Twilight Hotel

Review: The Vancouver Sun

Review of Highway Prayer by Marke Andrews, The Vancouver Sun, Feb 2, 2008

***½

If you like your roots dark, the Winnipeg duo Twilight Hotel belong in your speakers. Brandy Zdan and Dave Quanbury shade Highway Prayer with dark hues, both lyrically and musically. The title track, sung duskily by Zdan, describes a lonely road trip. The country-tinged No Place for a Woman is about life in the mines, where “there’s no beauty here, down here it’s always night.” Sometimes I Get a Little Lonely’s title is self-explanatory, Zdan giving the song a real blues feel. The Ballad of Salvador and Isabelle tells a heartbreaking tale of two immigrants to America who encounter a world of trouble.
As the pair sing in the lovely ballad Sand in Your Eyes, “sorrow and heartache make better songs than love.”

That’s not to say the record has no joy. The opening Viva la Vinyl, a tribute to the grand old art of analog recording, is an earthy, rockabilly shuffle. If It Won’t Kill You, featuring great dobro work by producer Colin Linden, sounds like something you’d hear in a rollicking New Orleans bar, with Quanbury jumping up into falsetto to nail a vocal line. And you can’t slumber to Slumber Queen — it’s got dancefloor written all over it. Iowalta Morningside also rocks, but here Twilight Hotel’s dark roots once again peek through, as Zdan and Quanbury sing about a murder.