The Ruffled Feathers
Pop, indie-rock group that has been lighting up Vancouver venues
The Ruffled Feathers climbed precarious cliffs and clambered over felled logs on the last sunny day of the season in a no-trespassing zone on a quest to find their spirit animals. A pair of seagulls and the crewmen of a tugboat were the only audience to a song about a castle floating over the Soviet Union.
It began with the young mandolin playing existentialist Charley Wu singing anthems with a loop pedal in the Gallery Lounge at the University of British Columbia. There he stumbled upon the soft-spoken sparrow Gina Loes. in October of 2008. He invited her travel through the woods with him to sing songs at the piano in his birdhouse. Together they made beautiful music and stretched their wings so wide that in January of 2009 they spotted the gilded melodies of trumpeter Andrew Lee sparkling through the skyscrapers and trees. With a few gathered sticks and battered bows their housemates Alex Leckie and Brian Lerher emerged from their nests on drums and bass and stitched together the heavenly and earthly sounds for the many tuneful evenings that would lay ahead.
From cities, forests, and deserts, the Ruffled Feathers converge in a cacophony of creations about home, the heart, and the seeds of a revolution as a chamber- pop, indie-rock group that has been lighting up Vancouver venues ever since. The Ruffled Feathers played their first show at Vancouver venue Café Monmartre in March of 2009. Together, the band recorded their first self-titled EP release produced by Charley Wu and released the record in September of 2009 
at Café Deux Soleil, along with the two music videos, Novy Mir and Ghost Pirates.
In September 2010, with vivacious percussionist Sam MacKinnon and the slick bassist Matty Jeronimo as the newest animals in the pack, the Ruffled Feathers have never had as much momentum. With a new-found spirit and enough velocity to escape the Earth’s gravity, they polished up their tracks from their self-titled EP and re-released in October 2010. They are currently working of a full length album planned for release in April 2011.
Around a small campfire they dance; with the gypsies and the communists, the pirates and their ghosts, and all the bucks and squirrels and sparrows of the forest they have made together.
Gina Loes sings slick oily phrases while her guitar begs her to continue her bold yet delicate strums. The strings of her ukulele stretch chaotically outwards like a harp fashioned on the antlers of an elk. If you were to see the world through Gina’s eyes, every lamp post would have twinkly lights and tap dancing shoes strung between them. Gina’s songs follow you past your epiglottis and inside yourself, then make you want to tell her that you’re secretly in love with your best friend.
Charley Wu‘s piano explodes with colour like the crab nebula. The ghosts that whisper insatiable torment in his ears are dismissed by a pure bow gliding across his mandolin. His keyboard is never complete without a hammer and sickle, and a single gaze from his eyes will reveal his past life: a deadly squid hungry for ambitiously naive pioneers. Charley’s songs will make you feel like those sailors staring into a dark ocean, wondering if they’ll ever make it to the new world alive.
Andrew Lee is what you get when you fuse sweet delicious peachy intonation with the sass of a thorny rose: a pineapple. His trumpet is a black hole in which the light of your soul is drawn in, then fired back out of the singularity with enough bravado and charisma to pull the moon a centimeter closer. When his voice massages Gina’s, you can almost hear two doves taking flight.
Sam MacKinnon anchors fluttering and flying songs to the earth with sticks, stones, and skins. He builds you a home with his steady and deceptively simple rhythms then demolishes it in the next moment with a fill as complex as calculus. Then, with the precision of a hawk, your ear drums are mice liberated from the field, caught and mesmerized by thumping wing beats in a final intrepid voyage to the frontier.
Matty Jeronimo enters the stage in a lightning flash of cool dauntlessness, followed three seconds later by thundering bass so shaking that you think a chasm might open up beneath your feet. His booming tones beckon exiled warriors from a distant apocalypse land. When behind a camera, Matty’s world is a slow-mo over-exposed laser light show, concatenated by the blinking strobes of his shutter.
