Rube & Rake

The Ship, St. John's NL, April 25

Photo: Vish Khanna

BY Vish KhannaPublished Apr 26, 2014

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Watching young people making old-timey/timeless folk music can be a delicate proposition. Their reverence for tradition might be contrived and backwards or perhaps too blatantly market savvy in appealing to every generation. Walking into the Ship and hearing the two men of Rube & Rake singing together squashed all the cynicism within me. Yes, they sounded like Simon & Garfunkel and they even did an Everlys song and it was beautiful. And maybe by doing all of this, they placed themselves in a new tradition initiated by, I don't know, the Milk Carton Kids or someone. Maybe timeline fixations are arbitrary obsessions and the true measure of a band's worth is how fast they trigger something within you, rather than a critical cobweb of whether they should or shouldn't be doing what they're doing. All I know is, the two dudes harmonized beautifully and sang lovely songs and it was gorgeous.

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