Acres and Acres do simple in the most complicated way. Its
debut album, All Nations, balances studio acoustic and lap steel
guitars with the rich sounds of about a dozen musicians performing at
Robie Street’s All Nations Christian Reformed Church.
“It’s funny because we wanted to make it simple and easy,” says Dave
Scholten. “We did two sessions like that, and then we said, ‘What about
strings…and a church.'”
Acres and Acres was supposed to be a folky break from Scholten and
Kris Pope’s multitrack-heavy rock band Down with the Butterfly. On lazy
days off they would have “national Acres and Acres days”—bumming
around from cafe to cafe, talking and running into people. “That’s
exactly how the name and the whole concept for the album came about,”
says Pope. “We just wanted it to be the opposite of the other
band.”
A tribute to their Halifax, All Nations explores
relationships and modern life with an ensemble cast of friends and
neighbours on strings, ukes, drums and backing vocals. But recording
off the floor, the musicians were at the church’s mercy. Drums were
scaled back to almost nothing, and Scholten, singing without a PA, even
had to hold back on consonants. Their sparse recording invites you to
share in the experience, and hear every creak and emotion as though you
were sitting in a first-row pew.
This article appears in Oct 1-7, 2009.