The duo of Lisa MacIsaac and Brenley MacEachern have clocked up 25 years as Madison Violet and have picked up numerous awards in their Canadian homeland. So, it’s a momentous decision to call it quits at this stage, as they bow out of the recording and performing world. A big transatlantic tour is shortly ending with a series of gigs in Germany and Switzerland while the pair’s three week sojourn in the UK has had a heavy weighting towards the northern areas of Scotland, perhaps linked to their ancestral roots (their surnames both have origins in Nova Scotia though they have been long term Toronto based) before closing in the South of England.
They’ve racked up 11 albums over the period with the final offering “eleven” suggesting that they focus on the music rather than the title, a ploy which worked for an earlier Liverpudlian band who knocked out a white album. “No Fool For Trying” is perhaps the duo’s most widely known album and indeed features in one of AUK’s writers Top 10 of the 21st Century, slotting in above Jason Isbell. That’s critical esteem! So it’s maybe no surprise that the majority of this album is played tonight.
The gig happens upstairs at the Lexington (there’s a nicely stocked and fairly priced pub downstairs too) which peppers its indie/alterative roster with regular Americana acts.
The audience of close to 200 give a mighty welcome as they start, all aware that this is the last hurrah. The guitar tones are thick and jangling and they start with “a new song from 20 years ago” and then, pondering on their Northern forays, query the pronunciation of Ullapool in one of numerous quirky snippets of banter.
With side-man Jake Zapotoczny on bass, electric guitar plus keyboards, there is plenty going on amidst the harmonised vocals which remain one of their trademark strengths and a joy to hear. MacIsaac periodically puts down her guitar and takes to the violin for spells on a chugging and energising song ‘Ohio’. Then follows a co-write with MacEachern’s dad, which dials back the pace and is a Stevie Nicks-style country rock meets power ballad.
They mention that having produced their last album they now count within the 2 per cent of non-male producers in the industry. A song from “eleven” was composed during COVID with all the attendant traumas (compounded here by parental loss and a break-up).
The next tune is about the painful abuse of MacEachern’s older brother by their local Catholic priest shortly after they had converted having moved away to a quiet rural outpost from Montreal – ‘Time to Right the Wrong’ . It’s a poignant song as befits the circumstances “I can just imagine how your life was unravelling.” The first set closes with another bracing racing violin break from MacIsaac.
Then comes the titular ‘No Fool For Trying’ and next up is ‘Woodshop’ which tells the tragic story of learning of her brother’s murder, with it’s biblical-referenced refrain “Dust to Dust Ashes 52”, and seeing the crime covered on the TV news. There follow two further songs from that centrepiece album ‘Small of my Heart’ with again dozens of backing vocalists from the floor, it’s a softly sung composition.
The first encore is another vignette of working through a relationship’s travails. And then they all go unplugged to sign off with, fittingly, the first song they ever wrote, ‘Haight Ashbury’. And so after 2 hours on stage, a stirring and candid swathe of songs to encapsulate 25 years of work, it’s over.
Excellent write-up, thanks. We saw the show last month in Stirling at the fab Tolbooth venue. So glad to have seen them live.