The Attempted Murder of Laura Jean
w/Kurt Inder, LUKA, Jennifer Castle
Thursday, January 19, 9pm
Seahorse Tavern, 2037 Gottingen Street
$23/$25
It's fitting The Attempted Murder of Laura Jean plays a festival called In the Dead of Winter. Images of skulls, typically of human and horse variety, frequent the artwork of her album covers and Bandcamp page.
"Skulls have always been my go-to," says Laura Jean Fraser, who is also a visual artist and designs her album covers. "Not in the morbid sense, more I'm aesthetically intrigued."
The north end folk artist shows humour with her performance name, The Attempted Murder of Laura Jean, named after a classic dad joke about two crows in the woods. (For those keeping score at home, it technically takes three or more crows to make a murder.)
Early in January, Fraser released Winter Depth Demos—two songs where she's playing guitar. While guitar's a pretty standard instrument for a singer-songwriter, it's a significant change for Fraser, who's played ukulele on all her previous recordings. "That was the first time that I'd started playing guitar again in four or five years," says Fraser, who picked up guitar again after moving back to Halifax from St. John's, Newfoundland.
Moving in with a roommate with lots of guitars and also looking to switch things up resulted in the demo tracks, recorded in her living room. The change will spill into her In the Dead of Winter performance where she'll play more guitar than usual and will have a drummer and bass player as well.
"It's going to be a much bigger dynamic," she says. "It's not going to be as soft and gentle as people might be expecting."
