Dressed in a handsome pinstripe suit and huge, floppy white slippers, Shivaree's Ambrosia Parsley shuffled into the spotlight and instantly had the tiny crowd at Richard's on Richards wrapped around her delicate finger. The first in a double bill of New York-bred Americana, Shivaree-like headliner Clem Snide-has enjoyed more success on the other side of the Atlantic than here, a fact borne out by the night's receipts and the two unassuming Econoline vans parked neatly outside the club. For those who grimaced through the unseasonable cold to watch this show, however, the dividends were huge. Speaking in a raspy whisper, Parsley confessed that she'd had a little too much whisky backstage, thereby explaining the slippers. Her demeanour was otherwise captivating and mysterious, as befits a band that traffics in a kind of lounge noir. Despite her girlish voice, Shivaree's songs are anything but childlike. "I Close My Eyes" is apparently derived from a dream in which Parsley gleefully tortured George W. Bush. "Mexican Boyfriend" concerns itself with her first love. "Got hit by a car and died," she announced flatly. "Fuckin' sucks."

The crowd finally stepped up for the midtempo mambo of "I Don't Care", which was buoyed by Danny McGough's surging organ and a mid-song shift into double time as pointless yet uncannily correct as something the Band might have done. That song was inspired by Parsley's grandmother, who stabbed her errant husband with a steak knife. It wound down to nothing but Parsley's haunted voice, and ended with a whispered motherfucker. With the massive exception of the bass player's white headband, Shivaree's lapses into vulgarity are a vital escape route from a genre that can be oppressively tasteful.

Clem Snide is the complete New York band, even if frontman Eef Barzelay—it was a gala night for rococo names—is currently living in Nashville. As if to prove it, the band opened with Talking Heads' "Heaven", reworked into something approaching high-lonesome country. The rest of the set showcased Barzelay's literate perspective on life as a knock-kneed, bespectacled nerd. Toward the end of the '90s, Clem Snide was saddled with the alt-country tag, but spiritually it's descended from the Velvet Underground, with Pete Fitzpatrick's tuba and banjo replacing John Cale's viola. "Don't Be Afraid of Your Anger", the evening's penultimate song, mingled mushrooming dissonance with lightning turns into a folky shuffle. Beyond its musical confidence, Clem Snide has a crackerjack personality in Barzelay, who claimed, among other things, that he always comes up to Canada to work out new songs, and that our metric system was responsible for his guitar going out of tune. Either one of these bands could have taken home the blue ribbon, but Clem Snide had the edge, due mostly to Barzelay's uncorked wit. He managed to make all the studied screwiness endearing. The entire band was dressed in matching white suits with blue piping and each member's "animal spirit" embroidered on the back. For Barzelay, it's a deer at sunset. "Gentle and easily frightened," he explained softly. "That's me".

Georgia Straight, April 2005