‘Gone to Bolivia’ has had a fabulous year and so has Ben Sures! First of all recording this tremendous record which received a 4 star review in Toronto’s Now Mag…..
4 stars NOW | July 7-14, 2011 | VOL 30 NO 45
(independent) BY SARAH GREENE
There’s a freshness to award-winning songwriter Ben Sures’s new album that belies his 20 years of making records. The Edmonton-based singer/guitarist sounds like he’s discovering new things on these simple, inviting songs about revolutionaries, American shantytowns, cruise ship work and residential school survival.
Producer Don Kerr is sympathetic to Sures’s warm and wordy delivery, embellishing it with playful touches of percussion, strings, pedal steel and piano that never overpower the songs. Backup vocals by Rhonda Stakich, Kathryn Rose, Michelle Rumball and the Good Lovelies add a breathy lightness to the otherwise political material – a good trick.
The album has personal touches, too. High School Steps is as much an ode to early friendships and the Kinks as it is to a high school sweetheart, while Everybody Matters is an unabashed feel-good group hug of an anthem.
Top track: Gone To Bolivia
..and according to The CKUA top 100 for 2011 it was the most played album by an Alberta artist, very cool.
As well as receiving the highest of praise from Canada’s Number one Roots Music Magazine ‘Penguin Eggs’
Ben Sures
Gone to Bolivia (Independent)
Ben Sures, based in Edmonton, AB, these days, has been, over the last 20 years or so, forging a sturdy career by writing, playing, touring, and putting out albums—each one better than the last … just as it should be.
In Gone to Bolivia, his eighth, he has put out his best work yet and it is as good a piece of work as any I have heard. From the terrific opening American Shantytown—“If there’s trouble in America then there’s trouble everywhere”—12 originals and one Mose Allison tune follow and not a runt in the litter. The Boy Who Walked Backwards Through the Snow is a heartbreaking retelling of some dark Canadiana. I loved the title track, a catchy political pop song.
Ben also wisely surrounded himself with helpers such as producer Don Kerr of the Rheostatics along with Claire Jenkins, the Good Lovelies and Michelle Rumball, the original singer of the Grievous Angels, and some of the Creaking Tree String Quartet, adding to the quality of the adventurous musicianship on the album. Ben has hit one over the fence with this release.
Les Semeniuk, Penguin Eggs Magazine 2011
2011 saw Ben tour England, Scotland Ireland and perform a concert in Beirut, Lebanon which was fabulously received! A return trip to all these places is already in The Works.
and finally in addition to all the great tours and reviews that transpired this year Ben Sures made his debut as a character in a murder mystery, The novel is called Hang Down Your Head and its by Janice MacDonald and is available from Turnstone Press
stay tuned more news to come…..
