Local rock goddess Carmen Townsend is playing close to a dozen gigs in Australia this month, ending the year with a New Year’s Eve performance at the renowned Peat’s Ridge Festival.
Townsend’s debut album Waitin’ and Seein’ was released on November 19th in Australia and has been getting good reviews. It will be released in Canada on January 25th but if you’d like a preview you can stream the entire album at CBC Radio 3.
Chris Eagar, our man in “the other” Sydney, caught one of Carmen’s recent performances and shared with us his thoughts:
For anyone who knows a thing or two about Australia they will have heard of Vegemite, a thick chocolate coloured spread loved by young and old alike. Being a yeast extract, it is savoury and grows on you until you just can’t get enough. Watching Carmen Townsend play at my local Aussie watering hole I couldn’t help but see a resemblance. Any unsuspecting observer would be expecting soft melodies from this songstress, but would soon be knocked over as she rocked out and unleashed her full array of talents.
Other than me, not a single person in the crowd understood when Carmen said that she was from “the other Sydney, Cape Breton’s Sydney”. From one corner of the globe to the other, Carmen is on tour ‘Down Under’ to release her debut album Waitin’ and Seein’. And for a Cape Bretoner living far from our fair isle it was a fabulous taste of home.
Still dizzy with jetlag, Carmen showed no signs of a disrupted equilibrium. Working her way through an arsenal of guitars, it was when she swapped instruments with her bass guitarist that I was really impressed. Not only can this girl sing, but she can play a mean instrument. Reverberating a full sound filling the venue, I was impressed with how tight the trio sounded. I couldn’t help but think to myself how powerful the Cape Breton music scene is and how deserving our musicians are to be on a global stage. And if the crowd was any indication, this wasn’t the last time Australia will taste the sweet sounds from Carmen Townsend.
