Archives : all posts by Sean

Whizzy's Canvas - "Wave". There's something of the sunset in this song. I should know: I saw the sunset tonight, sinking over pale blue waves. Palm trees wagged in the breeze. Torches glowed. Whizzy's Canvas approach this song with the patience of the international date line. They will not be harried. They will not be hurried. They are playing their "Wave" at the tempo of the blood that pumps through their veins, and the blood's pumping slowly, maybe because they sat and watched the sunset, those wagging palmtrees. I can't decide if this song sounds more like Yo La Tengo or Blind Melon or a Yellow Submarine B-side, but I know it sounds like a slide-show: all of us cozy in a darkened den, one panorama after another, lit up from the carousel. [bandcamp]

Hurt Valley - "Indoor Living". At home at the TV, game controller plugged in. Surfing on a crystal surfboard. A character that glitzes in analog streaks, riding shivering animated waves. Right and left, glin glin glin, win and die. Lean your head back against a couch cushion. Sky white out the window. Distant radio. New air comes in through the ventilation grate. All the framed photos seem to be looking the other way. A character gets back on its crystal surfboard. The screen flashes: Select Level. [bandcamp]

Basia Bulat - "Never Let Me Go". I give you this song, but I ask you to set it free. Don't trap it in cozy headphones or little laptop speakers - let it out into the air, through a lamplit room, loud. Let it out through an open window, or reverberating off your bookshelves. These calls and drones, dampened drums, Basia's ashen entreaty: be generous with them, be kind.

"Never Let Me Go" is not - by a large measure - the most immediate track on Tall Tall Shadow, her third album. There are many songs with swift, thundering melody, with clicking percussion and cheer, like little banquets. It is a record of rich dynamics, gallop and glide. But for me, "Never Let Me Go" sits apart. It is a one-off, a lone moment. A little like a single heartbeat (and it reverberates).

It's a love song, but not that kind of love. It's a farewell that is all about not saying farewell. A sincere, proud, begging, resigned refusal. We have heard a hundred songs about the times that people are taken from our lives, or they drop away from our lives, and we do not want to release them. Basia is not singing that song. She knows she will never release the person she is singing to. But what she asks is that they never release her. No, don't let me / never let me / go. From the far side of ever, long before you see me, say that you believe me, and never let me go.

The word death never appears on Tall Tall Shadow. It has been banished, sent out. Basia will not repeat Carey Mercer's brave mistake. Death is, and will forever be; but it need not be let into song.

[buy / Basia is on tour in Europe / listen to the album's lead single, "Tall Tall Shadow"]

(image by Boguslaw Strempel / via Colossal)

Young Galaxy - "Talk To Her". Young Galaxy cut one of my favourite Ultramarine songs from their final edit of the album. "Talk To Her" is too sentimental, maybe; too on-the-nose. But for me the beauty of it is that it's sentimental, right on the nose: like a monologue by Salinger's Zooey or Buddy Glass, like an Annie Lennox song or the Flaming Lips' "Do You Realize?" Sometimes what we need, as lost & wandering listeners, is the plainest straightest advice. Sometimes we need a mitt full of fortune-cookie slips, a volley of arrows sent straight to our hearts,.

A few days ago, I was arguing with a couple of friends about REM's "Everybody Hurts". I remember one of my teachers pulling it out in eighth grade, using the lyrics as an example in our Poetry unit. I used this as evidence of "Everybody Hurts"' feebleness: verse for eighth-graders, for people who don't even understand what a poem is. But A, J and M had "Everybody Hurts"' back. They weren't going to let it hit the mat. Sure, they said, "Everybody Hurts" seems obvious. But it's true. Not only is it true: it wasn't always so obvious. Before that song existed in the world, it wasn't yet a cliché. Just like the video, which now seems archetypal - it became an archetype when it fit so perfectly into civilization. "Everybody Hurts" is direct, unsubtle; but as Carl Wilson spent a hundred pages discovering, there's a virtue to direct, unsubtle music. It serves a function. At certain times, it sings.

"Talk To Her" is about a million times more subtle, more artful, than "Everybody Hurts". But Catherine McCandless's pearly chorus could be crucial advice for certain eighth-graders (and a fair handful of thirtysomethings). The song doesn't disguise its prescriptions - it holds them up on a splendid platter.

More than that, as almost-always, there's melody, harmony, rhythm & timbre. There's the gorgeous lilting march of this song. It's brittle and diaphonous, glittering and hazy. Pricks of Dan Lissvik's plucked strings, Stephen Kamp's unconfused bass, a whirling and winning final synth. The chorus is a showpiece for Ultramarine's tropical ice, warm springs & space & pastel reflections. It's a hothouse I want to winter in, a frosted dancefloor under a sequinned disco-ball. Earlier, I mentioned Annie Lennox; this time I'm going to come right out and say "Walking On Broken Glass".

"Talk To Her" appears on the Deluxe edition of Ultramarine, which is out now. [buy]

(Images from the incomparable Middle and Off)

Ted Lucas - "It's So Easy When You Know What You're Doing". I apologize for Said the Gramophone's recent quiet. I was getting married. This was a whirlwind, a snowstorm, a carnival, but also a well-executed game-plan, a careful choreography, a fine scheme. There were bells, toasts, questions, answers, breakdancers, curries, flowers, slapshots, marshmallows, blindfolds, speeches, dancing to "One Thing" and "Sweet Thing". I wore a blue suit. She carried a bouquet. We did our thing and then tumbled into another thing.

Ted Lucas isn't singing about such a perfect love, here. Stuff is a little tangled, a little messed-up. Chicks, money, etc. But I think he felt the same thing as I did, when I was staring out onto a room full of friends - sometimes life is easy, sometimes being deliberate is perfectly simple, sometimes time unspools like a fine red carpet, a berry growing on a vine. Sometimes singing to the world is just as easy as singing to yourself. [buy]

(photo source)

The Dodos - "Confidence". At this point, the Dodos' name is a liability: they've lost almost all of their early silliness, replaced with a handsewn, earnest determination. At best, they are using their namesake bird as a different sort of symbol - evoking the totem's tragic, faraway expiration, not its arch, goofy mien.

Anyway: "Confidence". Yes, it's confident. It's confident and breathlessly rushing, much more Do Make Say Think than Visiter. Across almost five minutes, they move from a tolling, hopeful tribute to a ferocious mayday - Buddhist warnings over drums and black-charged electric guitars, fence-jump & steeple-chase, near-drowning & a seized raft. This band used to include Women's late, great guitarist Chris Reimer: here they do full credit to their departed friend, here they find sweet notes and set them alight.

[buy]

---

Montrealers, go see my friend Basia Bulat play at Cabaret Mile End tomorrow night. Tall Tall Shadow is great, and I'm going to write about some of it as soon as I can.

(image via Glitch News)

This September/October is too overwhelming a September/October to compose a complete Guide to Pop Montreal as I've done in previous years. (At the time of writing, I'm in Toronto as a Polaris Prize jurist.) If you're new to the festival, most of my introduction to last year's edition continues to apply - Montreal's still the same city, Pop Hopper and other festival passes still work in the same way, Pop's Symposium conference is still a neglected treasure, and my overall festival advice remains unchanged. That advice? Seek out the extraordinary. Screw any show where Pop is just one more stop on an act's touring route. Screw the shows where it's a couple of local acts playing the same old spaces. Find the least pedestrian of concerts, the follies that won't ever happen again - one-offs, rare bookings, special settings, or perfectly curated showcases. And don't run around so much that you don't have any fun.

Here are ten picks for this year's Pop Montreal:

1. Songs of Darkness (Rialto, Sunday, 8pm - $25)
   As a critic, I find the concept of this concert hokey to the max: a one-off gig drawing from "[the musicians'] personal connection to the ubiquitous theme of darkness in music. An evening of not just acknowledgement, but celebration of the darkness that inhabits the music we hear every day and that exists within ourselves." The description evokes a clumsy high-school art project, something amateurish and tryhard.

   But musicians aren't writers, and they shouldn't be blamed when their earnest synopsis comes off like the intro to a DeviantArt gallery. Here, some of the city's great art-folk musicians will try to make something beautiful and powerful together, in one of the city's most beautiful performance spaces: AroarA, Little Scream, Patrick Watson, Sarah Pagé, Hans Bernhard, Joe Grass, Becky Foon (Saltland), Lil Andy, and more. I think this will be lovely.

2. Killer Mike in conversation with Matt Sonzala(Pop HQ, Saturday, 5pm - free)
   This free Symposium event is a pretty extraordinary thing: Killer Mike, one of my favourite contemporary rappers, in a little room, with a (probably) small-ish crowd, talking about whatever we (and Sonzala, a former SXSW hip-hop boss) ask him. Could be one of those bonkers, brain-filling moments that only Pop makes possible. (See also similar 2013 festival talks with Yellowman, Dan Graham, Bernie Worrell/Fred Wesley, Tony Visconti, Shuggie Otis, etc.)
3. Les Soeurs Boulay + Michael Feuerstack + Safia Nolin (Breakglass Studio, Sunday, 7pm - $10)
   In the intimate, magical Breakglass Studio, two exceptional acts. (I don't know Safia.) The Boulay sisters sing songs as sweet as tire d'érable, shot through with showy melancholy; they're also some of the most charismatic performers I've ever seen. Feuerstack, the singer-songwriter formerly known as Snailhouse, is one of the best lyricists making music right now. Still, these artists are an odd pairing: while both make folk-music, more or less, they seem to reside in completely different worlds. My hope/dream is that the Boulays and Feuerstack come together in a non-mun unexpected way: for laughs. Three of Montreal's best banterers, on a single bill.
4. Li'l Andy in 3D + Sea Oleena (Rialto, Friday, 8pm - $18)
   Andy's a clear-eyed country singer, one of contemporary Montreal's musical fixtures. In 2008, this tall ladykiller played one of my favourite Pop Montreal concerts of all time - a late-night performance of Neil Young's Tonight's the Night. Here he is performing accompanied by an original 3D film - yes, 3D as in 3D-with-glasses, by Yves Bourgeois. He'll be joined by guests including Patrick Watson and Whitehorse, with an opening set by the promising phantom-folk singer Sea Oleena.
5. Miracle Fortress + Seoul + Silverkeys + Mori (Rodos en Haut, Saturday, 8pm - $12)
   My pick for the best small, special, inexpensive local showcase. A handful of the city's great young bands: Miracle Fortress is unwavering, chilled-out (and a little hungry, I think). Mori are tender slinkers, Seoul are slowfade slowjam. And Silverkeys, making their live debut, are the new thing from my friend Adam "Amethysts" Waito. Cozy in for the night and hear new sounds. (The other local showcase that rings my bell is this one on Friday night, with Freelove Fenner, Pat Jordache and The Moment - all StG faves - but in a boring-er venue.)
6. The-Dream + Mozart's Sister (Olympia, Friday, 8pm - $45)
   If this were 2011, this would be my number-one can't-miss essential festival gig: The-Dream, aka Terius Nash, one of R&B's great kings, and Mozart's Sister, aka Caila Thompson-Hannant, one of Montreal's most liberated musical heroines. The-Dream didn't just co-write Rihanna's "Umbrella" and Beyoncé's "Single Ladies" - as a solo act he he made three of this decade's best urban records, crass and lush, bizarre and singular, jewelled and sexy. Like a more hypnogogic R Kelly, maybe (only without the rhymes); or a frustrated, obsessive Justin Timberlake.

   But this is 2013, not 2011, and The-Dream's splendid album run has ended. His last two LPs, 1977 and IV Play, were pretty much worthless. His new songs droop and sag. His well of fresh sounds seems to have dried up. And as a performer, Nash was never that appealing - he can't dance, and he seems like a jerk.

   If this seems like an indictment, it sort of is - I wouldn't dare predict that this show will be worth the (steep) ticket price. But for those, like me, who are already fans, Friday night could offer a fascinating portrait of an artist we once adored. It's worth it if only to support Pop Montreal's risk-taking, and to see Caila take a big centrestage. Besides, maybe he'll play the old stuff.

7. Leif Vollebekk + Angel Olsen (Ukrainian Federation, Friday, 8pm - $20)
   Vollebekk's North Americana is one of the albums of the year, tragically overlooked by the Polaris. Fresh from triumphant residencies at the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal and New York's Rockwood Music Hall, he's back at home to headline perhaps his biggest-ever concert. That adjective - "biggest-ever" - is what makes this gig special. Leif's nervous about the UK Fed and those nerves are going to translate into an exceptional evening - with special guests, drums and strings, songs that crest and break, that don't ever feel safe. Chicago's ghostly Angel Olsen opens.
8. Colin Stetson + Tim Hecker (Rialto, Thursday, 8:30pm - $22)
   Playing live, Tim Hecker doesn't do anything. He stands behind his laptop like an obelisk. He refuses to go easy on you: no distractions, no entertainments, no tools to decode the noise that's rising all around you. Hecker wants you to face these sounds exactly as you are, without help or adornment. (Sometimes - and hopefully, at the Rialto - he fills the room with smoke.)

   This is rarely easy. But if it's the right night, and you're in the right headspace, the experience is transformative. An hour with yourself, in the din, as Hecker summons weather. For me, it is best when I can stand - when I can stand and move around, travelling a hall, hearing the way the roaring sounds reflect and change throughout the angles of the room. For that alone - to hear the shape of Hecker's music, filling the Rialto - I would come to this gig.

   But then there's also Colin Stetson - devastating, inimitable, literally incredible. Bravely making an impossible music - singing whalesong and starsong through a damn piece of brass.

9. Whoop Dee Doo!! (Pop HQ, Saturday, 2pm and 4pm - pay what you can)
   Kansas City's bonkers kids show Whoop Dee Doo!! lands in Montreal for a pair of parties that, I suspect, will push the gladdest buttons of any child or childlike grown-up. Josh Dolgin (Socalled) and Ruby Attwood (Yamantaka//Sonic Titan) are assisting - I predict magic, make-up, and lots of happy falling down.
10. L'Ensemble d'Ondes de Montréal with Radwan Ghazi Moumneh, Marie-Jo Therio, and Patrick Watson (Ukrainian Federation, Wednesday, 8pm - $25)
    With the EOM celebrating its 37th anniversary, they are sending three ondes-martenot players to join a group of unlikely (and much younger) musicians: the arty folksinger Patrick Watson, Radwan Ghazi Moumneh (who makes experimental Arabic music with Jerusalem In My Heart), and Québec chansonnière Marie-Jo Thério. From what I understand, the ondists will be playing original music - adapting Moumneh's Middle Eastern scales or Watson's glassy melodies. Guaranteed singular, spectral and far-out.