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La Volee D'Castors
Friday 4.40pm
 Watch the performance.
It means ‘a flock of beavers’, okay? The name of their close geographical and musical neighbours, La Bottine Souriante, means ‘the smiling little boot’. Right, now we’ve got that cleared up...
Comparisons with LBS are unavoidable: Québécois band, accordion-playing foot-percussionist, driving rhythms, huge sound, engagingly enthusiastic and energetic chaps. But imagine a six-piece younger and hungrier stadium-rock version without brass et voila! The Beavers!
Right from the off the audience is up for 40 minutes of controlled mayhem. Whereas LBS go jazz, for La Volée d'Castors read rock, at least in attitude. There’s bones and spoons and bodhrans and djembes and shakers, wild fiddle, loopy bass, accordions, guitars, mandolins and gojones. Or the equivalent Québécois word. The songs are the rapid call-and-response tongue-twisters familiar to LBS fans but with a Beaverish style all their own.
The grin factor kicks in early, when an already mad tune ramps up a notch to somewhere esoteric, and it remains throughout the set. The onstage TV cameramen are kept on their toes dodging the leaping, ambling guys who frequently line up to do a cute little shuffly bop to stagefront, twirling in sequence first. The pace quickens and slows, extended passages of hypnotic rhythm swirl by and so does the time.
The band takes a mad dash into Eastern Europe before getting the audience to join in the French réponses, trying to emulate that brilliant, zany mouth music these French-Canadians do that makes Irish diddling sound positively understandable. There’s a long foot percussion solo with more beats per second than are humanly possible, after which Frédéric Bourgeois’ legs go straight into the next tune with no visible signs of fatigue. How do he do that? The man must be bionic. Just watching him's enough to make you tired. I’m off to lie down in the beer tent.
Mel McClellan
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