity, gravity and absurdity. Three and four part harmonies, thick slabs of Hammond organ, and an insistent licking at the guitar, are all belted together by the far off tinkle of piano and wail of harmonica. They give nods to The Band, doom-trilogy era Neil Young, and American recordings of Johnny Cash in evoking dirt roads and tall pines. Listen to it explode like fisticuffs under a drunken orange moon on their debut album Kingdom of the Burned out now on Northern Electric.