RISE UP w/ Sargeant X Comrade and Blake Reid Band

Lo-fi soul pioneers Sargeant X Comrade’s diverse musical playground encompasses neo-soul, hip hop and nu-jazz, centred on Yolanda Sargeant’s rich, smoky vocals, which can be playful or melancholy, joyful or pensive. They soar over the sonic architecture of producer Evgeniy (a.k.a. Comrade or Whatevski) to form an exciting and challenging sound that features unexpected and captivating juxtapositions of elements and genres. Their latest release The Elephant In The Room has been burning up the charts.

To understand Blake Reid’s music, you need to know about an old creaky abandoned farm house east of High River. Weather warn, paint peeling, leaking roof that sits empty in the middle of a wheat field. Some might pass right by it. Not Reid. It inspired him as the perfect place to record an album so he dragged in a stack of vintage recording equipment, called up a bunch of musical friends and he made it so. Reid is a singer songwriter whose songs lean toward the more radio-friendly side of Americana. Think the Zac Brown Band with a touch of Allman Brothers and a dash of the Travelling Wilburys. But recently, Reid let the pendulum swing back to his Alberta acoustic country roots with the songs he recorded for the farm house album No Road In - all acoustic, all analogue – 13 songs in five days live off the floor. They filmed it too. The resulting movie was "No Roads In" – an award-winning documentary that chronicles the trials and tribulations of turning a ramshackle house into a recording studio. Reid follows that simple tried-and-true rule, "write-about-what-you-know.” His songs are about hardship, pain, joy, remembrance, family, friends, hope, and love; pretty much songs about Albertans like you and me.