Timber Timbre

History

Timber Timbre started out in 2005 as a one-person project for Taylor Kirk. After putting out two records on his own, Kirk released a self-titled album in January 2009 through Out of This Spark. The label Arts & Crafts then picked up the band, putting the album out again on June 30 in Canada and July 28 everywhere else. That same year, on June 15, the record made the longlist for the Polaris Music Prize, and Eye Weekly named it album of the year.

In 2009, Mika Posen and Simon Trottier came on board. Posen later said that playing with a group was still fresh for Kirk, since the last album had been mostly his own work and was only turned into a live band afterward. In 2011, Exclaim pointed out that while guest players had shown up on most Timber Timbre records, the core of the music was always Kirk’s personal vision.

The song "Magic Arrow" turned up in the Breaking Bad episode "Caballo Sin Nombre" and in The Good Wife episode "Bitcoin for Dummies." "Black Water" landed on the soundtrack for the 2012 comedy For a Good Time, Call..., the 2017 film Bottom of the World, and the TV series Russian Doll in 2019. "Demon Host" played during the end credits of the 2013 movie The Last Exorcism Part II, appeared in Sarah Polley’s 2012 documentary Stories We Tell, and was used in the 2014 film The Gambler.

The band’s fourth album, Creep on Creepin' On, came out in April 2011. It was one of ten shortlisted nominees for the 2011 Polaris Music Prize, which ended up going to Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs. In 2012, Timber Timbre opened for British folk singer Laura Marling on her UK tour and for Canadian singer Feist on her American tour.

The fifth record, Hot Dreams, dropped on April 1, 2014. It made the shortlist for the 2014 Polaris Music Prize, which was eventually awarded to Tanya Tagaq’s Animism. The track "Run From Me" showed up in the Netflix documentary Wild Wild Country, the sixth season of Orange Is the New Black, the second-season episode of The Blacklist called "The Mombasa Cartel," a second-season episode of Good Girls titled "The Dubby," the trailer for HBO’s Barry Season 4, and season 2, episode 2 of the period romantic comedy Our Flag Means Death.

Did You Know?

• Timber Timbre's sound has been described as 'an aesthetic rooted in swampy, ragged blues' and 'beautifully restrained blues from an alternate universe'.
• 'Run From Me' was featured in the trailer for HBO's Barry Season 4.