Adam & the Amethysts - "Prophecy". With Flickering Flashlight, their upcoming second album, the Amethysts' Adam Waito has emerged from his home studio brandishing a treasure. It is a hunk of beautiful rock, granite studded with silver and mica and quartz-crystal, veins of feldspar, spurs of pyrite, amethyst filigree. It is heavy enough that you could take it in your hand and punch a hole in the wall. You could throw it at a bird and knock the whole tree drown. You could set it on a mantelpiece and make that house a home, heirloomed. You could use this hunk of rock to marry a girl, to start a campfire, to bankroll a locomotive.

There are people everywhere making folk music, making rock music, nursing nostalgias in low fidelity. Adam & the Amethysts' work is set apart, not just by geography - the Canadiana in these songs, the vast woods and great lakes, - but by its sound, weird and kind. It is some of the highest-fi lo-fi music I have ever heard - imagine dusty songs, the way a bar of sunlight turns this dust to gold. Yes, it evokes the ragged sincerity of Neil Young, Tim Hardin, Woods, Kurt Vile, but what sets it apart are the stranger influences, baroque and psychedelic, grinning and eldritch: the Incredible String Band, Fairport Convention, Van Dyke Parks, the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, Jesus Christ Superstar. These are quarries not yet plumbed: the Amethysts' music is splendid, fertile, new.

And so "Prophecy", a song that recalls Brian Wilson, the Unicorns, "Auld Lang Syne", Macbeth. Drumsticks and acoustic guitar, pinned by whoops, hooks like arrows fired at the clouds. It's a tune that cuts through this winter like confetti through an empty room. It starts by telling you to chill out, ends by summoning witches (in three-part harmony), and you'll not hear a sweeter, catchier nonsense before the summertime swoon.

[Adam & the Amethysts are seeking a label / bandcamp / website / they are performing in Toronto on March 11, as part of Pop Montreal's CMW showcase]

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(photo source unknown)