Figurines - "The Air We Breathe"

I had written off the new Figurines album as terrible. Over a year-and-a-half ago, I was swept up in Skeleton immediately, and I saw them live within a week. The live show didn't measure up to the album, and they didn't play the soft piano number (head and shoulders the best track) so I left disappointed but still focused on them as a "studio band", so this new album When The Deer Wore Blue was much anticipated by me. But it fell real flat. After one listen I just felt the same way I did at the live show: empty, pulled in a direction I didn't want to go, like they weren't playing the notes, the songs, they ought to be playing. So I wrote it off. And many weeks have passed since I deleted it from my computer, and I heard "The Air We Breathe", as if on the radio, as if it had fallen like a raindrop softly against my window, on the Paper Bag Records compilation. I thought it wasn't from the new album, I thought it was a new song, that's how much I loved the orange sunset beach boys falsetto foundation, and the hard like ribbon candy verses, snaps in the cold, but stretches when heated.

The Acorn - "The Flood Pt. 1"

Also from Paper Bag Records, here come The Acorn from sleepy Ottawa bringing way more elation, way more clear talent, than I've heard from them before. Here we're riding on brown feathers, we're whisked right away and into the blue. The peppered layers of light percussion imply travel, to me, while everything else implies home.

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[Buy When the Deer Wore Blue]
[Buy Glory Hope Mountain]
[Paper Bag Records, a very nice label in Toronto]