by Anastasia Chipelski
While they trade in the haunted howls of the blues, the Harpoonist and the Axe Murderer are not the doom-soaked reapers one might expect. “We’re not a dark band, it just sounds like a dark name. We’re jovial people, really,” asserts Shawn Hall, aka the Harpoonist.
Hall is one half of the duo that is becoming known for their gritty, stripped-down blues. He carries a case of harmonicas, while Matthew Rogers – his partner in crime and the so-called “Axe Murderer” – holds down the beat while also tearing up his Telecaster.
Winnipeggers got a taste of the Harp/Axe combo at last year’s Winnipeg Folk Festival, including a slightly raunchier than usual workshop with Hayes Carll and Jason Collett. Before the workshop, Shawn woke up under a tree after sneaking into the Festival’s infamous campground (“trust me, no one wants artists to go into that campground for good reason”), and then joined the other songwriters on stage to swap dirty stories.
“I showed up at the workshop with wine on my shirt and blood – my own blood, I wasn’t sacrificing animals or anything,” explains Shawn, “but I changed halfway through the workshop. I put on a new shirt ‘cause that’s what you do.”
As they were travelling back and forth across the country (keeping clean shirts handy), Shawn and Matt were inspired by the many other talents they shared the stage with. Shawn recalls opening for the illustrious Taj Mahal on a floating stage, while also playing creepy and “exotically Canadian” venues such as a converted old movie theatre in rural Saskatchewan. While they didn’t share songwriting responsibilities on previous albums, they decided that they had to up their game.
“We needed to do it to have better songs.” Shawn tells Stylus. “We decided to combine forces, so we sat down and just jammed this stuff out.”
The biggest challenge in putting together A Real Fine Mess – their latest offering, released June 17 – was writer’s block. The economy of words necessitated by a genre like the blues is “challenging for wordy, chatty people, especially like myself. But it’s a good thing,” claims Shawn. “It’s tougher to tell stories when you’re paired up with another performer that’s got 20 verses. How do I tell stories using this form of music?”
The stories of the blues are as well worn in words as they are in the growls, howls, and winding wails of the Harp and Axe. The video for their latest single, “Shake It,” tells a story of a rag-tag group of hard-luck folks being won over by the band’s impromptu performance on a stage built of pallets, and coming together to shake it in all their worn glory.
The video was set in the back area of an actual trailer park that was reserved for abandoned motor homes, some still full of people’s belongings under a thin layer of moss. “It was absolutely straight-up creepy,” said Shawn, as he wondered about the circumstances that would drive people to live there in the first place, and then walk away from their lives entirely.
Matt may have been contemplating the surroundings a little less, as he spent most of the shoot day passed out in a tent, recovering from the revelry of International Tequila Day. “You could have done anything to him, you could have drawn on his face [..] a mustache, and all that stuff”, but as you can see in the video, he emerged relatively unscathed – proof of the true jovial nature of his travelling companion, perhaps.
The Harpoonist and the Axe Murderer haven’t held an official release party for A Real Fine Mess just yet, but they promise that “We’ll celebrate the album, just let us know when and where”. They’ll be stopping by the BBQ and Blues festival this August, so grab yourself a deep-fried pickle and brace yourself for some hard-rocking greasy (and maybe slightly creepy, but still fun) blues tunes.
Catch the Harpoonist & the Axe-Murderer at the Winnipeg BBQ & Blues Festival August 16 at CanWest Park, home of the Goldeyes. If you can’t make it then, keep an eye out for their return to the Park Theatre in October 8.