Holly Springs Disaster and Architects in Thunder Bay, 12 August 2010

The announcement for this one put the words “farewell tour” beside the name of a band from Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan. The Holly Springs Disaster had formed there in 2005 and had made metalcore for five years by the time it called time. The Thunder Bay stop fell on Thursday, 12 August 2010. The date went public on 7 June, more than nine weeks ahead.

Architects, a band from Brighton on England’s south coast, shared the run, along with the Toronto band Structures. The tour schedule placed the Thunder Bay date at The Office, with Crocks in brackets after it, and that is the room name it used for the club.

Fourteen nights across the country

The run opened on 3 August at the Rickshaw Theatre in Vancouver and moved east through Calgary, Edmonton and Regina. Winnipeg’s West End Cultural Centre followed on 11 August. Thunder Bay came the next night, the sixth date of fourteen, and the schedule then dropped south to Sudbury for the Jubilee Room on 13 August.

There was a gap in the middle. Regina on 7 August was followed by four days with no listed date before Winnipeg, a breather on a long prairie route. After Winnipeg the dates ran night after night: Thunder Bay, then Sudbury, then the southern Ontario cities that fill the second half.

Read as a map, the sequence follows the Trans-Canada corridor around the top of Lake Superior. Bands going from Winnipeg to Ontario have one obvious place to stop in between, and this was it.

After Sudbury the tour took Ottawa, St. Catharines, Oshawa, Barrie, Hamilton and London before ending on 21 August at the Opera House in Toronto.

The band on stage that night

By the end the group was Michael Froh on lead vocals and keys, guitarists Josh Guillaume and Tony Davalos, bassist Andy Foord and drummer Dan Marranca. Its releases were two EPs, a self-titled first one from 2005 and Motion Sickness Love, put out on 18 September 2007 through the label Underground Operations.

The 2007 material also produced a music video, for the song “Up in Smoke”.

Two EPs and a farewell tour make a compact career. A whole coast-to-coast run had been built around a catalogue that fits in a single sitting. Anyone who came to Crocks that Thursday was seeing a band at the end of its Canadian dates, with eight more nights still ahead of it.

The Brighton band up the bill

Architects formed in 2004 in Brighton around the twin brothers Dan and Tom Searle. Their album Hollow Crown had come out in 2009 on Century Media Records, so in August 2010 it was the most recent record they carried across the country.

The Here and Now followed in 2011 and Daybreaker in 2012. The band was back in Thunder Bay for that last one, and the 2012 tour page covers it.

Structures were on that later bill too, so the same Toronto opener reached the same room in two consecutive summers, with two different bands above it. Between the two visits the opener had gone from the middle of a farewell tour to the first name under a British headliner.

After the farewell

A metal news site ran the tour announcement on 8 June 2010, a day after the Thunder Bay post, with the same three bands and fourteen dates. Thunder Bay, with roughly 108,000 people on the north shore of Lake Superior, sat among far larger stops on that itinerary, Toronto and Vancouver above all.

The break did not last. In July 2014 the Moose Jaw band announced it was returning and booked two nights at the Danforth Music Hall in Toronto, 19 and 20 December of that year. The tour Thunder Bay saw on 12 August 2010 was a pause of a little over four years, and the word on the announcement turned out to be premature.

No ticket price or start time survives for this date. Crocks stood at 16 Cumberland Street South, and other nights at the room that summer are on the shows page. What the tour dates do show is a band with eight nights left, and a small city sixth in the count.