Honesty and wit permeate the lyrics, and musically Alma Mater is bombastic one minute and serene the next.

8 MP3 Songs in this album (27:25) !
Related styles: Rock: College Rock, Pop: Pop/Rock, Type: Lyrical

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Details:
Dave Norris & Local Ivan's debut full-length album Alma Mater is bombastic one minute and serene the next. Honesty and wit permeate the lyrics where singer and lead songwriter Dave Norris attempts to sing about some fairly ethereal things, like sound, and light, and the popular arts, declaring in the title track "Maybe that's all there is!"

The group are no strangers to recording and playing out live having released two EPs, No Scuttle and New Thoughts in 2009 and 2010 respectively, and toured through Montreal to Toronto on several occasions. The group has opened for acts The Good Lovelies, Owen Steel et al., Flecton Big Sky, Minto, Parlour Steps, The Darling Daemas, The Wilderness of Manitoba, and Hooded Fang among others.

In the lyrics Norris is questioning the celebrity 'thing' and the culture industries built on exploiting and perpetuating inferiority in its consumers. The role of Local Ivan (or village idiot, if we take the Russian literature reference) pops up throughout, but the spin is interesting: if we think of the character as a culture consumer stripped of the safe-guards that a decent upbringing and education can bring, confronted with massively popular culture products like music, television, and movies, where built-in to the sale is the permanent impossibility of being accepted 'as-is', and where normative behavior is reinforced one-size-fits-all; if we think of how some may not have the same tools to oppose the will of the marketing and advertising industry that surrounds these products, we start to uncover a quite unstable dude: jealous, paranoid, disgruntled, isolated, and at points institutionalized ("Woe Is Me") and suicidal ("Last Song").

It's definitely a caricature of the consumer that Norris attempts to portray (and soothe), but at times it exposes that wretched person to us as all-too-human, and reminds us that as witnesses, we share some responsibility. In the last song titled, ahem, "Last Song," our Local Ivan is implored to make an escape from the burden of the status-quo. And through what means? What else? Love. This is not a thesis paper, it's pop music. But the academic reference Alma Mater conjures when paired with the straight-up pop harmony and chord progression is the juxtaposition the album hinges on. This is a concept-y album that tries to lay bare the thin line between the artist and the fan, the producer and the consumer.