Royal Canoe have announced a Spring tour with Bombay Bicycle Club. The band will be supporting the English indie rockers on tour dates across the US and Canada. Royal Canoe’s debut LP Today We’re Believers is out now on Roll Call Records.

A six-piece ensemble from Winnipeg, Manitoba, Royal Canoe give you everything, but on their own maniacally hybrid terms. It’s one thing to reference a particular style, or even a range of styles. It’s another thing entirely to grab huge handfuls of sounds from pretty much anywhere, throw them all together and come up with something.

For live shows, Royal Canoe would rather lug hundreds of pounds of keyboards, mixers and pedals across the continent (very much like a voyager canoe, in fact) than rely on lengthy backing tracks. They actually play every part, every time. And while their van is packed with hardware, much of that hardware is, in turn, crammed full of widely-sourced samples and adoringly homemade sounds.

In 2012 alone, Royal Canoe released two independent EPs, Extended Play and Purple & Gold. They took part in Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra’s New Music Festival, arranging and performing a portion of Beck’s Song Reader, an album released as sheet music and published by McSweeny’s. So far, the band has played nearly one hundred shows. For 2013, the main act (so far) is releasing their full-length album, Today We’re Believers, with L.A.’s Roll Call Records and Toronto’s Nevado Records.

They have cited their hometown as a core influence for their work, in particular, Winnipeg’s extreme perpetual cycle through euphoric summers under gigantic prairie skies, to near-debilitating winters that instill their own intense, almost aggressive energy into the psyche. While the 2012 EPs feel more consistently located in hot open spaces, more about floating in strangers’ backyard pools without them knowing and biking all sweaty down roads that don’t actually end, Today We’re Believers leans more heavily into urban side of things, cruising the downtown core at night with streetlights fractured and smeared by frost patterns on the windows. The full cycle is balanced out.

If you really, absolutely had to reduce Royal Canoe to a single ‘thing’ you could say they catch the moment of explosive, blissful restlessness that hits you when a savage winter finally eases into light, and you feel some actual warmth on those pasty, vitamin-D deprived limbs and all they want to do, suddenly, is move.

‘Today We’re Believers’ LP Tracklisting

01. Today We’re Believers
02. Hold on to the Metal
03. Just Enough
04. Exodus of the Year
05. Bathtubs
06. Button Fumbla
07. Show Me Your Eyes
08. Birthday
09. Nightcrawlin
10. Stemming
11. Light
12. If I Had a House

Tour Dates With Bombay Bicycle Club:

04.11 – Sacramento, CA – Assembly
04.13 – Las Vegas, NV – Vinyl
04.14 – Phoenix, AZ – Crescent
04.18 – Tucson, AZ – Club Congress
04.20 – San Francisco, CA – Fillmore
04.22 – Portland, OR – Wonder Ballroom
04.23 – Seattle, WA – Neptune
04.24 – Vancouver, BC – Commodore
04.26 – Salt Lake City, UT – Urban Lounge
04.27 – Denver, CO – Gothic
04.29 – Minneapolis, MN – Varsity Theater
04.30 – Chicago, IL – House Of Blues
05.01 – Columbus, OH – Newport Music Hall
05.03 – Toronto, ON – Danforth Music Hall
05.04 – Montreal, QC – Corona
05.06 – Boston, MA – Royale
05.07 – Philadelphia, PA – Union Transfer
05.08 – New York, NY – Webster Hall
05.12 – Chapel Hill, NC – Cats Cradle
05.13 – Atlanta, GA – Terminal West
05.14 – Nashville, TN – Exit Inn
05.17 – Dallas, TX – Granada
05.18 – Austin, TX – Emo’s
05.19 – Houston, TX – Fitzgeralds

http://royalcanoe.com/believers/