Original Pairs is a Toronto-based band fusing folk, country, pop and psychedelia into their own inimitable brand of rock’n’roll. Lead singer and songwriter Andrew Frontini grew up in Kingston Ontario playing in bands with future rock luminaries Gord Downie (Tragically Hip), Hugh Dillon (The Headstones) and Finton Mcconnel (The Mahones). By the time he left this musical hotbed to study Architecture at the University of Waterloo, Andrew had played in a dozen working bands, honing his skills on bass, guitar and vocals and in a variety of genres that spanned from punk and new wave to jazz, blues and what is now called world music.
From this point onward, Andrew would sustain a diverse creative practice that includes architecture, painting and drawing and music. Andrew began to write, record and perform under the name Ivo the Man beginning in the early nineties. This pseudonym provided Andrew a degree of separation from his increasingly public profile as an architect allowing him to hone an existential, acoustic idiom influenced by Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen and and the Italian Cantautori Lucio Battisti and Francesco De Andrea. (This project runs in parallel to Original Pairs to thai day). Missing the collaborative fruits of band life, Frontini joined the folk rock ensemble les Marinquoins where he met the legendary Toronto based percussionist Blake Howard. In 2000, Blake and Andrew formed an instrumental guitar and drums duo, Quadruped who toured through Canada and the US, releasing the albums, Entering Elderado and Barbeque of Souls, both of which reached the top ten on the Canadian College Radio charts. After an 18 month residency at the Rex Hotel in Toronto, the band recorded its final album, an unreleased live performance and disbanded in 2003 to pursue their separate interests.
On the heels of Quadruped, Andrew formed a new duo with drummer Lisa Logan, who quickly became his partner in life as well as music. The band took the name Original Pairs, and released Forbidden Fruit, an album of romantic pop rock tracks, chronicling the couple’s scandal ridden romance. The band has maintained a consistent presence on the Toronto live music scene since 2008, drawing on the talents of Berklee trained multi-instrumentalist Chris Bartos, saxophonist Richard Underhill, keyboardist Jon Loewen and New York based bassist/guitarist Lynda Krarr to create a rich sonic palette for Frontini’s compositions. The band’s long awaited follow up album , “Natural State”, explores the full range of the group’s musical influences, wrapping them around a solid core of dark americana. The album offers a collection of musical short stories, each one a chapter in an “everyman blues” song cycle for our time.
