Fur Eel will be bringing the funk and the noise and everything in between to the Slice, Feb. 17.
They are looking forward to being back on the road and returning to Lethbridge on the eve of releasing their sophomore CD.
“We played there last year at the same time,” observed the Regina based funk, rock, pop quartet’s frontman/ guitarist Justin Sheppard.
Thomas St. Onge, bassist Travis Reshaur and drummer James Belle incorporate a variety of influences in their music.
“There’s nothing worse than being pigeonholed as a blues band or a funk band or a pop band,” Sheppard said.
“We all listen to diverse and different influences, which is why you can’t really say we’re a funk band. Because there’s some hip hop, some rock and roll and some blues. It’s very diverse, which is really great,” he continued.
This show will be part of a quick tour including Lethbridge, Calgary, two nights in Banff, one in Canmore, Saskatoon and back home.
They will be flying out to Toronto in March for Canadian Music week.
“It will be a chance to listen to a tonne of talent and play a really great show,” Sheppard said adding the show is what people talk about.
“Our show is crazy, high energy. We don’t just stand there and play music. Though the music is very important. We play our instruments very well,” he said. Our show is what people talk about. The show is the reason we have any type of buzz,” he said.
He is looking forward to returning to Lethbridge to play the upcoming album, some tracks for the last album and some which haven’t been recorded yet
They will be doing a major tour in April and May after the next CD is released. As some of the band members are still in university , while others hold down jobs, that is a better time for them for a new CD and ensuing tour.
“We’d love to make a living playing music, but we can’t yet. We’ll be playing from Vancouver to Montreal and everywhere in between,” he said.
“We’ll be bringing it hard,” he said. We’re looking forward to it. We’ve been compared to the Rolling Stones and David Bowie and Mick Jagger,” he continued.
“We’ll be playing the best. And we say the best because our first record was written and recorded two months after we became a band, and a lot of the lyrics and chord progressions were improvised in the studio. On this one, we paid more attention to chord progressions and song structure,” he said.
They enjoy being on the road.
“We meet such nice people. We’ll have the occasional heckler which we’ll have to deal with, but most people are there to enjoy it,” he said.
While they are an anomaly on the Regina music scene, which he said is dominated by a lot of country music and indie rock, he said people there enjoy it for real.
“So to speak. It’s hard to tell because even though Regina is a city it also has a small town feel, so the people who come to our shows are usually our friends. But we’re always well received,” he said.
There is no cover for the Lethbridge show, which will begin at 10 p.m., Feb. 17.
