Tuesdays

Build a Horse started out as something entirely different. A few Charlottetown bands got together (among them Eyes for Telescopes and the Rude Mechanicals) to jam on, and maybe record, some traditional country songs. A healthy amount of island moonshine and Alexander Keiths cut them off at the pass, however, and the songs they wrote are shuffling East Coast odes that are often as quirky as red sand, but usually are sincere enough to fool you into thinking that the Tuesdays weren't drunk when they recorded them, although the bonus track dispels that rumour. Build a Horse is somewhere between Carolyn Mark and Fisherman's Blues. Acoustic guitars, mandolins, a steel guitar and an out of tune banjo backup light-hearted lyrics that occasionally seem as though they were lifted from a 14-year-old boys' locker room. "Where Oh Where is John" is a stirring hymn to the Tuesday's awol lap-steel guitarist and "Bangor, Maine" espouses the attributes of a small New England city over those over-sung pop spots - New York and California. What is probably the best song on the album, "Don't Know Why," is a brilliant Nova Scotia driving duet akin to something Radiogram might write if they lived on the right coast.