Folk and garage rock icons combine into a supergroup
Given the tight-knit nature of Calgary’s music scene it’s not at all that unusual to find individual players chasseing between local acts as glibly as a well-choreographed chain of square dancers.
But what happens when one of our city’s best-known folk acts gets a yearning to team up with some seriously shady garage rock heroes? Getting to the murky bottom of this atypical “you got chocolate in my peanut butter” conundrum Bob Keelaghan of the Agnostic Mountain Gospel Choir has thrown in with ghoul-core pundit Tom Bagley of Forbidden Dimension infamy. The result: A lugubrious anar-roots breakdown that’s put a new notch hole in the Choir’s old school Bible belt.
“I had been joking with Bob for years about doing something together” acknowledges Jackson Phibes the vocalist and guitarist for the band. “After all his band plays all the posh soft-seaters while my band is relegated to shitty bars. So when he called me about doing something last March I thought it would be a fun diversion. Like eating a vegan meal instead of a steak dinner” says Bagley who goes by Phibes onstage.
“It’s just fun to see someone who’s used to bringing the volume and ghoul image with Forbidden Dimension playing in some hippie environment like a tiny grassroots festival in northern B.C. for example” confirms Bob Keelaghan another vocalist and guitarist for Agnostic Mountain Gospel Choir. “The best part of doing these gigs with Tom is seeing him as a songwriter rather than a weird underground dude within a niche. He’s a great songwriter and it’s good to hear him doing songs that show-off another aspect of his talent.”
Taking one serious allemande left the duo formulating a sideshow-worthy hybrid of their respective bands under the banner of the Agnostic-Phibes Rhythm & Blood Conspiracy. With fellow AMGC members bassist Vlad Sobolewski and skinsman Jay Woolley aboard Agnostic-Phibes is poised to jump feet first into the frenetic summer festival season. Not surprisingly the newly spawned quartet has already aggregated enough material to forge their first “voodoo concoction” entitled Campfire Tales.
“All 11 songs are originals with half written by me and half written by Bob; we even redid a Forbidden Dimension tune” says Phibes. “The name Campfire Tales is kind of a reference to spooky stories and urban legends that kids might tell around the bonfire.”.
“Bob’s contribution was providing a hillbilly take on non-hillbilly subject matter. For me it’s about slowing down and being quiet; tuning my guitars all weird and not being the lead electric guitar. I have no love for Tom Waits but I like Bob’s atonal old scale mountain stuff. It’s a lot more twangy but it’s also a lot more atmospheric. Overall the recordings have a real live-off-the-floor sound.”
An unlikely yet winning combination of howling fury and ponderous gumption Agnostic-Phibes Rhythm & Blood Conspiracy is definitely a supergroup to be reckoned with. Intent on dragging dark and twisted things out of the deep woods and exposing their hideous forms by firelight the swamp-rock-meets-country-blues foursome anticipate a bevy of pitchfork-and-torch receptions as they continue the Albertan leg of their tour. After Calgary their tour will continue with stops at the South Country Fair in Fort Macleod and Beaumont Blues Festival before jetting off to Belgium and the Netherlands in October.
“There’s been a slow build of terrification” Keelaghan reports of the band’s incubation. “Our sound is so varied; it doesn’t go by one vibe and I find that really exciting. I’ve always thought that Tom’s music despite being loud and garagey has had a subtle undercurrent of blues R&B and even country running through it. The Agnostic’s sound is grounded in murder ballads which is essentially like what Tom does so there’s definitely a shared element of death and tragedy all treated with a good sense of humour” he surmises.”
“It’s a beast that has taken on a life of its own. Our two sounds met in the middle and now it has gone off in its own direction.”
