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The Burying Ground delivers retro sound

With a name like the title of a movie Daniel Day Lewis never made, and a sound equally cinematic, The Burying Ground is digging themselves into a throwback niche. They have a solid retro-tation.
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Vancouver band, The Burying Ground, will be playing a concert in Prince George on Thursday.

With a name like the title of a movie Daniel Day Lewis never made, and a sound equally cinematic, The Burying Ground is digging themselves into a throwback niche. They have a solid retro-tation.

The Vancouver band has shared their photogenic music with Prince George enough times in the past that they have friends and fans here already, eager for them to blow in again like a dust bowl breeze.

The Burying Ground busts through the door of the saloon like a prairie sharecropper, playing tunes they squeezed from the grapes of wrath and caught out in the rye.

As the music puffs out from their acoustic machines, you can almost see the colour draining away like living sepia photographs.

The titles of their songs frequently contain words like "blues" and "rag" and anachronistic phrases like "doing a stretch."

They are all modern in actuality, energizing the East Van music scene and adding charisma to the summer festival circuit.

They are on their way to the Kispiox event, presently, so a stopover at the Omineca Arts Centre was a big easy.

"We try to keep it somewhat traditional, that's the heart of what we do, but are not in fact from the '20s and '30s so modern influences inevitably make their way into it, and that's what makes it ours," said Devora Laye, who plays a percussion-modified washboard and adds vocal colour.

The band's core is cut from the heartwood of the First world War's aftermath, the Great Depression and the seeds of the Second World War. For a great swath of North American culture - especially the informative region of the American deep south - it was a desperate time. The desperation - the blues - of the day sparked some of the world's most applauded expressions of music.

"Today it's the same, that playing music keeps the struggles a little lighter," said Laye. "There is a lot going on in today's world that makes you worry, makes you afraid, and it's still music that can help your day. The struggles faced by the people who first made the music we cover is something we want to share, because we can still relate to it."

Lead singer and guitar player Woody Forster channels the era into his stage presentation, and adds historical context as well. The songs are stories, but they also have stories and he likes to tell them.

They cemented their grasp of the music's history by travelling a bit in the American deep south, passing through places like Memphis and New Orleans as they toured and performed.

The Burying Ground also took their modernized Canadian brand of Americana across the Atlantic, this summer. They recently returned from a 21-show swing through Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands and Ireland.

The tours will likely grow farther, larger and more intense once their double-album plans for the coming year show their fruit. They have designs on releasing a disc of all-traditional covers from the jazzy, bluesy, dusty-folk country of their target era.

They also intend to set free an album of all original material that hearkens back to that time-region but spawning from the modern age.

The most immediate plan, though, is to perform a house concert in Horsefly then the downtown show in Prince George on Thursday night. Joining Laye and Forster on this jaunt north will be upright bassist Wynston Minckler and trumpet player Bonnie Northgraves, just two of the many collaborators who regularly accompany them.

Another former collaborator, back when they were all together in a band called The Dire Wolves, is Big Fancy.

He will be on the Prince George bill as the special opening act.