Canada – Page 5 – Fingertips

Free and legal MP3: The Robots (gripping, driving 21st-century rock)

“I Didn’t Know What I Was Saying,” from the Prince Edward Island quartet the Robots, performs the unusual 21st-century trick of sounding influenced by Radiohead without sounding slavishly hypnotized. I don’t think we’ve heard enough of this sort of thing, actually—bands recognizing Radiohead’s seminal power while spinning the vibe into something very much their own.

“I Didn’t Know What I Was Saying” – the Robots

With the year-end easing off of new releases comes the intermittent Fingertips tradition of revisiting my folder of songs that were seriously considered for review earlier in the year, to see what I might have unaccountably overlooked—heard at the time but didn’t really hear. There are always one or two goodies in there that are well worth (re)discovery.

For instance: “I Didn’t Know What I Was Saying,” from the Prince Edward Island quartet the Robots, which performs the unusual 21st-century trick of sounding influenced by Radiohead without sounding slavishly hypnotized. I don’t think we’ve heard enough of this sort of thing, actually—bands recognizing Radiohead’s seminal power while spinning the vibe into something different and worthy. Bands did this with the Beatles all the time (and still do). Not everyone gets to invent the wheel; we need folks who can work on the chassis and the engine as well. Here, the Robots take Kid A-ish intensity but reapply guitars: searing and itchy lead lines, dark and jumpy rhythm lines, rumbly background washes. Actual keyboards—not just synthesizers—enter the fray as well. The song’s disciplined vehemence is epitomized by its very structure, which places the semi-undiscernible verses all together in the first two-thirds of the song, followed by a chorus section of marvelous power; there, front man Peter Rankin lets a bit of his inner Thom Yorke out of the bag, while the churning background swells with an almost orchestral grandeur. As for that last 40 seconds, with its foghorn guitar and thrummy white noise, not sure if it’s necessary but it’s actually pretty interesting.

The Robots come from Charlottetown and released their debut full-length, Hey Buddy, Dummy, back in April on Halifax-based Night Danger Records.

Free and legal MP3: Young Galaxy (dreamy pseudo-tropical groove)

Sleek, sultry, and groovy—as in, it has a groove—“Peripheral Visionaries” sounds like dance music for the sleep-deprived: you kind of want to move around, but maybe not as much as you want to nurse one last cocktail and just kind of zone out, with a blurry smile on your face.

“Peripheral Visionaries” – Young Galaxy

This one’s all about sound construction, about how sounds of different tone and fiber interact. Listen, first, to whatever it is that sounds somehow like an electronic accordion—you hear it first in the introduction at around 0:10—and then listen to how, underneath the male vocal in particular, it produces an Auto-Tune-like effect, but far less awful, thankfully. (Unless that is, also, Auto-Tune and I’m god forbid getting used to it.) There’s a definitive way this sound adds something visceral to the song that is nevertheless neither rhythm nor volume nor melody. Then there’s that plucky, rapid-fire synthesizer (I think) that builds interest and character against the more languorous beat. Those two sounds, weaving in and around each other, are the backbone of this deceptively easy-going piece; together they create an almost palpable sense of…breathing, somehow. Like the song is breathing itself. And okay, maybe I’m the one who is sleep-deprived.

With its dreamy, pseudo-tropical lilt and its studio-crafted textures, “Peripheral Visionaries” is the end result of an unusual collaboration between the Montreal-based Young Galaxy, a quartet previously known for a shoegazy kind of dream pop, and the Swedish producer Dan Lissvik. Apparently, the band completed the album, their third, and sent it off to Lissvik, who twiddled and tweaked and softwared the thing into something quite different than what the band had recorded. The album, appropriately enough, will be called Shapeshifting; it’s coming out on Paper Bag Records in February. MP3 via Paper Bag; thanks to Largehearted Boy for the head’s up.

Free and legal MP3: The Salteens (sparkly, guitar-free ensemble pop)

Check it out: there are no guitars in “Last Train From London,” which could make it the first train song in pop music history that cannot rely on a guitar to create the train vibe.

“Last Train From London” – The Salteens

Check it out: there are no guitars in “Last Train From London,” which could make it the first train song in pop music history that cannot rely on a guitar to create the train vibe. No worries, however—a percussive piano motif does the trick, with a complementary bass and drum part; some well-timed hand claps help too. Even the horns manage to get in on the act; spurred by the chugging percussion, they do, also, contribute to the train-iness of the music, in a subtle and unexpectedly Burt Bacharachian way.

And there certainly are horns aplenty here, as the long-dormant Salteens, now eschewing guitars, expanded from five to ten to create their new. brass-infused sound. The energy is sparkly, and yet the horns play with a wonderful delicacy—there’s no blaring, and no self-conscious “cue the horn charts” kinds of moments; the feel is very ’60s, somewhat soulful, and rather British, even though the band is from Vancouver. Front man Scott Walker brings Stuart Murdoch to mind, but sings with more infectious exuberance than Belle & Sebastian’s mastermind.

“Last Train From London” is the opening track on Grey Eyes, which was released in October on Boompa Records. Note that the band themselves started the label in 2003, to release their second album; note too that the label has since acquired a roster of more than 15 artists, while the Salteens themselves released nothing at all. Situation at long last rectified. MP3 via Boompa.

Free and legal MP3: Two Hours Traffic (crackling power pop from Canada)

“Noisemaker” – Two Hours Traffic

And now back to our regularly scheduled programming: sharp, catchy, summertime pop from our impressively talented musical neighbors to the north. That’s more like it, eh?

This song has many things to love, and right away. First, the brisk, ringing guitar intro, which is not merely a persuasive opening salvo, but sounds brilliant following just about any other song on a playlist. Try it at home, you’ll see. Second, the way the voices join in, singing wordlessly, with the brisk, ringing guitars. Subtle and wonderful. Third, the fleet, wonderful sidestep taken from that guitar riff into the “oooooh” that opens the verse. Nifty, effortless little chord progression there. And then, oh boy, what about that “oooooh” itself? Straight out of the power pop handbook (Shoes, anyone?) and yet also a surprise coming right at the beginning like that. If they didn’t have me at hello, they surely had me at “oooooh.” The song is now about 23 seconds old. (And lasts 3:41–also as per the power pop handbook.)

Singer Liam Corcoran has just the right kind of spirited tenor required to make this crackle and resonate. It’s about energy, not content, as the thing about great power pop is that no one has to be singing about anything that is in itself all that powerful or intriguing; rather, there’s something in the music and presentation that makes whatever is being sung pretty much besides the point. It’s all deep and mysterious when the melody’s there, and the chords, and the unflagging energy of a band that knows it’s onto something. Songs like this often push that extra bit harder to knock your socks off, and I hear that here in the second half of the chorus, which uses a bit of unanticipated repetition to add an almost giddily satisfying resolution beyond the basic hook.

Two Hours Traffic is a foursome from Prince Edward Island. “Noisemaker” is the lead track (of course) from the band’s third album, Territory, which was released last year in Canada, and is due out in the U.S. in September via Bumstead Productions.

Free and legal MP3: Postdata (hushed, echoey, portentous ballad)

“Tobias Grey” – Postdata

I missed this one when it came out back at the beginning of the year, but it was probably one of those on-purpose accidents, as there is something in this hushed, portentous, echoey acoustic ballad that resonates with me in the middle of this seriously wacked-out weather. There’s a stifling stillness in the air during a heat wave, you don’t even have to go outside to feel it, it seeps through the building’s walls, suffuses the remedial air conditioning, makes effort—any effort—sad and impossible. This song is kind of like that, only pretty, also. Bonus for particularly relevant lyrics
(“Sometimes the weather don’t change/It just stays in the very same place”).

And it’s all so very quiet, with whispery vocals, tightly recorded acoustic guitar (you can hear fingers squeaking on the strings), and a really effective keyboard drone in the background, grounding the piece in something electric and threatening.

Postdata is a Canadian duo featuring Paul Murphy of the band Wintersleep and his brother Michael. The self-titled, self-released album has been out since January. The songs were born during a visit to their parents’ home in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia. They were recorded on a laptop originally, then reworked a bit some months later in Halifax—mics, at least, were added, but they still used the laptop. So if you hear some lo-fi distortion here, that’s why. And for once I don’t really mind the roughness of the recording because the intimacy isn’t compromised—it might even be augmented.

Free and legal MP3: Kathryn Calder (New Pornographer goes solo)

Beginning as a pensive bit of Jane Siberry-like abstractness, fueled by little more than an egg shaker and a spare piano line, “Slip Away” unfolds deliberately, but never loses my attention. Despite the minimal instrumentation, the song opens with a strong melody and a prolonged sense of anticipation. It’s two full minutes before the music stretches out a bit and yet I’m with it all the way.

“Slip Away” – Kathryn Calder

And then at 2:15, the song really kicks in, and the kicking-in part is at once lyrically incidental–there are no lyrics in it at all, in fact–and musically central, radiating out both forward and backward in time, illuminating both what we’ve already heard and what we are about to hear. What I think we have here is a lyric-free chorus, sung without words, which I’m not sure I’ve heard too often. But what a wonderful, dynamic thing it is, with a melody taking almost yodelly leaps that would surely have defeated any effort to be burdened with language.

Calder is a singer and keyboard player from Vancouver who is best known at this point for being the least known person in the New Pornographers. She also co-fronts the band Immaculate Machine, which has been featured here in April ’09 and May ’07. “Slip Away” is the lead track from her first solo release, Are You My Mother?, coming in August via File Under: Music. MP3 via Spinner.com.

Free and legal MP3: Broken Social Scene (involving single from veteran Canadian collective)

“World Sick” – Broken Social Scene

Harboring as many as 19 people in its fold, the veteran Canadian ensemble Broken Social Scene is one of those loosely organized “collectives” that the indie rock scene has often favored. But on its first album in five years, Forgiveness Rock Record, set for release next month, the group was prepared to act more like a stripped-down (for them) six-man band, largely because of difficulties getting everyone together to record. And so the six prime movers–led by co-founders Kevin Drew and Brendan Canning–did the writing and arranging; but in the end, go figure, pretty much everyone showed up after all, including Amy Millan and Evan Cranley from Stars, Emily Haines and Jimmy Shaw from Metric, Leslie Feist, and some 15 others. It just can’t be a BSS record without a crowd.

“World Sick” is the album’s lengthy opening track, an almost seven-minute composition with the big bashy sound of an anthem, the unhurried development of a prog-rock opus, and an itchy-echoey ambiance that stitches its ambitions together. The band is guitar-heavy (four of the core six are guitarists) but uses its instrument of choice judiciously. What we get is nothing like the muddy, canceling-out effect of those silly rock-celebrity gatherings when they bring nine guitarists on stage to celebrate someone’s birthday and you can’t hear any of them. Here, it’s all about dynamics, about presenting an effective spectrum of sounds from soft to loud, from individual notes to chords, from melodic lines to crashing walls of noise. And while I’m normally not too keen on long instrumental outros, I don’t mind this one, both for its subtle interplay of guitar and rhythm and nature sounds and for the thematic statement it makes in the context of its somewhat inscrutable but obviously world-weary lyrics.

Forgiveness Rock Record is due out next month on the Toronto-based Arts & Crafts label. MP3 via Magnet Magazine

Free and legal MP3: Colleen Brown (girl-group theatrics meets D. Springfield)

“Boyfriend” marches to a big, retro, triplet-driven beat, delivering a vibe that’s part girl-group theatrics, part Dusty Springfield-style R&B, part something elusive and (dare I say it?) new.

“Boyfriend” – Colleen Brown

“Boyfriend” marches to a big, retro, triplet-driven beat, delivering a vibe that’s part girl-group theatrics, part Dusty Springfield-style R&B, part something elusive and (dare I say it?) new.

This is in fact a quality that strikes me again and again about Canadian musicians, if I may generalize (and I assume positive generalizations are somewhat less irritating than negative generalizations!): their capacity for drawing upon influences without either drowning in them or negating them through archness and irony. Here, Edmonton-based singer/songwriter Colleen Brown–with a slightly dusky voice, some sly lyrics, and an easy way with a time-shifting melody–has built a song and a sound clearly grounded in the past while managing, at the same time, to resist painting herself into a history-centric corner. I’m not exactly sure how this works up there north of the border but I appreciate it every time I hear it. In any case, “Boyfriend,” with its driving stomp and gleeful vocal energy, is very much a winner in the here and now.

You’ll find the song on Brown’s second solo album, Foot in Heart, which was re-released last month by Dead Daisy Records, an independent label run by Canadian singer/songwriter Emm Gryner. The album had been previously self-released in 2008. Brown has also recorded as a part of a duo called the Secretaries. MP3 via Spinner.

Free and legal MP3: Aidan Knight(able country-tinged sing-along)

“Jasper” – Aidan Knight

When a song comes along as effortlessly gladdening as “Jasper” I actually get a little suspicious. “That’s it?” I think. “It’s that easy to write a really good song? A sing-along even? Anybody could do that!”

But of course as it turns out anybody can’t. Otherwise we’d have a lot more of this around, which we clearly do not. There’s something ramrod solid about this song, even as it glides so easily through its three and a half minutes. Perched squarely on the shoulders of Aidan Knight’s comfortable, boy-next-door baritone, “Jasper,” for all its laid-back, singer/songwriter-y vibe, shines with the melodic assurance of an old Elton John song. (This is, to be clear, a compliment, and anyone who doesn’t realize that would do well to go revisit some of the songs Sir Reg recorded between 1970 and 1974.) The song sounds channeled more than written, and everything about its presentation–from the delightfully restrained steel-guitar licks to the climactic group-sung chorus–rings true and right, as if no one had to decide any of this, as if it sprung to life of its will alone.

Knight is from the lovely city of Victoria, B.C.; “Jasper” is from Versicolour, his first album, which is due out early next month. It is also the first release for the record label Adventure Boys Club, a label started by Knight along with Tyler Bancroft, of the Vancouver band Said the Whale.

Free and legal MP3: Woodpigeon (spacey strummer becomes hoedown)

“Empty-Hall Sing-Along” – Woodpigeon

A multifaceted musical adventure awaits you here. What begins as a sort of spacey, choral Fleetwood Mac-ish strummer takes a left turn at 1:37 and reinvents itself as a western hoedown a la Poco or Pure Prairie League (reference for those of a certain age). Front man Mark Hamilton clearly likes to surround himself with musicians–Woodpigeon is a shape-shifting ensemble featuring eight semi-regulars and a dozen and a half potential guests–but here their presence is as much vocal as instrumental. If you listen carefully, you’ll discern more than the usual number of guitar and percussion sounds, yes, but what ultimately dominates the song are an unexpectedly large chorus of voices. Five of the central eight are listed as singers and while there’s no telling who exactly is singing what, what I’m liking a lot is the vibe of a group of singers singing together, which creates an entirely different feel than multi-tracked harmonies. This is a “sing-along,” after all.

Woodpigeon is based in Calgary and issued its debut album in 2006. I don’t think I can stop myself from telling you that Hamilton called his first band Woodpigeon Divided By Antelope Equals Squirrel. That was while he was living in Scotland and it didn’t apparently amount to much. “Empty-Hall Sing-Along” comes from Die Stadt Musikanten, Woodpigeon’s third album, released this week in Canada on Boompa Records; the American release will be in March. MP3 via Boompa.