One of the newer groups I was able to check out at the recent Music New Brunswick weekend hails from Saint John. The Earthbound Trio are indeed a three-piece, featuring Dwayne Doucette on guitar and vocals, Bob Fitzgerald on stand-up bass, and recent import from the U.K., Dave Crewe on drums and percussion. They are on the road this weekend, a good chance for you to catch them as well.

The Trio hasn't released a disc or downloads for sale as yet, but you can hear their first recodings online, a generous seven songs, featured at http://www.earthboundtrio.ca/. While the trio is set up as an acoustic unit, that's merely the base of each track. The idea for several of the cuts is to add on, whether it's as simple as a harmony or harmonica here or there, or such major shifts as layers of electric guitars and electronic washes of horns. So a song like Horizon starts out softly, adding a bit as it goes, but still a nice little strummer, a campfire cut for the first couple of verses. Then percussion drops in on the chorus, some keyboards, it's a largely gentle and mellow tune. But Late Night Bus makes its rock presence felt way earlier, with full drums joining even before the first vocals, and that's joined by lots of harmonies on the chorus. By the second verse, an electric guitar is doing a second riff, and it eventually becomes louder that the acoustic. Everything keeps building, and now our small song is a big one, with handclaps, really pounding drums, and epic qualities along the lines of Hey Rosetta!

Over the course of the cuts available, the band shows they can go from ballads to reggae to rock, and that's a pretty good trick for a three piece. They're getting the word out in other parts of the province this weekend, with two shows. Friday night they will be at The Red Herring in St. Andrews, and on Saturday it's back to Moncton, where you can find Earthbound Trio at Plan B.