Half Moon Run live at Crocks at NV in Thunder Bay, 12 July 2019

Nothing from A Blemish in the Great Light was out when Half Moon Run played Thunder Bay on Friday 12 July 2019. The album was announced on 13 September, when the single Flesh and Blood came out, and the record itself arrived on 1 November. The people at Crocks at NV heard a band between albums.

The show was on sale by late May, about six weeks ahead, at C$32 in the promoter’s online shop. Crocks at NV was at 228 Red River Road, where the club had opened its new room on 5 October 2018.

A Montreal band with two albums

Half Moon Run formed in 2009 in the Mile End neighbourhood of Montreal. Conner Molander and Dylan Phillips had moved there from Comox, British Columbia.

Devon Portielje is the lead vocalist. Its first album, Dark Eyes, came out on 27 March 2012 on Indica Records, with Full Circle released as the lead single eight days before. Molander’s instruments include pedal steel and harmonica, and Phillips plays drums.

The band went on to win a Juno Award for breakthrough group of the year and to earn a Polaris Music Prize nomination. Sun Leads Me On followed on 23 October 2015 from the same label. Nearly four years had passed by July 2019, long enough that a new record was overdue.

What was coming

A Blemish in the Great Light was produced by Joe Chiccarelli and recorded partly at Planet Studios in Montreal and partly at Bathouse Recording Studio in Bath, Ontario. It has ten tracks and came out on Crystal Math in Canada and Glassnote elsewhere. It reached number three on the Canadian albums chart, and won the 2020 Juno Award for Adult Alternative Album of the Year.

Phillips, describing the record when it was announced, said it kept the sound people expect from the band while adding more experimentation. Things get a little heavier and a little harder, he said. None of that had been heard on 12 July, and whether the Thunder Bay set previewed any of it is not stated.

Theatres, six months later

When the band announced Canadian dates for January 2020, they were theatres and halls: the Royal Theatre in Victoria, the Queen Elizabeth Theatre in Vancouver, the Winspear Centre in Edmonton, the Burton Cummings Theatre in Winnipeg. The list ended in Ottawa at The Arena at TD Place on 31 January, and Thunder Bay was not among the dates in that announcement.

That makes July 2019 a nightclub floor just before the band moved into seated rooms. A club of this size puts a band with a pedal steel guitar and a drum kit within touching distance of the front row. A theatre with fixed seats takes that away, and an arena takes it away twice over.

The room also has a second life. NV Nightclub, which shares the building, kept its dance parties on weekends alongside the Crocks concerts, so a Friday show sat in a space with a different crowd on other nights.

A week with two sounds

Half Moon Run followed Colter Wall by one night. Wall had played the same room on the Thursday for $25, two days after the Sudbury date. Put together, the Thursday and Friday gave the room two different Canadian acts in two nights: a Saskatchewan baritone first, then a band from Montreal with a pedal steel.

Thirteen days earlier, on 29 June, Monster Truck had played Crocks at NV, and on 30 July The Motorleague followed.

Thirty-two dollars

C$32 sat in the upper half of the range. Across the fourteen priced shows of 2019 in the record, tickets ran from C$10 to C$45. Wall’s ticket the night before was seven dollars cheaper. It came to a little over three times the year’s cheapest ticket and about seven-tenths of its dearest, and the shop showed a single tier for the night.

The other shows of the season are on the shows page. The band’s next album, Salt, came out on BMG in June 2023.