The Mohawk Lodge

It is with a formidable amount of pleasure that I am able to introduce to many of our American readers and certainly many Canadian and European readers as well the music of The Mohawk Lodge.  I first heard The Mohawk Lodge on one of many dim evenings spent at Toronto's The Dakota Tavern hoping against hope that some band or other would chafe against the grain.  And chafe they did.  Fronted by Vancouver transplant and iconoclast Ryder Havdale having assembled a young and devastating complement of head scalpers from the fringes of the Toronto 'scene', Havdale is essentially remounting in countless devastating and new ways his album Crimes recorded on the left coast.

Having moved to Toronto in the past couple of years Havdale began to hang out at some of the spots where rounders, night hawks and usual suspects percolate: this would include The Dakota Tavern (owned largely by The Beauties Shawn Creamer), The Communist Daughter and the Three Speed (owned by Creamer's bandmate Jud Ruhl) there he'd start to find the savage compliment of players he's now toured extensively with.

Havdale first recorded the material that became Crimes in a cabin in Pt. Roberts, WA with  Arch, Cory Price, Rob Josephson, Paul Goertzen and Jordan Koop engineering and recording.  After the preternaturally gifted Eamon McGrath (who has his own criminally good album Peacemaker out that manages not just to rival The Mohawk Lodge's Crimes but just possibly bests) re-jigged a couple of tunes in the back of a wine soaked van a handful of west coast heavyweights including Dan Mangan, Leah Abramson, JP Carter, Larissa Tandy, Megan McDonald and Jay Arner - all laid down in Darryl Neudorf's (Neko Case) studio.  The resulting album Crimes with it's obvious standalone 'hits' like Wicked Nights (Canadian Girl), Bad News and Done Fightin' bears out near-constant replay and an entire suite of material that belies a bar brawl beaten heart made soft like a pebble.


Here in this rooftop footage - that was the sight of one epically debaucherous Canada Day party in the heart of Toronto's Little Eritrea (just north of Little Portugal) - you can see the core of this formidable song and begin perhaps to glimpse the ragged glory of the wise-beyond-his-years McGrath.