The Trews live at Crocks in Thunder Bay, 5 December 2014

Rock94 got the first credit on the poster, ahead of the promoter. The Trews came to Crocks on Friday 5 December 2014 with a tour named after “Rise in the Wake”, a single from their fifth album, and Loffredo & Associates shared the presenting line with the radio station.

Doors opened at eight. The event was 19+, photo ID was required, and advance tickets cost $25, sold at Rainbow on Bay, Extreme Pita, the club and online.

The self-titled fifth album

The Trews is the title of that fifth album, a self-titled record that came out on 22 April 2014 on Nettwerk. It was produced by Gavin Brown and the guitarist John-Angus MacDonald, and it was recorded at Noble Street Studios in Toronto. It debuted at number 3 on the Canadian albums chart, the band’s highest position there.

Three singles came from it that year: “What’s Fair Is Fair” in March, then “Rise in the Wake” and “New King”. The tour took the middle title and began in Montreal in October, so Thunder Bay arrived deep into the run.

A return to the room

The band was not new to the building. A listing of upcoming shows from February 2012 put The Trews at Crocks on Monday 19 March that year, with Poor Young Things. Names and date are all that the February 2012 list gives.

The two visits differ in shape. The 2012 date was a Monday with a support band and no stated price. The 2014 date was a Friday with a radio partner and a stated $25.

Between those two nights the band made two records. Hope & Ruin appeared in 2011, and the self-titled one followed in 2014. The shows page lists the rest of the room’s calendar.

Where the band came from

The group is Colin MacDonald on lead vocals and guitar, his brother John-Angus MacDonald on guitar, Jack Syperek on bass and Sean Dalton on drums. They formed in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, in 1997, and their first album, House of Ill Fame, came out in 2003 and went platinum in Canada. Den of Thieves followed in 2005, and No Time for Later in 2008.

The band’s best-known song was probably “Highway of Heroes”, written after the death of Captain Nichola Goddard in 2006, a soldier who had been a schoolmate of band members. All proceeds went to the Canadian Hero Fund, and the single had reached platinum in Canada by October 2014, two months before this show.

The Junos took notice early. The band was nominated for New Group of the Year in 2004, the year after the first album, and for Single of the Year in 2005. Those two nominations came from the first two albums, well before the Crocks visits.

Where $25 sat

Set beside the year’s other advance prices at the club, the Trews ticket lands in the middle. Evan Dando asked $18 in May and Swollen Members $25 that month, Beenie Man $30 in April and Machine Gun Kelly $35 four days before this show. A band with three gold or platinum albums charged what a Vancouver rap group had charged on a spring Sunday.

The outlet list had moved on since then. The May posters named Bean Fiend among the shops, and by December it was gone. The Machine Gun Kelly poster added Waking Giant Coffee Co., a coffee shop that was absent again four days later, when the Trews poster listed only Rainbow on Bay, Extreme Pita and Crocks itself.

Outlets came and went from one poster to the next. The online store stayed constant.

Four days after a rap show

Machine Gun Kelly had played the same room on Monday 1 December, four days earlier, with tickets at $35 in advance. His night was a rap show and this one was a rock show, but both were announced on the same day in mid-November. Their prices were ten dollars apart.

No support act was named for the Trews date. The bill carried the band’s website and Twitter handle and the station’s name, so it amounted to one band and one radio partner on a Friday. Set length and songs went unrecorded.