Miss Quincy & The Showdown

With roots originally planted deep within the frozen terrain of northern B.C., Roadside Recovery is the third full-length album from Canadian all-girl band, Miss Quincy & The Showdown. The album boasts a penetratingly powerful soundscape that bridges the gaps between rock ‘n’ roll, blues, soul and a speckle of gospel.

The album effortlessly transports listeners to a timelessly cool wood-panelled rock bar you’d expect to frequent in Austin, Texas, where patrons drink beer with a side of whiskey and are treated to live performances from amateur bands that eventually take the music industry by storm. Roadside Recovery kicks off extremely strong with the track “Bad Love.” With a thumping bass line that mimics a heart pumping with adrenaline, it perfectly sets the stage for the other nine powerful tracks that follow.

The collection has a beautiful storyline to it, carrying a strong build through standout tracks like “Making Money” and “Wild Fucking West,” until it climaxes and brings things home with the title track. The band also shows their diversity by slowing things down slightly with numbers “Talkin’ Trash” and “Take It to the Well,” which show a vulnerable, sexy side and perfectly round out the album.

One consistent element is the raunchy-bluesy guitar riffs, superb drum lines and incredibly powerful vocals paired with enticing lyrics, with which Miss Quincy & The Showdown mesmerize. Roadside Recovery is a robustly memorable album that is exemplary within its genre, bringing in classic elements you would expect from bluegrass forefathers of the 1930s but never losing its modern aesthetic. This is a must-listen for anyone who would like the opportunity to fill their veins with authoritative tuneage. - Beatroute Magazine

Roadside Recovery (Independent)

Hailing from the wilds of northern B.C., Miss Quincy and the
leather-clad ladies of Showdown are happy hitting the road
in a worn-out tour van, shameless about their classic rockroots.
On Roadside Recovery, Miss Quincy’s third album and
first with the Showdown, the band has nothing to be
ashamed of anyhow, slamming down no-frills, dirty blues like
shots of Jack Daniel’s in a bloodstained dive.
Influenced by the likes of Joan Jett and the Black Keys,
singer-guitarist Miss Quincy—aka Jody Peck—favours
stripped-down, searing-guitar odes to old flames and cheap
bars. Whether she’s laying down a venomous lick on “Bad Love”, as
drums pound like a hangover, or promising that “this one’s gonna
hurt” on the torch song “Damn You”, her six-string slinging and
controlled voice seem effortless.

Though much of Roadside Recovery sticks stubbornly to its bluesrock
groove, jukebox ballad “Talkin’ Trash” is a punchy, ’60sinspired
standout, complete with gospel-choir oohs in the vein of
retro girl-groups. Meanwhile, on the soul-breathing “Take It to the
Well”, Quincy’s pipes are rust-red one moment, and then cool as
blue smoke the next.

With “Water Tower”, a shadowy tale of a broken-down farm, amp buzzing anticipation builds, before the album smoulders out with
the burnt-rubber smell of a life spent proudly on the road.

VIVIAN PENCZ - Georgia Straight

May 1, 2014

Miss Quincy says being on the road with her band has shaped and refined their music.

Miss Quincy and The Showdown
May 3, 8 p.m. | Media Club, 695 Cambie
Tickets: $10 at northerntickets.com

It’s a Tuesday afternoon, and we’ve caught Miss Quincy and The Showdown in the middle of a quintessentially rock ’n’ roll enterprise.
OK, maybe we’re stretching it just a tiny bit. They’re sitting in a grocery store parking lot in Edmonton with bags full of vegetables and other healthy foods, just about to make themselves sandwich wraps for lunch.

The three-piece, led by Miss Quincy (a.k.a. Jody Peck), might be self-described “road dogs” but they’re not interested in killing themselves on a continuous diet of french fries and beef dip to make a point about how bad-ass they are. They’re making their point with their music, a raw, earthy blend of blues and soul-based rock that howls with the best of them, especially on their latest album, Roadside Recovery.
The Vancouver-based band now calls the road home, playing hundreds of gigs a year across Canada and occasionally Europe. It shows.
This is Miss Quincy’s third album, but the first that credits her band, as well, something she feels is important considering the amount of work
they’ve done together.

Q Do you see Roadside Recovery as being a departure from your first two albums?
A I’ve had a few people say it’s a departure, but nobody makes art fully formed in a personal style. You work at it. The music we’ve been making is refined by being on the road, if you can call making music on the road “refined.” The songs on Roadside Recovery were played to hundreds of audiences. They were the ones that stood out. When you play to that many audiences, you see what works in different situations.

Q By different situations you mean different crowds or venues?
A Maybe both? I started going away from quiet music because it didn’t hold up in loud bars. I wanted the music to be heard, so that meant I had to play electric. Eventually it affects how you write. You learn to write about your experiences, learn what works and what doesn’t and all of a sudden you have this cohesive thing that comes out organically. It comes from playing on the road, this authentic experience that makes sense and speaks to the lifestyle. We’re road dogs.

Q That’s a very outmoded way of doing things for many young musicians, who seem to look to something like American Idol for the best way to do things.
A It’s the only way we know how to do it. We’ve been doing everything from the bottom up, not the top down. It’s as grassroots as it gets. When you look into the audience and see 15 of the same faces that you only know from playing shows, and at the end of the night all your expenses are paid and you’ve had a beautiful experience with the audience, well, that’s living the dream. For better or for worse.

Q I heard that you’d shot a couple of videos, but the files were stolen recently.
A It’s an unfortunate situation. The hard drive got stolen with the video for Bad Love and Making Money (from Roadside Recovery) and we
haven’t got any leads on it. It was a lot of effort and money, and it’s heartbreaking. The awful thing is that the hard drive is useless to anybody but us, and it’s probably in a garbage can somewhere.

Q Are you going to redo the videos?
A We’ll end up doing some more videos, but I don’t know if we’ll do them for the same songs. My heart just wouldn’t be in it. We unfortunately made those videos for a particular time period, in time with the album release.

Q Considering the amount of time you spend on the road, I can see why you’re careful with things like nutrition.
A I guess that kind of kills our credibility, doesn’t it? We’re sort of health-food nerds. We’ve also been talking about bringing one of those
machines that makes individual-sized drink portions on the road with us. So much for being bad-ass. Still, we balance it out by getting drunk
every night. That’s what life is all about — balance.”

© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun - Vancouver Sun

"No doubt the “voice” is the star of the show for me but that’s not to take anything away from the songs themselves, clear and uncluttered arrangements provide the structure to a range of styles with a warm vintage feel" - Beat Surrender (UK)

"No doubt the “voice” is the star of the show for me but that’s not to take anything away from the songs themselves, clear and uncluttered arrangements provide the structure to a range of styles with a warm vintage feel" - Beat Surrender (UK)

"boasts a virtuoso vocal performance"

- Rich Morris (UK) - Soundlab.com (UK)

"This is an of-the-moment cold time take on old time music that could well make Miss Quincy a hip name to drop in the future. She has a strenuous, forceful voice that has character and carnivale clarity. The plaintive songs are rooted in strong woman blues, vaudeville vehemency and string band sanctity...sounds like it should have been played in an Alaskan mining camp in the 1890's or in a cabaret in Berlin in the 1930s." - Lonesome Highway (UK)

"You don’t have to try to hard to get to like Miss Quincy even if she is brash, bold and seemingly constantly drinking. Perhaps she is the perfect person to take home to mama; or, at the very least, her latest album exhibiting exceptional roots music certainly is.

- Slavko Bucifa (UK) - The Line of Best Fit (UK)

"Tipping her hip hat to earlier times and the rugged northern beauty that has been the backdrop of her life, [Miss Quincy’s] songs are beautifully crafted and she sings with an energy that’s at once fresh and fun and daring - a reflection perhaps of her pioneer family energy, of roaming the Yukon on horseback, living in BC’s oil rig territory, and working her family owned hunting lodge. It’s no surprise that her growing number of listeners are jumping on for the adventure. She’s the real deal and she’s good."

- Bettyanne Hampton, Executive/Artisic director North Peace Cultural Centre, Co-founder Vancouver Island MusicFest - Bettyanne Hampton, Executive/Artisic director North Peace Cultural Centre, Co-founder Vancouver Isla

"Miss Quincy is a raunchy and sassy young belter and she is probably right about Your Mama, but I have to say that she really works for me! I admit that the more I listen to this little joy the more I think of ladies like Maria Muldaur and Bonnie Raitt but mostly I just cue it up again and enjoy it all over again. What an unexpected delight."

- Marco Gandolfi Music News (UK - Music News (UK)

"Steering away from the major record labels has allowed Miss Quincy to deliver us the brilliant ''Your Mama Don't Like Me''. The album has a wonderfully crafted blues/country/folk feel, with a variety of instruments all backed up by Miss Quincy soulful voice."

- Adam Hardy (UK) - allgigs.co.uk (UK)

"Steering away from the major record labels has allowed Miss Quincy to deliver us the brilliant ''Your Mama Don't Like Me''. The album has a wonderfully crafted blues/country/folk feel, with a variety of instruments all backed up by Miss Quincy soulful voice."

- Adam Hardy (UK) - allgigs.co.uk (UK)

Recorded in a log cabin amidst below zero temperatures up in Northern British Columbia, Miss Quincy's debut solo album reaches this reviewer in similar conditions, albeit the comparatively kinder snowy terrain of a seasonal South Yorkshire. The warmth created in the studio, aided by liberal quantities of whiskey, has transferred well onto disc and proves to be just the tonic for these cold nights. Recalling the heyday of the great blues women of the 1930s, Quincy creates music from another era entirely, yet loses none of its contemporary edge.

Stylistically fusing early blues with bluegrass, old timey and even Kletzmer, Miss Quincy and co deliver an album, seemingly uncluttered by over-arrangement or studio gadgetry. There's no unnecessary sugar coating to Miss Quincy's determinedly bluesy vocal set against a bluegrass backdrop, courtesy of a fine cast of A Grade Canadian musicians including, Craig Korth on guitar and banjo, Reno Finch on mandolin, Pete Mynett on upright bass and Josh Giesbrecht on violin, together with additional dobro, steel guitar and piano.

The title song, Your Mama Don't Like Me, a jazz-infused bar room foot-tapper of an opener, shows precisely where the rest of the album is going with a whiskey-soaked vocal performance of a seasoned barfly. There's a sense of the vaudeville in some of the compositions; dramatic, almost theatrically so, each song infused with a gypsy spirit and a healthily carefree attitude.

The nine songs and one instrumental collectively demonstrate Miss Quincy's approach to grassroots music, the album being the culmination of the years of playing festivals, bar rooms, street corners and house concerts on both sides of the Atlantic. The retro approach is maintained throughout whether borrowed from old time country such as the banjo-led Wild Mountain Flower or the bluesy barrelhouse of Dirty Boat. Water and Whiskey, featuring Lance Loree's dreamy steel guitar provides a little Hawaiian sunshine amidst the frost.

Miss Quincy's most outstanding vocal performance on the album, is the heart wrenching Record Store, with its memorable metaphor of too many lovers being likened to a 'crowded record store', bringing with it a temporary moment of reflection amongst the foot-tappers.

Closing the album, the well rounded coupling of Miss Quincy's harmonica and Pete Mynett's upright bass, prove to be all that's necessary to bring Memphis Minnie's Bad Luck Woman back to life, with a fitting tribute to an obvious influence.

Allan Wilkinson
Northern Sky - Northern Sky folk-roots-acoustic (UK)

"Feisty is really not a big enough word for the amount of sass she brings to her music" "...genuinely different" "...lyrics pointed and insightful" "...sounds remarkably like Patsy Cline".

- Jeremy Searle Maverick Magazine (UK) - Maverick Magazine (UK)

"Canadian roots songstress carries on her upbeat spirit that makes nods towards jazz, gypsy and melodrama in an intriguing mix of styles...arrangements that hark back to the hot dance clubs of the 20's and credit where credit is due, she pulls it off with considerable aplomb...the balance of vocals and music just right, the results are stunning...Without question, the talent is there..."

- The Music Critic (UK)
- The Music Critic (UK)

"Her blend of acoustic roots, blues, jazz and classic country has attitude to burn, her accompanying musicians are effortlessly proficient, her lyrics pointed an insightful and the result is an album that, in an overcrowded market, can lay claim to being genuinely different… 'Record Store' is a delicate piece that shows off a voice with more range and subtlety than you might expect and 'Water and Whiskey' recalls the full, rich sorrow of Patsy Cline. A mighty fine set, then."

- Jeremy Searle, Rock N' Reel (UK) - Rock N' Reel (UK)

"Miss Quincy has a wonderfully expressive voice and she can also turn her hand to acoustic guitar, banjo and harmonica." "...sassy, energetic and powerful voice." "...compelling listen from start to finish with great songwriting, resourceful singing and varied arrangements."

- Michael Hingston, Country Music People (UK) - Country Music People (UK)

"It’s almost an embarrassment on an Americana website to find that almost every excellent new act that comes to one’s attention is actually Canadian, but that’s simply the way it is. The sassy Miss Quincy, hailing from the northern reaches of British Columbia, instantly joins those ranks with her self-released debut album."

- Naomi Koppel, Backroads Music (UK)
- Backroads (UK)

Here’s a thought. Or rather another thought as I have many thoughts. What if we moved Canada a bit closer to the UK so that Miss Quincy could come visit more often? We could even get God involved – it would be a good time for a miracle - just so She could prove that She hasn’t abandoned this once glorious country.

Now, I might possibly have had a small refreshment or two before this album offered itself up to me for judgement but, and this is a time for honesty, class is class. As hard as this is to believe, I’m no fan of roots/folk/Americana type musicians generally and that should have pretty much finished off Miss Quincy’s chances of getting anything other than a kicking from my ink filled rigger boots. Only she didn’t for she and the musicians involved have brought a big of magic to an increasingly dull genre. Even in conventionality (“Wild Mountain Flower”, for example), Miss Quincy evokes the clarity and affection of early Dolly Parton rather than the bastardised modern day genre known as Americana. With more than a nod to other pure musical influences (and perhaps Jason Webley while she is at it), Miss Quincy takes us on a dance around the gypsy campfire in “Reno’s Song” and on through the shadows with “Nobody With You”.

Even the industrial strength grumpiness normally resident in my heart was overcome by the music to be found on this album. Miss Quincy has stamped her character all over it and I, for one, want to get to know her better. Time to get on the Internet thingy and see what else she has done…


Available from CD Baby.


Review by: Bluesbunny - Bluesbunny Music Reviews (UK)

Miss Quincy
Album:Your Mama Don't Like Me
Label:Self Released
Website: http://www.missquincy.net/
This is an album that could easily slip into legend, like "The Campfire Tapes". Singer/Songwriter retreats to a log cabin in British Columbia in a cold snap and writes classic old timey album playing music gathered around a log fire between bouts of whiskey consumption. That in a nutshell is the origin of "Your Mama Don't Like Me". Miss Quincy sounds like it was fun to record, there's foot tappin' and I swear you can hear the crack of a log in the fire on one track. It's got an edge to it accentuated by a slight drawl to the vocal. I didn't think albums like this got made anymore. - FATEA Magazine (UK)

"Canadian Miss Quincy sounds like she was born in a frontier saloon, Your Mama Don’t Like Me, (Self Released - 4 stars) an exotic blend of country, bluegrass fiddles, rockabilly and whiskey warmed by the fire of her mountain cabin where her oddly timeless-sounding album was recorded."

- Q Magazine (UK) - Q Magazine (UK)

"...it actually captures a vibe and a mood, a moment in time that could not be captured had the musicians not all been sitting in a room. I'm not sure if this song was recorded in the above way, but it sounds very "roomy". And I love it."

- Craig Norris, CBC Radio 3
- CBC Radio 3

"Miss Quincy is a big voice from a small town. She brings the Wild West to the big city. Whiskey drenched banjo, brass rail tapping bass, saloon door swinging fiddle. There’s a timely song on this CD: Record Store. Serve up another shot of Miss Quincy."

- BC Musician Magazine - BC Musician Magazine

“A definite star for the future”

- Ralph McLean, BBC Radio Ulster - BBC Radio (UK)

“A definite star for the future”

- Ralph McLean, BBC Radio Ulster - BBC Radio (UK)

"What impressed me most was the quality of the original tunes, which made made up almost all of the first set... It’s not often one hears a young group with catchy, well-constructed melodies, interesting and relevant lyrics, and a real stage presence. That’s Miss Quincy and the Ramblers...
Miss Quincy ain’t just another pretty face with a guitar. Did I mention she can sing? Her voice is a welcome change from the over-produced, synthesized female drones filling commercial airwaves these days. It has character and bite, like a good cigar."
-Markham Hislop - The Calgary Beacon

If I had a say in the matter... I would appoint "Miss Quincy and the Ramblers" official band of the Peace Country. Maybe it's hard to explain, but if you have seen them perform before you know what I mean. The energy and enthusiasm of the Peace, with songs about The Peace Country and stuff that I feel only Peace Country folks really understand!

-Russell Eagleston, Publisher Northern Groove Magazine - Northern Groove Magazine

As one of the more popular house concert venues in the Toronto Ontario area you can imagine that I receive many CD’s through the transom to listen to. Lately I spent an afternoon (yes a whole afternoon after 3 times through) listening to “Your Mama Don’t Like Me” By British Columbia’s “Miss Quincy”. Miss Quincy’s songwriting is very strong, with some of the most unique phrasing I have ever heard. Musicians on this release are second to none. I highly recommend you give this CD a listen. If you are in the position to book talent I would strongly urge you to book Miss Quincy……"I plan to” - Don Howard, Caledon House Concerts - Don Howard, Caledon House Concerts

Charted #5 Canada wide Folk/Roots/Blues November 2010 issue - Exclaim Magazine