Valley at First Avenue (09 Oct 2024)

What is admirable about Valley is that they want to help their fellow musicians on their first tour, so they asked Charli Adams to open. This was her first Minneapolis appearance.


Her stage setup is quite unique. She has a table, a photo frame, a drink, a couple of lamps. It was like we were seeing her in her living room.



She mostly played tracks from her debut album Bullseye and she mentioned she wrote “Time of My Life”, right before going on this tour with her “best friend Laurie” (who was behind the scene).



Highlight of her set was a cover of Jimmy Eat World’s “The Middle.”



She ended her set with “Backseat”, which is perhaps her signature song. She introduced it as the song that got her on this Valley tour. She said someone put that song on a mixtape and it landed in Valley’s playlist and they loved it so much that they reached out to her.



In stark contrast of a quiet singer/songwriter of Adams, was a very loud and energetic full band called Mickey Darling… making their Minneapolis debut. I actually really like them, they had a great singer called Scott, and they sang about being “a sh***y dancer” and getting bored waiting for the future.



The best part of the show was their drummer, Danny, was originally from Minneapolis, so they asked one of Danny’s family, named Jay, to come on stage with them to play saxophone. They’ve never had sax on their songs before, so they weren’t even sure if it would work. And you know what? It worked, they should have sax on all their songs.



This was one of Toronto’s Valley biggest headlining venue to date. The formation of the band was almost by accident, ten years ago, there were two bands that accidentally got double-booked for recording time. The two bands met and found out they shared the same passion and, thus, Valley was formed. I don’t love the name (it’s too common), some of the other band names they considered were Thieves, The Engineers, and Grouphug. They should have called themselves Accidental Booking.



After a few EPs and singles, the band released their debut Maybe in 2019. It was that album that helped them win the Breakthrough Group of the Year at the 2020 Juno Awards.



Their latest album Water the Flowers, Pray for a Garden came out in August and it was announced that it was the first time the band is a trio, featuring Rob Laska, Alex Dimauro, and Karah James, as Mickey Brandolino left the band to pursue music production full-time. For their live shows, they added additional guitarist.



While early in their set, lead singer and guitarist Rob Laska, took center stage… drummer Karah James would sometime take over singing. It’s clear that fans loved her and wants more from her.



Their new (or old) songs “Water the Flowers, Pray for a Garden” has more in pop music direction, and it’s colorful and fun.



Valley’s third album Water the Flowers, Pray for a Garden is out now on Capitol Records/Universal Music Canada.