Hank Pine and Lily Fawn

"Well, they're dark, beautiful, dreamy, weird and highly original...showcasing both their adoration of all music forms and manic sense of humour.... you just gotta check 'em out!"

- Discorder Magazine

"More than interesting characters, these two are multi-talented musicians that sure know how to please an audience with their haunting yet beautiful noises. Their music tells a story.......... I am excited when I find CD liner notes containing
not only an 8 page mini comic book but a list of instruments including the following; cello, glockenspiel, musical saw, theremin, Wurlitzer, bells, accordion, electric saw, slide guitar, trumpet, pots n' pans, fire alarm, music boxes, and much, much more! Hank Pine and Lily Fawn do exactly this, and do it with such skill that I am amazed every time I put The Road to New Orleans double CD on for a listen." uberslut.com - uberslut.com

Osheaga, 10 pm: The bulk of the festival-goers were making a beeline from the instrumental music-box-meets-jack-in-the-box set of Explosions in the Sky, to the rock-is-dead wailings of Billy Corgan and the Smashing Pumpkins.
But a few of us were drawn off the beaten track towards the Tree Stage, where we sat cross-legged like children at story-time, facing a welcoming red-velvet curtain and a sign that read “The Hank and Lily Show“
“Don’t be afraid� Lily sang as she took the stage. “Don’t be afraid…until I tell you that you ought to be afraid.�
Let me enumerate the reasons that we may have be tempted to feel afraid: Hank is a leather-clad, post-apocalyptic raptor and Lily, despite her cuteness and child-like voice is sporting horns, wearing Tim-Burton tights, tap-dancing shoes, and playing the saw. The drummer is a wolf, and frankly, she looked possessed.
Darkness, rustling breeze and swaying trees were the perfect setting for this act. After all, they go by the names Hank Pine and Lily Fawn, and their backup musicians are a wolf, a bear and a zebra. But Pine and Fawn aren’t only creatures of the woods, they are also the terms of twisted love affairs.
Hank and Lily’s music is murderous and carnivalistic and dances a razor-fine line between gloom and glitter. It’s music that makes a marionette of you.
Also intriguing, Hank and Lily have a comic-book series - one of the songs they performed last night was a tribute to their co-comic-book character, Alligator Boy, who couldn’t make the flight from Victoria BC to join them in Montreal. I feel like I could spend days just immersing myself in the strange world of Hank and Lily.
I definitely plan to catch them again at Grumpy’s on Monday. Come see them. Don’t miss this show. And somebody, please, take these guys to the top.
- Indyish.com

Sitting in a booth on the third level of Dawson's whimsical Palace Grand Theatre, a friend to my left said he felt "just like Abraham Lincoln, before he was assassinated."

The feeling of occasion overcomes you in Dawson's famous playhouse.

And that magic finds its way into every corner of the Dawson City Music Festival.

Organizers bill the event as "Canada's tiny perfect festival" and the sales pitch is refreshingly honest.

The town's gold-rush facade, its far-away setting, its gritty folk and streets, its Yukon scenery and raunchy saloons all conspire to make you itch for a gunfight at high noon, and a rock concert at night.

But please, don't tell anyone south of 60 about the Dawson City Music Festival.

What makes Dawson's festival so perfect, so enchanting, is that it's our Yukon secret: a first class music festival in our favourite Yukon town.

Dawson's festival always mixes elements of musical strangeness and obscurity with more popular and accessible acts.

Unless you monitor the Canadian music scene with a microscope, you will hear unknown Canadian talent in Dawson.

This year's festival didn't fail.

But still, nothing could prepare me for Toronto's Owen Pallett, known to many by his stage name, Final Fantasy.

Pallett is likely best known as the guy who plays strings for Montreal's Arcade Fire.

After watching a workshop at the riverside gazebo Saturday afternoon, I struggled to describe his solo music to friend's who had yet to hear him.

"He's a violinist � but not like you're thinking," I said.

"He uses electronic gadgets to loop small bits of songs.. He keeps building and building them into these layered arrangements.

"I think he's a genius."

I said this after watching Pallett construct an entire Mariah Carey song, beats and all, with his violin and his electronic pedals.

He was playing at a cover-song workshop, after all.

Pallett's headline show later that night at the Palace Grande was, understandably, a bit harder to describe in a sentence.

Witnessing him weave crude thumps on the body of his violin, with screams into its electric pickup, and intricate melodies bowed on its strings, all into a musical climax, is a haunting experience.

You don't listen or watch a Final Fantasy show, you submit to it and allow Pallett to etch emotions into you with his bow.

Several people commented they had to close their eyes to experience it all.

Pallett's one-man technique of building song element loops into complex arrangements was the cutting edge at this year's festival.

Mihirangi, a singer-songwriter from New Zealand, layered airy voice texture loops with beats spit into the mike with Bjork-like melodies, then danced across the stage twirling poi in her hands as her music continued to play.

Looping technology enables musicians to create a performance bigger than playing an instrument or singing.

The other act I'll be describing to the unlucky ones who didn't make it to Dawson was decidedly low-tech in comparison.

But the cowboy-psychedelia-meets-punk-meets-shock-rock of Victoria, BC's Hank & Lily impressed nonetheless.

Imagine a Western-themed vaudeville act, in which a woman plays a damsel in distress while also playing an electric saw, the drums while standing up, and screaming baby-voiced lyrics.

To her side stood Hank, playing a guitar and singing distorted lyrics - into a gas mask.

Hank and Lily scared the heck out of me, and I loved it.

At times I caught myself wondering why the Dawson City Music Festival isn't bigger.

Could there be a cooler music festival in Canada, I thought?

It isn't hard to see how Dawson's music festival could be the next big thing on the Canadian music fest circuit.

But then I realized Dawson's obscurity and smallness are what make it so perfect.

It's a miniature weekend festival, tucked away into the northern exotica of the Klondike, known only by those few souls who venture north in search of adventure.

Let's hope it stays that way for years to come.

- Yukon News