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Every once in a while I get sick of hearing the same old hackneyed musical styles. So I try to imagine a new style by combining old styles that, heretofore, have not been officially combined. So far I've experimented with a cross between country and funk-- a style I call Fun Country -- and a cross between bubble gum pop and punk, a style I call Bubble Gunk. Bubble Gunk is like the gum they call jawbreakers. It's undeniably sweet, but so hard it that it almost breaks your jaw to bite into it. Now there's a band that is forging its own path with this heartwarming, heartbreaking hybrid style and it just happens to come from the town I grew up in, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Though Mark Kleiner is the unmistakable leader, and not shy about taking center stage, his comrades, Pete Mills (bass, guitar, backup vocals) and Kurt Dahle (drums, guitar, and backup vocals) possess powers of their own that propel the band to new heights. The music of Mark Kleiner Power Trio is a little easier to sink your teeth into than Bubble Gunk, but it's a little too hard to fit neatly into the category of pure pop rock. 

Judging by the bumper crop of burgeoning bands to come out of Saskatoon of late, this prairie town could more aptly be called "Saskatune." This humble Canadian community once gave us two of the great female folk artists, Joni Mitchel and Buffy St. Marie. The Guess Who and their progeny, Bachman-Turner Overdrive, also have their roots in or around Saskatoon, and Canadian born icons Neil Young and Gordon Lightfoot are friendly eastern neighbors.

Have you ever been to my neck of the woods? If you're one of the one-hundredth of the one percent of the population that has, don't let its halcyon, bucolic nature fool you. This is a place where people are not afraid to speak their minds. When Prime Minister Trudeau paid a visit to Saskatoon in the early seventies, he slept restfully in the Besborough Hotel, a virtual castle on the rustic banks of the pristine Saskatchewan River, only to be rudely awakened by a band of angry farmers. They came from all across the prairies, riding on a convoy of John Deere tractors, brandishing vitriolic signs of protest, and tossing rotten wheat like contaminated confetti at their Eastern-Canadian-favoring-French-Canadian Prime Minister.

A bit of residue from the rotten wheat, and a scintilla of the sentiment symbolized in the gooey grain clutched inside the sweaty palms of these furious farmers, remains in the heart of Mark Kleiner and at the helm of his music. Get past the sugarcoated surface and you will find a little Johnny Rotten in the mix, the punk part of the equation. But the faith of Kleiner's father, a Lutheran minister and a chaplain, has had a purging effect on Kleiner's music. I've been searching for the cream of Saskatoon's crop and the Mark Kleiner Trio comes close. The wheat germ that emerges once the chaff of lesser acts has been culled out is a nutritious neo-new wave concoction that serves as a staple for prairie people and city slickers alike. 

Love to Night is filled with all of the evangelic zeal and none of the proselytizing platitudes that plague certain otherwise well-meaning Christian bands and solo artists. It is precisely because Kleiner does not regard his music as a response to a "calling" that he is able to say what he wants to say instead of saying what he may feel he should say or what he perceives others want to hear. In the words of humanistic-existentialist psychologists, he has been freed from the "tyranny of the shoulds" and so he is free to be his authentic self. Kleiner still has a ways to go in terms of finding his true artistic self, but he is still young, and there will be plenty of opportunities in the future to become more experimental. 

At least he is beginning to feel a bit of the freedom that accompanies a PK's journey from the pulpit to the slam dance floor. He has by no means abandoned the faith of his father. The closest thing to a declaration of faith occurs on “Baby Don't Believe in Love Songs.” It's about a girl who has lost her faith in love and has fallen prey to cynicism, the cyanide of 21st century civilization. There's a yin/yang thing happening between “Baby Don't Believe in Love Songs” and “Birth to Blue,” a song that in many respects could be imagined to be a collaboration between a younger Sir Elton John and younger Sir Paul McCartney. Kleiner explores some of his own disillusionment. The song speaks of a loss of innocence and points to the ineluctable conflict that emerges when the dreams of a young person collide with the stark realities of a corrupted adult world. 

Like the Psalmist who entreaties the grief-stricken soul to walk with him "through the valley of the shadow of death" where he will "fear no evil," Kleiner invites the listener to take his hand--a hand that claims no death, down every darkened road/through every thorny bend. The most spiritually grounded song on the CD, “Kindness of Strangers,” the random gracious acts he refers to in this piano-framed poetic piece sound like the kinds of kind acts revealed in the parable of the Good Samaritan. 

At times Love to Night feels a little heavy on the pop end of the scale, making it seem formalistic and overly commercially driven. But just when you're about to give up on the band ever making an artistic statement “Birth to Blue” comes to the rescue. It is the lyrical counterpoise that, saves this crispy treat from becoming all pop and no snap and crackle. 

By psychologist Dr. Bruce L. Thiessen, a.k.a. Dr. B. L. T., The Rock Doc. 6/23/2002