The Motorleague live at Crocks at NV in Thunder Bay, 30 July 2019

Don Levandier once turned a music video into a role-playing game. In July 2014 his band, The Motorleague, released a clip from the album Acknowledge, Acknowledge that doubled as an advert for Atlantic Canada: The RPG, a free download in the style of a 1990s Final Fantasy cartridge in which players wander the region’s music scene. It is a fair guide to the band’s temperament.

The Motorleague formed in Moncton, New Brunswick, in 2006, with Levandier singing and playing guitar. By the summer of 2019 they had thirteen years behind them, which is how a Maritime rock band came to be booked for Tuesday, 30 July at Crocks at NV in Thunder Bay.

A band that toured its own coast

The 2014 clip went out ahead of a summer run that stayed close to home: Fredericton on 17 July, Amherst and Halifax on the next two nights, St. John’s on 3 August, then Moncton, Fredericton again and Montreal by 10 August. Montreal was the farthest west it reached.

The autumn of 2015 stretched further. The Holding Patterns tour ran through the Maritimes and into Ontario, ending on 31 October, and several dates were shared with Godsmack and Sevendust, or with The Dying Arts. Thunder Bay lies a long way past the Ontario cities named on that route, and the 2019 date was the band’s turn to make the drive.

Three records and a producer

The first album, Black Noise, was released in May 2009 through Forward Music Group. Acknowledge, Acknowledge followed in 2013. Holding Patterns arrived on 16 October 2015 on Sonic Records, cut at Vespa Studios in Toronto with Eric Ratz producing, ten songs in all.

Ratz is better known for his work with Billy Talent and Cancer Bats. When Holding Patterns came out, Levandier described the lineup as four people with one vision, a group that had stopped apologising for being a straight-ahead rock band. A Tuesday club date four years later gave them no reason to change their mind.

What twelve dollars bought

Advance tickets were $12 plus a service fee, sold through the promoter’s online shop, and doors were at 8 p.m. Loffredo & Associates presented the night. Among the fourteen priced shows of 2019 on this site, prices run from $10 to $45, so a $12 ticket sat close to the bottom of that scale.

Set against the same room earlier in July, the gap is plain. Colter Wall’s Thursday night cost $25 in advance, and Half Moon Run’s Friday show was C$32. Both were more than double this one.

Tickets were sold through TicketScene, which took Visa, Visa Debit and MasterCard, and the night was billed plainly as The Motorleague live in concert. The billing named no tour. It read as a band with a catalogue coming through on a weeknight, priced to match.

The room on Red River Road

Crocks had moved on 5 October 2018. After about nine years at 16 Cumberland Street South, its events shifted into the NV Nightclub building at 228 Red River Road, as NetNewsLedger and CBC News both reported. Crocks shows were arranged to end early enough for NV to run its own late programme afterwards, so an 8 p.m. door suited the building’s day.

That made 30 July an early-evening rock show in a club that would change character once the band left the stage. On a Tuesday in high summer, with daylight lasting well past nine, it competed with patios as much as with other concerts. That is a reading of the calendar, not a stated reason.

Between two July weekends

Two of the month’s bigger names had already been through. Wall played on 11 July and Half Moon Run on 12 July. Eighteen days later a Moncton rock band with a modest ticket price and a video-game side project took the same stage.

The mix, country and then indie and then plain guitars and drums, is what a room this size ran on. A support act for the Tuesday was not announced. The other shows in the promoter’s calendar are on the shows page, and Ratz’s name comes back around in September, when Cancer Bats, another band he has produced, played the same floor.