AV & The Inner City is a six piece, all-female, soul, roots and blues-infused vocal group from Edmonton’s inner city.
They will be performing in Prince George on Friday, October 25 as part of Coldsnap Festival at the Knox Performance Centre.
Embracing the diversity and wide-ranging musical backgrounds of each of its members, AV & The Inner City creates a Roots-Soul blend of R&B and non-religious Gospel style music that is easy to sing along with, and hard to forget.
Their inception story is as captivating as their music: the group formed after each member attended and performed at a series of socially distanced porch concerts hosted by AV (Ann Vriend) during the pandemic.
Garnering accolades early on, the group took home the Edmonton Folk Music Festival’s “Emerging Artist Award” during their inaugural Western Canada tour in the summer of 2023, and this year received a feature in Porter Airlines in-flight magazine, Edmonton’s Edify Magazine, spins on CBC and CKUA, and reached 20,000 streams on Spotify in their first three months as a group.
Featuring JUNO-nominated Indigenous vocalist Debbie Houle, Jazz singer and musicologist Johwanna Alleyne, Crystal Eyo of pop/R&B group “Mercy Funk”, Czech Republic songwriter Alenka Lundell, and multi-instrumentalist Jenn Dahlen– all under the guidance of award-winning Canadian Blues/Roots artist, AV (Ann Vriend)– the group is a mosaic of diverse Canadian talent. The group will be releasing an inspirational, Gospel-style new single about standing in our own way, titled “Lion at the Gate” on Friday, October 18, 2024.
Written by AV, “Lion at the Gate” was recorded at Riverdale Recorders, located just down the street from where the group began in Edmonton’s inner city neighborhood of McCauley, and was co-produced by AV and Elie Mercier.
Soulful and dynamic, AV and the Inner City’s third single, “Lion at the Gate”, is an encouraging and hopeful song about recognizing habits that keep people in their own way– and then overcoming those self-imposed obstacles. Weaving elements of roots and soul into their enveloping gospel harmonies the track was written long before the pandemic, and remained unreleased until it found its perfect fit within the group’s collective sound.
Using the symbol of a lion standing before a gate the song focuses on self-sabotage and the fears that keep people from fulfillment, while offering a message of hope and encouragement that one can always make it past the lion. From its melodic, sparse vocal and piano focused introduction, “Lion at the Gate” rapidly blooms into a powerful anthem with powerful vocal harmonies in a gospel-choir arrangement style. Though the instrumentation of the non-vocal elements is intentionally sparse (piano, bass, and drums) the striking group vocals and AV’s soaring voice unite to create an unbelievably full-bodied sound.
The cover artwork for the song features a photo of the Northern Lights, taken this past summer in the greater Edmonton area, which quite strikingly resembles a lion, and which was serendipitously captured by a partner of one of the band members just as the group was looking for an image to fit their song. The song’s final refrain, “you can make it go,” closes the song with a sense of empowerment and triumph, and the realization that the very lion itself can seem less terrifying as it is recognized and named.
October 25, 2024 – Prince George, BC – Coldsnap Festival – Tickets