Beholding Royal City

It's not easy finding your way into Radio 3's archives (I'm still not sure how I did it), but once you're in there, if you take the time to look around you can find some really amazing stuff. Case in point: the session below from Royal City.

Though the band's break-up means that they're pretty much forgotten now, a few years ago they they seemed to be on the verge of really big things. They had a pair of albums to their credit, and they'd just signed to Rough Trade. Their next album, Little Heart's Ease, was good, but unfortunate it didn't receive much attention on its release, frontman/principal songwriter Aaron Riches got married, went back to school, and seemed to lose all interest in making music, and that, anticlimactically, was that. All they left behind were three outstanding albums, the unfulfilled guarantee of a rarities compilation...and the fact they helped launch the careers of The Constantines (whose albums to date were all released on Three Gut), Feist (who played guitar in one of the band's incarnations) and Sufjan Stevens (who played several shows with the whole Three Gut collective early on in his career).

On a personal note, they're also half-responsible for one of my favourite shows ever -- a Royal City/Constantines double-bill in Ottawa in the fall of 2002, which saw the bands playing beer-drenched sets to about a dozen people at 2 in the morning over Thanksgiving weekend. I also want to note that I saw them a few months later in Montreal, co-headlining a show with Broken Social Scene. I mention the latter because, while trying to figure out exactly what the show was, I found out that there was a third band on the bill, who my friend and I skipped just because we didn't want to get there early. Let's just say that four years after the fact, having just learned who it was about ten minutes before writing this sentence, I'm bitter I skipped that opener.

1. Bad Luck
2. Don't You
3. Burning Touch
4. Can't You Hear Me Calling
5. You Are Not My Enemy
6. Daughters of Jerusalem

Enjoy!