I do realize this mix is two days late, or thereabouts. Perhaps sometime in the near future one (or both!) of us will be able post on regularly and on time.
As a young child my favourite book was The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams. I had been given a bunny for one of my first Easters and it was a fairly insignificant toy to me until I became very ill when I was five years old. My toy bunny was a constant companion throughout a year spent in and out of the hospital and operating room, and it showed. After over a year of childish anxiety and tension released through worrying my bunny’s synthetic fur and body, he didn’t much resemble a bunny any more. For obvious reasons, then, I found a special significance in the story of The Velveteen Rabbit. Realizing that I probably haven’t read it since I was a child, I just reread it for the purpose of this post and, sure enough, my eyes welled up all over again. That toy – and book – were the beginning of my affection for all things bunny.
Since then, my love of rabbits has most often manifested itself in my being drawn to cute illustrations and toys, as my attachment to them is primarily sentimental and I tend to want to revisit aspects of my childhood repeatedly. This particular mixtape was also initially inspired by the Myxomatosis title (despite myxomatosis itself being a seriously unfortunate end for our little friends) given to our biweekly playlists. Somehow, though, the word evokes just the right amount of macabre creepiness for our mixtape posts. I’m also never against a tune having to do with a rabbit, whether it’s a tale of familial tension in which a coat represents wealth (“Rabbit Furcoat”), as aids to magicians (“Pulling Rabbits Out of a Hat”), or as a character that’s ostensibly wading through a wasteland of industrial noise (“Happy Bunny Goes Fluff-Fluff Along”).
Even though there’s lots of death and darkness in this mix, please enjoy a mixtape that’s dedicated to rabbits, springtime, and many future Myxomatosis mixtapes.
CN Lester is a London singer-songwriter and classical mezzo soprano who first cropped up on my radar several months ago when I joined the wild and mostly wonderful world of Twitter. My obsession with music coupled with my passion for the LGBT* community as well as Lester’s work and LGBT* activism put us in each others’ Twitter paths and so it felt highly appropriate as well as beneficial to both parties that I write about their debut album, Ashes. Happily for everyone, Ashes is a beautiful album and an absolute joy to discover, from its sleeve, adorned with shelves full of vintage books, to the songs themselves, featuring hushed vocals that push Lester’s expressive piano parts to the fore. The fact that the portrait of Lester on the album’s cover is in black and white is rather indicative of what their music is like – full of contrasts, fragile and strong, broken yet hopeful.
The title track, “Ashes” opens the album on a contemplative note. Lyrically concerned with struggle and with grasping the ephemeral, however fleetingly, these words are accompanied by a lone piano track that lilts, pauses, and tumbles, effectively underscoring the oblique nature of the words. Whether the song’s meaning is clear to the listener or not, however, the sometimes sad beauty of “Ashes” is immediately apparent – it’s a lovely album opener. “Tongue” is more urgent but no less melancholy, this time musically augmented with gentle acoustic guitar. The power and potency of physical memory is considered here, with brief lyrical flashbacks to a past relationship explored in lines such as “A gaping hole where your lips met mine/Empty jaws where our love had hung.” The memories of this relationship are investigated in both fond and scathing terms – the emotional connection and subsequent loss has been dealt with, but sensory memory works differently, pervading unexpectedly into scenes of everyday life.
There’s something quite tentative about the way “Shiver” begins, slowly and softly, but the piano builds steadily, particularly after the first stanza: “He’s got a stop to his fury/Waiting for the blow to come down/He’s got a weight and he moves it/Weighting with a weight in his hand.” There’s a little break between the second and third verses in which Lester introduces a major-key interlude, and it’s brilliantly disarming. These eight measures counter the haunting, although elegant, remainder of the song with a little sunshine. “Fractals” is entirely more beautiful than a song about the experience of being bipolar has a right to be, capturing the multiplicity of life and experience sensitively and honestly, whether that life is affected by mood disorders or not. There’s an inevitability to the structure and melody of the song that captures the continual spinning of the lyrics. “Fever” is unabashedly joyful, and it feels incredible at this point in the album to revel in happiness. Guitar-led and exuberantly punctuated with higher notes, Lester has lovingly captured what was clearly an amazing moment in their life with this song that – almost? – feels as good.
“Lullaby” has a gorgeous, tumbling piano line and a soothing feel to it that befits its title, and “Joan of Arc” is a lovingly rendered Leonard Cohen cover. Bonus track “I’m Your Man”, another Cohen cover, fairly seethes with contrasts: the synths and sleazy-sounding muted horns present on Cohen’s 1988 album recording are replaced by a comparatively restrained piano part, but the swagger and lust are retained, making it immeasurably pleasing as a subversive, genderqueer take on the aggressive heterosexism of the original. Certainly there’s something almost universally identifiable in Cohen’s lyrics, about need and control in equal measure, and the initial surprise of those words being sung in a significantly less masculine voice provides perfect counterpoint to lyrics that could be interpreted, at least in the original, as creepily obsessive.
Throughout all of this, Lester’s voice is an anchoring constant, offering strength and steadfastness in a sea of emotional pain. The influence of classical vocal training is obvious here, giving these piano ballads an elegant splendour that belies their often difficult lyrical content. And when Ashes offers the occasional reprieve from its themes of pensive sadness, its perfect, imperfect humanity is revealed fully and powerfully. For all its contrasts and iterations of black and white, Ashes is ultimately an exploration of nuance, subtlety, and the shades of grey that are an integral part of any black and white photograph. There’s a most familiar emotion that lies between joy and sorrow, one that’s filled with the small pleasures of the everyday, and in Lester’s very capable hands and voice that liminal space is brought to shimmering light.
This is the first in our bi-weekly mixtape series, Myxomatosis. If everything goes according to plan, Laura and I will alternate mix posts every second Sunday. Factor in the daylight savings time change, and my mix is nearly on time.
Simon Reynolds has been getting quite a bit of mileage out of his book-length theory on “retromania,” a combination of Derridean hauntology and prosthetic memory. Most recently, he’s inspired an entire issue of Spin, which has relaunched as a bi-monthly, and bid us to “raid the past, dream the future.” Realizing that the digital, networked environment has irrevocably shifted and altered the monetary value of the intangible and tangible, Spin has turned back to previous mandates of incorporating cultural analysis into the music magazine format, a recognition which I thought would have/should have happened sooner. You have to capitalize on what defines the medium you’re using, and bite-sized album reviews, superficial short features on uninteresting, but popular artists, and up-to-the-minute news blurbs are much better suited to the online environment. Now if only the NME could remember its own roots…it still probably wouldn’t be as effective as The Quietus.
Nevertheless, I do find it interesting that the only way to relaunch is to rewind. Even Wax Poetics celebrated its 10th Anniversary and redesign, including a new logo, with a special issue on…Prince. Or perhaps I’m only noticing this retroactivity because I’m now of a certain age. Maybe this is how people of my generation begin an unseemly Mojo/Uncut devolution. It could also be the reason the latest meta-Muppets film had both such a sentimental and unsettling effect on me. I felt like it had broken into my brain and used my memories like some insidious soma against me, the predictable marketing demographic that I evidently am. But I almost cried during “Rainbow Connection.” You also end up forgiving everything because of how self-reflexive and self-aware the film is. Using similar logic, Simon Reynolds manages to find something positive about Lana Del Rey rather than about Adele in his article in the relaunched Spin.
While I agree that we’ve entered a hyper-accelerated culture and an infinite present where we turn back to the past faster than it can settle into becoming the past, I don’t know if I feel particularly alarmed about it. Originality is a tricky term to begin with, and the more you learn, the less things seem truly original. There often seems to be as much joy in repetition as there is in puzzling out new things. Time, the companion in all of this retromania-mania, is equally as fraught a term. It may be that the only decade I actually lived through in real time was the 1980s. Everything seems new and present to you when you’re under ten.
I’m a Calvin-Harris-huggable child of the 80s. Courtesy of my older sister, I spent my first seven years hearing the sounds of Cyndi Lauper, Billy Idol, Van Halen, Pat Benatar, and the Footloose soundtrack. I religiously watched Pee-wee’s Playhouse and Muppet Babies. I also absorbed The Neverending Story, The Princess Bride, and The Little Shop of Horrors, and as stated on the About page on this blog, I watched Labyrinth roughly 40 times in the third grade. And perhaps even more strangely, I relived the 80s in the 90s on a diet of syndication and synthesizers, consuming John Hughes films and the Back to the Future trilogy just as readily as New Order, Prince, and Duran Duran. I always did have an overdeveloped sense of nostalgia–even as a child. I had a panic attack at age seven when the year turned into 1990.
I needn’t have worried about missing the 90s the first time around because I not only relived the 90s in the noughties, but I continue to do so in this decade with the Britpop zeitgeist zombie rearing its nationalistic head at this year’s Olympics. It just so happens that the Internet has made it possible for everything to be syndicated.
In this week’s mix, you’ll find a medley of authentic 80s fare and neo-80s revivalists. Make connections where you will.
I first became aware of London-based Band of Holy Joy when frontman/BOHJ constant, Johny Brown, did guest vocals and lyrics on Vanilla Swingers’ debut album. I then managed to track down three albums (More Favourite Fairy Tales; Manic, Magic, Majestic; Positively Spooked) and an EP (The Big Ship Sails) out of their twenty-seven-year-spanning discography. With its long and fluid roster of former band members over the years, Band of Holy Joy have been described as a parallel, inverse version of The Fall; where Mike E. Smith’s project seems like an endless subtraction and whittling of art into ever sharper shapes, Brown’s band has thrived on its own fluid democracy and expansive creativity. The current line-up for the latest album, How to Kill a Butterfly, includes Andy Astles, Christopher Brierley, William J. Lewington, James Stephen Finn, and Inga Tillere. This album also features backing vocals from members of Jonny Cola and the A-Grades and Something Beginning with L, and Jon Clayton on cello. There’s something arcane and mystical about Band of Holy Joy; their music is the perfect accompaniment to psychogeographic perambulations, following urban ley lines all the way out to the humming countryside. This record is filled with tales of flight and death. And it is one of the most uplifting records I’ve ever heard.
The album package is exquisitely designed as a blood-crimson book containing ghostly images which radiate through technical scientific diagrams of anatomy from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I’m reminded of almanacs like Aristotle’s Masterpiece, popular manuals that hybridized folk alchemy with early modern science, gleefully displaying monstrously impossible children. This record, too, is often concerned with birth and sex, which seem to flirt and meld with the headiness of mortality. See the tango-inflected track “Between a Nightingale’s Song and Now”: “Starstruck and killed by the life we loved/The sport of death in every spurt of come.” Brown introduces the liner booklet with a mini-essay of sorts. He shifts back and forth, alternating between optimal instructions for killing butterflies and for making records; both are delicate procedures. How best do you preserve fragile, colourful insects? How best do you preserve ephemeral sound? This record becomes an answer, straddling that line between expiration and beauty, an aural wunderkammer. After all, the wunderkammer is a displayed collection of natural, curious specimens, essentially a chamber of aesthetic deaths. Brown concludes his essay by writing: “We’ve killed a butterfly and made a new artifact…talk about visceral tangibility opposing archaic practices.” He manages to pin down the intangibility of music and its tension with the beauty of the well-crafted object.
After an introduction of eddying wind, Brown pleads for an emotional thaw and baptism in the opening song “Go Break the Ice.” As the violin accelerates into a counter-wind of sorts, Brown’s idiosyncratic quaver leans precariously close to overwrought, but continually catches itself in a gripping performance of otherworldliness. His vocals pitch into diaphragm-heaving bellows on “Oh What a Thing This Heart of Man” as he bids us to “strike out now.” Despite the bewildering disappointment probed within the lyrics, the swelling musical backdrop and the pronouncement of “You’re either with life or it’s against you” imbue the song with conviction. This internal mapping is a breathtaking maneuver through the baroque curls of brain matter and their inexplicable machinations. The album starts to become something akin to a life manual.
The band explores northern mapping on songs such as “These Men Underground” and “Northern.” The former contains the oscillation between pensive, staid verses of grim industry and an incredible girl-group-style chorus that is pure elation of temporary escape, the rush of release—even if it’s as doomed as transplanted wings on a man’s shoulder blades. The latter is a similar alternation of wistful, slow verses and a psychedelic 60s go-go party of a chorus as Brown meditates on migrating away from the north:
I catch the light sometime
A dirty blush of cloud
Over the drifting of the crowd
History and ambition fuel an endless fire
Of famine migration sadness and desire
Granted, Brown is originally from Newcastle-on-Tyne, which may account for the recurring theme, but the concept of “the north” remains a fascinating one. So many countries, including my own, have varying ideas of what “the north” means, but it is often still consolidated into one location of preconceived notions, assumptions, and otherness, the cultural differences wrought from arbitrary geography. Where does “the north” begin? Perhaps for Canada it is the tree line. Perhaps for England it is the northernmost band of the M25. For Brown, “the north” is an industrial north, proud and pining, dirty and damp, grey and grand.
For “The Observer’s Book of Birds’ Eggs,” “The Repentant,” and “A Clear Night. A Shooting Star. A Song for Boo,” Brown recites free verse over undulating soundscapes. In fact, these songs are reminiscent of the band’s weekly Radio Joy podcasts in which there are often spoken elements and readings backed and embraced by esoteric music and found sounds; dream narrowcasts, nocturnal transmissions. “The Observer’s Book of Birds’ Eggs” lovingly documents a seven-year-old’s nascent understanding of new life and the compulsion to collect and curate it, often extinguishing it in the process. The world-weariness of age sets in on “The Repentant,” which takes comfort and relief in the knowledge we are temporary. The song’s narrator literally embodies the excess and putrescence of humanity with brittle bones that could be as easily crushed as an eggshell. The music shambles with street energy and city friction; an entire urban procession of observation and surveillance is present: protestors, tourists, students, police. The last sentiment of the song is a provocative, but fortifying perspective on what it means to be humane:
You clamour now to save the planet. But I say this…maybe the planet will do ok without us. Maybe the planet is going to be fine. Maybe the planet doesn’t need our saving. Maybe this planet can get as polluted with as many chemicals as it can ingest. Maybe the planet will continue in all its very mutations. Does it matter? Not to me. What matters to me…and what I think it all boils down to…at the end our days, having lived through all our ways, and with the memories that have stayed, deep down inside, what matters to me, surely, is how we treat each other.
The final track, “A Clear Night. A Shooting Star. A Song for Boo,” picks up on this sense of hope. It sounds like a crystalline call of dying and newborn stars pulsing out of deep space. The staccato melody also seems to mimic the precise flow of electricity and binary code. As Brown mesmerizes with his instructions on how to take back the silence, the song becomes an alternative, self-help relaxation recording in which you need to lance the chemicals boiling in your appliances and to pull the plug on their electrical support. He entreats you to baptize yourself in the quietude. The album comes full-circle as it ends with the sound of wind, now solicitous where before it was lonely.
How to Kill a Butterfly is raw, and honest, and sweet even when grotesque and surreal, like butterflies nibbling on the carcasses of piranhas. It doesn’t profess an irritating hippy-crusty-traveler ethos, nor does it pander to some middle-class, “back to the land,” pastoral utopia. It is folk music informed by the city. You can feel the powdery and fractal spectrum of sound, iridescent in your ear. This record is life made strange and wonderful. In it, we are all time travelers and space travelers, tenuous collections of coal dust, road dust, stardust, butterfly dust.
Anyone who is familiar with the music of artists Tobin Prinz and Suzi Horn, aka Prinzhorn Dance School, is already familiar with their artistic concept: the rawness associated with outsider art meets the sparseness and power of post-punk music. Their band name – and stage names – come from Dr. Hans Prinzhorn, a German psychiatrist who famously collected the art of his patients and inspired Jean Dubuffet to coin the term art brut when developing his own artistic philosophy, which focused on an appreciation of so-called “low art” and primitivism instead of polish and conventional beauty. Art brut, later termed outsider art in English, is widely defined as art made by people without artistic training, outside of professional and academic spheres, but it was initially used to describe the pieces made by Prinzhorn’s psychiatric patients as well as by prisoners and children. Dubuffet’s art often included the incorporation of such raw materials as straw and sand in order to capture the roughness he valued as “authentic”. True to this conceit, PDS’s music is simple, repetitive, sometimes disturbing, and in both music and lyrics is certainly highly evocative of the raw and untrained. How respectful and ethical this mimicry is is perhaps not my place to say, but as a novel approach to the chill of post-punk music it works, if in a rather heavy-handed way. It often draws the ear away from the music itself and towards an appreciation of the structure and design that is integral to the music. It also works as a welcome reprieve from maximalist trends in dance music, serving as a thought-provoking palate cleanser with that dance backbone still intact.
Clay Class, appropriately, comes after the drawing class that was 2007’s Prinzhorn Dance School in the band’s artistic development and, following the skill set established with their first LP, this second album is more fleshed out than PDS’s self-titled debut outing in 2007. Slightly more fleshed out, that is. That album practically assaulted the ears with its glaring blasts of silence amid a framework so spare and sharp that it practically bristles with discomfort and irritation, begging for the listener to keep their distance. The starkness of the production used on it certainly proved a point about musical simplicity and power, but it also perfectly complemented lyrics about the mundanity of working class life; the empty routine of eat, sleep, work. The repetition of the lyrics echoes the repetition of the music, both working together to compound the effect of stultifying sameness, unvarying boredom.
“Happy in Bits” opens Clay Class and right from the outset it’s apparent that there is a new warmth present in the mix. While still a good distance away from the sound of more conventional post-punk bands, the silence isn’t as aggressive here, becoming an ingredient in the mix rather than its most important component. Repetition and simplicity still reign supreme, though, and the lyrics “I’m glad you’re here/building on sand/So glad you came/Drawing in wax” while repetitive and evocative of a hospital patient receiving a visitor and the associated bittersweetness of that visit, also serve as a welcome of sorts to the listener. There’s even a semblance of melody in a tumbling guitar part that follows this phrase. So while there’s less atmospheric alienation here than anything on Prinzhorn Dance School, “Happy in Bits” also lyrically shows that there are moments of real contentment in the company of others.
“Usurper” isn’t as friendly, dealing with feelings of being unwanted and the experience of being pushed aside and replaced. A child is specifically mentioned in the lyrics (“Do you look in a child’s eyes and say/Usurper, replacer”) along with mention of the cyclical, circular regularity of being supplanted by someone/thing different and novel. “Seed, Crop, Harvest” revisits a favourite PDS theme of regularity, the inevitably of the seasons, even when experiences feel new (“Got off the treadmill/Got off the breadline/It’s a new dawn/It’s harvest time”). An ominous bass line underpins swathes of guitar in the intervals between verses and it’s particularly clear here that PDS’s approach to musically exploring their ideas of rawness and alienation has shifted. “I Want You” furthers this stylistic change; the song is positively sweet and gentle with its thrumming one-note guitar part and simple, charming harmonies. The lyrics tell a drastically different story: between repeated declarations of “I want you” are discomfiting verses of obsessive jealousy or smothering love or both. The words “I want you/suffocate your soul/cage your freedom/in a loving prison” offer creepy counterpoint to what could be a little love song. I suppose, in its disturbed way, it is a love song, but from a psychologically and ethically muddled perspective and as such surprises and stands out on Clay Class.
“Your Fire Has Gone Out” addresses the meaningless of boredom and instead of keeping lyrics sparse, paints a depressingly grey picture of travel and experience without interest or passion. The lyrics also point to the sameness of large cities, all looming buildings and office drones, public transit and loneliness in the presence of thousands of people. “Crisis Team” is about the emotional depression that comes with winter and its pervasive chill. After a couple of verses that repeatedly mention whiteness, coldness, and death, a refrain is introduced that tells of a scary kind of co-dependency. The words “I need your crisis in my life/Can’t breathe with no accident” are sung in a hauntingly pretty melody that lends poignancy to this confession of addiction to emotional turmoil. Economic depression is the subject of “The Flora and Fauna of Britain in Bloom” and lyrics about unemployment and poverty are contrasted by images of cold, uninviting, and neglected parks. “Sing Orderly” perfectly encapsulates the mostly meaningless minutiae of the everyday, interspersed with occasional mentions of the need to be looked after and cared for. “Shake the Jar” ends the album on a less depressing, depressive note than most of the preceding songs, with the refrain “Shake your jar/Rattle your tin/Rattle their cages/Let the fight back in” alongside an almost jaunty little bass line and punctuated with unexpected percussive hits.
Despite efforts to make their music easier to digest, Prinzhorn Dance School still sound very much like themselves on Clay Class. This feels like a pretty ideal combination – the music is still stark and bare but with less of the minimalist production that made their debut album sound like the aural equivalent of a skeleton. Despite this progression, PDS’s unique viewpoint isn’t compromised at all and they manage to provoke and surprise, alienate and disturb in all the best ways possible. Draping their framework of a sound with a few more guitars doesn’t detract from the poignant isolation of their lyrics; indeed, it fills out their sound perfectly so that it emerges on just the right end of unembellished sharpness and loneliness. An accomplished follow-up to a debut album that was far from subtle in concept and execution, Prinzhorn Dance School have proved with Clay Class that they’re worth watching for the long haul.
The Clash was my gateway to “political” music. From then on, I became a fan of songs that made me think and carried more meaning than a dance party or a love story. In the words of McCarthy, boy meets girl, so what? Having said that, I don’t know if I ever thought I was listening to protest songs. This realization, then, makes me wonder where the line is between songs about politics and protest songs, or if there’s a line at all. Sometimes I think that political music is more about condemnatory commentary whilst protest songs should be about activism and bringing people together to fight for a cause. To borrow from John Gray, the former is about perceiving the world as clearly as possible; the latter is about changing the world. If this is indeed the case, then Dorian Lynskey’s book 33 Revolutions Per Minute: A History of Protest Songs, from Billie Holiday to Green Day would be more often about political music rather than protest songs. Not too many of the songs selected include explicit imperatives nor are they suggesting active solutions. Then again, is the act of inserting politics in pop music—pop music being a contentious concept in its own right—an act of protest? Is intelligent observation in a public piece of art a form of protest? I don’t believe that my favourite band, the Manic Street Preachers, thought they were changing the world through their songs; conversely, they seemed to wallow in their own spectator astuteness and inability to act on an unjust world. Interestingly, Lynskey chooses the Manic Street Preachers’ “Of Walking Abortion” as a turning point in which the protest song “eats itself.” He argues that because the Manics quite explicitly put the blame and responsibility on humanity as a whole (Hitler reprised in all of our souls), “the protest song’s traditional contract with its listener—you and me, we are on the right side—is irrevocably shattered.”
To be fair, Lynskey does address the ambiguity of the phrase “protest song” in his introduction. He frames his discussion by saying that he is “using the term in its broadest sense, to describe a song that addresses a political issue in a way which aligns itself with the underdog.” Ultimately it’s this framework that makes his book such a fascinating and balanced read. He has done an admirable job of tracking the development of the protest song through the twentieth century and its knackered whimper into the twenty-first whilst probing at the protest song’s polarizing tendencies. Though he has broken the book up into thirty-three chapters about thirty-three significant protest songs, he really uses the songs as jumping-off points for analyzing a specific period of protest songs and their sociopolitical contexts. There were many expected appearances, including Woody Guthrie, Phil Ochs, Nina Simone, Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger, Billy Bragg, The Clash, Public Enemy, and Rage Against the Machine, and not-quite-as-expected artists like Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Huggy Bear, and Stevie Wonder. Lynskey does not confine himself to Westernized circumstances, and in including songs from Chile, Nigeria, and Jamaica, he provides a much-needed contrast, showing the realities of protest with actual, tangible risk.
Taking Lynskey’s broader understanding of the protest song and its interesting complexities, I’d like to pick away at my own prejudices and explore my own understanding of protest songs and politics in music. If I place the first song in the book, Billie Holiday’s rendition of the Abel Meeropol-penned “Strange Fruit,” next to Green Day’s “American Idiot,” the titular track from their Grammy-winning rock opera, I’m faced with my own notions of what an effective protest song should be. Where do my own conceptions and judgments of authenticity come from?
Holiday’s growl of “bulging eyes” is particularly disturbing, augmenting an already riveting performance. She is powerful in her delivery, voice ragged, angry, sad, proud, and tired, and the simplicity of the backing piano and her pregnant pauses are conducive to an atmosphere of contemplation. I’m forced to focus on the message as I’m led into the full horror of the narrative. The tension within the performance echoes both the racial tension and the incongruity of politics being aired in this sort of venue. Billie Holiday sings with just enough control and possibility of breakdown to do justice to the carefully constructed lyrics. Meeropol’s lyrics are subtle and are all the more unsettling for their subtlety. Of course, Lady Day’s own troubled existence casts a long shadow over the song and its performance, adding further dimension and depth.
Compared with Billie Holiday’s sobering, haunting performance of “Strange Fruit,” Billie Joe Armstrong and Co.’s video seems like an ADHD protest replete with its own snotty green flood of sick. I’ve generally taken a rather negative view of Green Day’s attempt at a protest concept album, viewing it as a superficial take on complex problems. In light of reading 33 Revolutions and pushing myself to think about “American Idiot” beyond my knee-jerk reaction, perhaps my own negativity about it could be stemming from my own contexts for the song and for Green Day themselves. I couldn’t take protest seriously from a band that I associate with high school antics, and their sudden leap into the then-emerging emo aesthetic didn’t help. Their album came across as insular, uninformed whining rather than thoughtful, creative protest; the only apparent politically charged difference between their music and the moody, suburban alienation of My Chemical Romance was the insertion of the titular song and occasional references to America’s war on terror. Green Day painted disenfranchised teenagers traumatized by the American Nightmare in such broad strokes that they came out like cartoonish bogeymen for the Far Right. Whilst there was no chance of it ending up as a misinterpreted “Born in the USA” debacle, for the same reasons, it also felt like a hollow Rock the Vote pose. It’s a blunt take on the ignorant American stereotype unlike the more nuanced stereotype explored in LCD Soundsystem’s “North American Scum.” Although, if your touchstones when making a political record are The Who’s Tommy and musicals like Jesus Christ Superstar and West Side Story, you will likely be aiming for the grandiose rather than the subtle. Then again, perhaps bluntness is sometimes the only way to get your message across to a wider market. Where “Strange Fruit” and “American Idiot” do seem similar is in their success of slipping something subversive into what was meant to be mass entertainment. Perhaps I’m more disappointed that “American Idiot,” and its album, was the most subversive protest music the masses could grab hold of in the political climate of the time. On the other hand, I’m very likely misjudging what Green Day’s motives were in the first place.
Lynskey ultimately shows how varied the motives for writing protest songs can be, and, in turn, how these motives can be muddled and ambiguous. The book is filled with reluctant heroes and spokespeople, and with artists who very humanly contradicted themselves. There is also a fine line between fighting for rights and militancy buoyed by further intolerance, and many artists cross or straddle the line. At the end of his book, he writes:
What right does a musician have to discuss politics? What place is there for serious political issues in entertainment? And the answer is the same as ever: there comes a point where we have to accept that a musician does not have the same responsibilities as a politician, and that music can contain, and derive energy from, ambiguities that an interview cannot.
Our suspicion of the earnest in a popular song may go further than senses of irony, post-irony, post-post-irony, irony that has been posted so much it has somehow arrived at the other end as authenticity. I wonder if we would experience the same discomfort about protest and politics in other forms of entertainment like books, poetry, films, theatre, and visual art. I tend not to think so. In fact, art becomes “high art” the more serious it gets. This line of logic would seem to point to a discomfort stemming from politics being mixed with popular music. How is pop music defined? What are our expectations for its purpose? Perhaps we need to define entertainment first. Lynskey’s usage of entertainment is that which interests or amuses. It can also be defined as discussion of a subject or treatment of a guest. Related to this last meaning, I think there might be an odd expectation to be accommodated and made comfortable as a guest of the music. The delicate catch-22, then, is political music that isn’t considered pop music won’t have much of a wider impact, but if pop music does deal with politics, it runs the risk of going against the escapist entertainment so ostensibly intrinsic to its genre. At the same time, I think that this contradiction is also political pop music’s most exciting potential and power; subversion smuggled into the pop charts is one of my favourite things. Because the idiom of pop music is already an unexpected location for the entertainment of political discussion, there’s an interesting advantage of sorts. I think subtlety is the key in all art forms; the more unexpected the metaphor, the more impact the message has. It’s the transfiguration of black bodies into strange fruit or the comparison of New Labour with the most Thatcherite/Reaganite of narcotics that elevates a protest song into something worthy of both entertainment and further thought. Political songs often work so much more effectively if they have cleverly constructed narratives and messy ambiguity illustrating their points. It’s a large part of the reason why Elvis Costello/Robert Wyatt’s “Shipbuilding” is a better protest song than the reductive sermonizing and Manichean worldview in mawkish, embarrassing songs like Band Aid’s “Do They Know It’s Christmas” and Prince’s “Ronnie Talk to Russia.” It also helps to have interesting music backing your lyrics.
There have been several written pieces interrogating the seeming lack of protest songs in the last decade, especially in light of the disastrous Bush/Blair years, and Lynskey’s epilogue points to this decline, citing the fragmentation and “armchair activism” of the digital world as possible explanations. I agree with these proposed reasons; there just aren’t going to be the same type of megastar artist saviours in this atomized world of niche interests and defused/diffused media. I also admit that I’m not one to hit the streets in any kind of visible activism; the most I’ve accomplished is signing online petitions and stewing in my own self-righteous anger. Perhaps Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death is also useful in looking at this mediated apathy and impotence; the more information of injustice and collapse we are flooded with, the less control we feel over any of it. We then let it wash over us in the same flow of entertainment; news becomes entertainment, entertainment becomes news. As long as we’re not aware that we’re consuming political matters like they’re meaningless entertainment, we don’t seem uncomfortable about them, nor do we feel like we’re being preached at. Nor do we feel like participating in them.
Aside from this paradoxical disconnection in the face of hyperconnectivity, the world is, of course, still in the midst of myriad protest movements, whether they are the multiple Occupy Movements around the world, The Arab Spring propelled by social media, or website black-outs to raise awareness about SOPA, PIPA, ACTA, and all of the other agreements that are a threat to Internet freedoms. However, the common thread to these protests is the use of globalized media technologies, not protest songs. The non-profit Fight for the Future states: “Remember: websites driving political action is how we beat SOPA!” Much like the technology that enables it, protest seems to be more decentralized; however, decentralization may also lead to perceptions of ineffectiveness. One of the main accusations leveled at the Occupy Movement is its lack of focus; it seems to be aiming for too many goals, or perhaps the objective to overturn capitalism in any effective and long-lasting way is too incomprehensible (see Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism). In recent times, we appear to be attempting to fight amorphous, pervasive, seemingly unassailable foes like terror and capitalism itself. When community is virtual, there are immense possibilities, but if the riots and occupations of public spaces are anything to go by, there are also clearly limitations to being a virtually connected group. There’s a need to be a visible, mobile presence in the streets. I think much of the anxiety about these shifting, rhizomatic mobilities is related to the anxiety over the lack of protest songs. Just as it seems difficult to locate the source, and thus boundaries, of these protests, it is now increasingly demanding to find their songs in a world of niche networks.
In his conversation with Jarvis Cocker on 6Music in April last year, Lynskey said that, ultimately, the value of political music for him is in the fact it gets you thinking and becomes more than escapism. I wholeheartedly agree. Just as other forms of art and culture can make you question and be questioned, an effective protest song can change your worldview and perhaps prompt you to change the world, whilst also being entertaining in every sense of the word.
Let’s get one thing straight right away: Beth Jeans Houghton says that her music is “not bloody folk.” That’s cool with me; she can be a petulant artiste if she feels like it. Even though her eagerly anticipated first proper LP with band The Hooves of Destiny, Yours Truly, Cellophane Nose, is sprinkled with the melodic sensibility of good indie pop and the glitter of glam rock, it is based primarily in the traditions of folk. I certainly find the comparisons between her and singer-songwriters like Laura Marling to be a bit misguided and personally see her work as being more similar to that of Bat for Lashes’ Natasha Khan, but again, that doesn’t mean there aren’t tendencies and patterns to her sound. Let’s put it like this: I am not usually very inclined to listen to or really appreciate much folk music, but Yours Truly grabbed me and held me from my first listen and I’m happy to say that I have yet to be released from Houghton’s musical and artistic grip. That could be read as hyperbole to some, but such is the beauty and freshness of this record, I feel.
Still based in her native Newcastle, Houghton is a visual mishmash in her ever-changing wigs and bizarre, often circus-like wardrobe. The songs on Yours Truly are reminiscent of being under the big top too, all swirling horns and pulsating piano. Houghton originally surfaced in 2009 with the alternative folk Hot Toast EP and then quietly fell under the radar for a while, resurfacing now with an album that reflects the years of work evidently gone into it. Even as she’s cavorted with the likes of American freak folksters Devendra Banhart and Joanna Newsom as well as London band Tunng, Houghton’s continually keen to shirk those pesky classifications that lump her in with the rest of this nu-folk scene. I don’t blame her at all, actually; Yours Truly is the most transcendent album I’ve heard in, well… a long time. It deserves its own moment.
Opener “Sweet Tooth Bird” hits all at once: the snare drum and horns in combination sound a bit like a marching band, but Houghton’s voice tempers that rigorous sensibility with its languorous huskiness. The fast-paced clip established on this song doesn’t take a real break for the rest of the album, instead waning moderately on less frenetic tracks, but otherwise “Sweet Tooth Bird” is an energetic and accurate indicator of what’s to come. Here Houghton sings about a bird she’s shot and killed. That, along with a passage of soaring piano topped with dementedly warped vocals, lends a surreal sense of unease to the song. The beautiful “Humble Digs” trundles along steadily with the aid of some well-placed banjo, but where the track really stands out as special is halfway through when the banjo subsides to make way for a stately procession of horns and choir. It’s an unexpected touch that comes out of nowhere, but it is exactly moments like this where Houghton’s songcraft rises above that of her peers. Her voice deftly lifts out of the phrase with a charming little bend, and the folk perfection of the verses continues, this time with added strings and vocal harmonies for emotional emphasis. “Dodecahedron” opens with the surreal line “Last night I dreamt of dodecahedrons/My eyes were bleeding with crimson sight,” delivered liltingly atop a subdued, syncopated background of bells and horns. The song becomes more powerful, however, when Houghton stops singing words and stuns with a baroque-pop vocal figure that fades away to sparse drum beats. Again a chorus joins her for the second to last line, her voice harmonizing high above the earthy voices below.
“Atlas” picks up the pace again with a rousing drum figure and keeps up that pace, excepting a couple of places where Houghton sadly sings “Ride swift through the houses like blood rides through me, red wine and whiskey are no good for me/Dissecting the atlas for places we’ve been, your list is longer but you’ve got more years on me.” “Nightswimmer” is accented by ethereal harmonies and skittering drums, meanwhile the lyrics are about how love is like drowning, exemplified with the words “You’re only my only love/And I can’t keep my head up above.” There’s also an intermittent little fluttering flourish in the background that ends the song on a mystical note. “Liliputt” begins deceptively softly with haunting voice and ukulele, but soon quickens and gallops away on an achingly beautiful string line. The pause midway through for the refrain “These hooves have had their day/If I stay I won’t survive” is disarming in its intimacy, but it resurfaces at the end of song with a different lyric and wreaks emotional havoc all over again. So far I haven’t been able to listen to it without tearing up. I’ve also embedded the video below, partially to give a glimpse of Houghton’s visual aesthetic and partially to share another song from this incredible album. I also love the idea that in it she’s apparently being haunted by figures from classic paintings.
“Veins” begins languidly with a warm soul groove that suits Houghton’s voice perfectly. Suddenly it morphs into frantic indie pop powered by forceful piano stabs and multitracked harmonies. The final line “nothing’s ever going to be the same” is carried out by a lively violin melody. “Carousel” seems to be named for the revolving, circling quality of its music. Indeed, it is the sound of a funhouse, complete with a maniacal, mechanical cackle that abruptly stops as if a door’s been shut and hollow metallic bells and chimes. This is complemented with an ornate violin and piano interlude that soothes away the spookiness.
Going back on my previous assertion, I do think there is some validity to Houghton’s being compared to Laura Marling. I prefer to think of Houghton’s sound, however, as being influenced by artists like Shara Worden and Alison Goldfrapp as much as by Marling. There’s a lot of interesting stuff going on here, to be sure. Anyway, reductive comparisons don’t do Houghton many favours – she’s an emerging artist in her own right and her particular combination of musical styles and distinctive presentation definitely make her one to watch. All told, this is an album to burrow into, to discover and rediscover, to dance to and cry to. I can all but guarantee that Yours Truly, Cellophane Nose will reappear at the end of the year on this blog, by then worn in and comfortable but no less magical.
I will readily admit that I’m a latecomer to the power-pop wondrousness that is the music of Imperial Teen. Like, really late. Will Schwartz (Hey Willpower), Roddy Bottum (Faith No More), Lynn Truell (Sister Double Happiness, The Dicks), and Jone Stebbins (The Wrecks) have been releasing albums as Imperial Teen for over sixteen years now, and their latest LP, Feel the Sound, is the first one whose release I’ve actually anticipated as a fan. Granted, their last release, 2007’s The Hair the TV the Baby & the Band, is from almost five years ago, and so I feel my ignorance can be forgiven slightly in the light that they are rather sporadic in their output. But back to the music at hand: Feel the Sound is as joyful and exuberant a pop record as Imperial Teen have ever released, this time with a shinier, more produced sound that suits their buoyantly catchy anthems. For me, a very near and dear band with a similar approach has to be the New Pornographers, also a supergroup made up of accomplished musicians in their own right, also soaring along on Carl Newman’s ridiculously catchy pop hooks, and also using boy/girl vocals as part of their distinctive sound. Of course, it’s the differences that count, and while the New Pornographers sometimes delve into darker, murkier territory than their power pop classification accounts for, Imperial Teen have a subtle but distinctive queer sensibility that informs their music and makes it so inimitable.
Feel the Sound opens with “Runaway”, also released as the album’s first single, and a sunshine-y burst of harmonizing string lines flood the intro with retro good vibes before boy/girl harmonies and new wave keyboards join. The climax hits when all of the multitracked vocals come in for the chorus, and it’s appropriate that this piece of sugary pop escapism is about, well…escape. “Last to Know” is a mid-tempo number with steady, chugging guitars that collapse with fervent, echoed vocals during the chorus. There’s a weary resignation about the delivery on the verses that’s suitable to the subject matter: an affair that ends a previous relationship. “Over His Head” is darker still: musically a more restrained effort with keyboards fleshing out a minor-key, atmospheric sound along with the repetition of the refrain “he’s in over his head”, numerous mentions of darkness, and echoing, elongated sighs that punctuate instrumental passages, this song feels like Imperial Teen have resolutely grown up and are not completely happy about it. Closing lyric “the best of days will come again” is evidence that despite being poppy, Imperial Teen are not always happy.
“Hanging About” is another atmospheric track, its lyrics obscured by reverb. Things lighten from the dreary mood of the verses when that reverb falls away for the refrain and is replaced by bright harmonies. In the intervals between vocal phrases is where they come closest to the Krautrockish, motorik-y sound that is touted in Merge Records’ promotional blurb for the album. “Out From Inside” rides on a propulsive beat emanating from the bass and drums in combination, and the lyrics again find solace in being overwhelmed. “The Hibernates” sticks out a bit on this collection, but not for bad reasons: on the surface it’s a sweetly simple pop song with charmingly hushed spoken/sung vocals, but the lyrics are more discomfiting than that, mentioning “blackbird screams” and growing mould. There’s also a keyboard solo (backed by the sound of chirping birds) two-thirds of the way through that is creepily reminiscent of the song my grandma’s old jack-in-the-box used to sing while you turned its little metal handle and waited for the inevitable fright of Jack himself. “Overtaken” nicely sums up the atmospheric direction that the band have explored on the preceding ten songs and ends Feel the Sound on an appropriately melancholy note. Despite the almost aggressive cheer of “Runaway”, this album is more subdued and nuanced than previous Imperial Teen releases. There’s a need to escape from something bad but the acknowledgement that this escape will yield something better.
I’ve also attached the video clip for “Runaway” as I think it’s a brilliant little video, even just taken on a surface level. An interpretation of the lyric “I could be you and you’d be me”, in the video party-goers exchange masks with the band members’ likenesses on them, and, in some fun and jumpy editing, switch clothes and effectively do a bit of drag. Reading a bit more into it, however, the “Runaway” clip, to me, distils what is so unique about this band: on an Imperial Teen record, gender and sexuality don’t really matter. The band is half queer-identified and half straight, half men and half women, and their lyrics largely don’t touch on those topics at all. Instead, the world of Imperial Teen is a world of equality, blissfully free from stereotypes and assumptions. That doesn’t mean Imperial Teen’s world is always happy and carefree, of course – but it is a place where pop perfection is the best and quickest route to contentment.
I’m a bit paralyzed myself in writing this review. I can’t seem to mobilize my thoughts in a way that would serve this latest of Montreal album. In addition to my own proclivity to self-sabotage, this record has left me weary, and feeling as though I have no ability to articulate its scope and vision. It’s as though I would have to compose my own hour of music to express what I’ve experienced but can’t put into words. After the sunshiney soul-funk of False Priest, the sexy alter ego antics of Skeletal Lamping, and even after what I had considered to be Kevin Barnes’s most self-revealing/reviling work, Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?, Paralytic Stalks is sonic violence, a passive-aggressive assault on your senses. The entire record is haunted by a searing high-pitched noise, regularly inducing a cacaphonic madness and spectral paranoia, but the sound never becomes muddy or muddled; instead, the production and composition are precise and crisp, lacerating in their clarity. Barnes has returned to the messy self-awareness of Hissing Fauna, but has kicked out the reassurance of poppy sing-a-long choruses and replaced them with the mercurial, unpredictable movements of Skeletal Lamping. In comparison with this latest album, Hissing Fauna’s nervous breakdown actually seems quite lucid and pleasant. There’s a punishing rhythm to Paralytic Stalks; the psyche-crushing intensity is bookended by those now-familiar wonky choirs of Barnes harmonizing with himself and almost-bucolic melodies, including fluttering flutes and gentle acoustic guitar. There’s also a sense of a relentless itch you cannot satisfy; a perching on the cusp of resolution without reaching it. By the end of Paralytic Stalks, your mind is crying out for a conclusive chord to tie up the infinite number of frayed ends that have stranded you on edge for the previous fifty-eight minutes.
The album opens with “Gelid Ascent,” which feels much like drowning in frigid waters. Reverb ricochets off more reverb like the disorienting push of water in your ears, and when the drum beat eventually kicks in, it sounds like a slow thrashing of numb limbs. Barnes’s vocals become garbled in a multitude of echoing, desperate pleas. In “Spiteful Intervention,” his vocals keep pitching into flashpoints of half-screamed taunting. Barnes rages against a reality that is increasingly meaningless and against his own ego whilst ruminating on his failings and self-hatred. His impotence is perfectly encapsulated in the lines: “There’s nothing to fight/it’s just a bitter fait accompli.” He recognizes his own fragility and malevolence; against a background of jaunty melody, he sings, “I made the one I love start crying tonight/And it felt good/Still there must be a more elegant solution.” It’s as though he can’t help himself in more way than one. As with several previous albums, much of the album seems to be directed at his wife, Nina Grøttland, dissecting the contradictions and complexities of their life together. The lightest track on the entire record is “Dour Percentage,” which, perhaps unsurprisingly, will be released as the first single. It floats in a psychedelic bubble of deceivingly saccharine music as Barnes negotiates the complications of his marital relationship. There’s an atmosphere of beleaguered alienation as he sings “this planet is an orphanage” and of a “personal ghetto.” The mutual torment continues in a more twisted fashion on “We Will Commit Wolf Murder.” Though Nina is the only person he can believe in, he also envies her capacity for belief. The agnostic antagonism reaches its frenzied, bestial heights as the song ends in distorted beats, sounding like a rave filtered through a bad hallucination. Barnes’s continued exclamations of “There’s blood in my hair” begin to sound much more murderous against this heavier backdrop, and he becomes like a trapped animal stripped of consciousness and ready to lash out. With the music ending in a fit of squeals, his sighing vocals carry you into the next softer track, “Malefic Dowry.” Although he sings of trying to remain Nina’s “rock ‘n roll ally,” he also adds the rather disturbing, impossible demands of his own emotional state, including “Now I feel you’re provoking me with your fidelity.” It’s as though Barnes is baring his threats and brandishing the misfortunate baggage to which Nina has yoked herself in marriage.
“Ye, Renew the Plaintiff” ushers in the half of the album with the lengthier, even more challenging, songs. In this track, Barnes actually addresses Nina by name, and two minutes into the song, his sweet falsetto performance has soured into the harsher taunting that appeared earlier. It’s like Barnes is tearing at his own brain in howling fury, trying to express the inability to escape his own corrupted thoughts. The music mirrors his mental state in squeals and pounding drums, helping him to articulate what he cannot otherwise: “I’m desperate for something/but there’s no human word for it.” You can feel the terror of recognizing the onset of depression in his half-screeched line “I’ve become so hateful/How am I ever going to survive this winter?” The song shifts gears in a myriad of squeaky whistles and a disembodied vocodered voice. As Barnes attempts to trace the ancestry of his own instability and emotional sterility, the music bounds along down a steeper path as though it cannot stop itself from tumbling into the looming abyss of “Wintered Debts.” In one of the most personally affecting moments of the album, Barnes nearly whispers the lyrics “Can’t survive another comedown day/where my spirit houses so much pain/so much bitterness” before swelling up with the anger of the music and proceeding with his “morbid fugue.” For those of us who can fall into an obsessive self-loathing that casts its moribund stench over everything we do, his rasping cry of “I can’t deal with mourning at the carcass of my failures any longer” is a magnificent metaphor. Four and a half minutes into “Wintered Debts,” the music begins to swirl in sinister, yet enchanting loops, like Giovanni Segantini’s “The Evil Mothers” come to life. The song then shifts back into a Beatleseque ballad as Barnes seems to experience a brief respite, singing that “the child of our struggle is free.”
“Exorcismic Breeding Knife,” the penultimate track, opens with a disjointed refraction, which spiders out with broken minor chords and horror film menace. The vocals shift from spoken-word to dream-like trance. There’s something terribly creepy about his lyric “horse-faced hours of ours,” as though he is plagued by true nightmares, time staring him down through equine eyes. Distant bell chimes add to the unsettling gloom before Barnes explores the lack of a system in dealing with this kind of pain; he later states that “There is no economy of despair.” His clipped vocals ask “How can you perform?/How can you operate?” as though his mind is a machine that has malfunctioned, and he is trying to find the correct frequency on which to recover, tuning different sounds and samples in and out. The final track on the album, “Authentic Pyrrhic Remission,” takes the bold experimental schizophrenia of the previous song a few hundred steps further. Though it begins with what seem to be facetious “la la la’s” and a final declaration of empowerment and return to some sort of salvation through his relationship with Nina, the strained jubilance drains away into another bout of chaos. The final movement of the suite is a glassy ambience slipping into a piano ballad. At this point, Barnes refers to himself as a nomad, a pariah, an exile, and a mongrel, but realizes that these terms are rendered useless in a world with “no nations” and “no concept of ego.” The last line of the record is the quietly sung “Our illumination is complete”; in this mockery of enlightenment, only the obliteration of a rational self and personal progress, and the erasure of all categorical boundaries can be a more elegant solution.
Paralytic Stalks is a sadistic and masochistic experience shot through with a brutally honest self-awareness. Kevin Barnes continues to fascinate, and I continue to empathize with him. As someone who lives with repeated mental hijackings by chemical imbalance, I can identify with much of Barnes’s exceedingly evocative lyrics and depending on my mood, this album can actually be a comfort in its blinding evisceration; it can become the welcome white noise I need to cleanse my fevered brain and drown out my own malevolent thoughts. With this record, Barnes seems to have reached a point at which he has had to resort to the non-verbal in order to articulate the unspeakable. Through a fluid musical exploration, he voices the vitriolic frustration with his helplessness and his exhausting struggle to free himself of the thoughts which prey upon him. Paralytic Stalks is an exceptional piece of noise therapy that expresses what it feels like to try to defend yourself whilst hunted down and cornered by your own claustrophobic anxieties and suffering through a suffocation of your own mind’s making. It is the sound of holding yourself hostage.
Paralytic Stalks is released on February 7. Preorder it at Polyvinyl.
The music of John K. Samson holds a very dear place in the hearts of many, many Winnipeggers and Manitobans. That’s a truism, sure, but it’s one I feel is relevant as his new and first solo album proper, Provincial, essentially a love letter to Manitoba, is released. Of course, Samson’s work with bands Propagandhi and The Weakerthans made him well-known a decade and a half ago, which is to say it also certainly holds a very dear place in the hearts of many people all over the world whether or not that work is about his beloved hometown. For all their specificity in name and place, the songs on Provincial are evidence of the appreciation that grows from years of living in the same place, seeing the same people, and relying on the same comfortable familiarities and, as such, I think this collection will appeal to a vast array of listeners.
There’s nothing here so bitter and conflicted as The Weakerthans’ classic “One Great City!” and its refrain of “I hate Winnipeg.” Instead, Provincial is an affectionate musical road trip to places forgotten or only known in story. From the Trans-Canada Highway entering and exiting Winnipeg to the city’s distinctive landmarks, culture, and customs to explorations of rural towns and their history, Provincial is both a continuation of the work he’s done on one of his favourite subjects and a new, committed, and focused collection of songs imbued with his signature melancholy, sometimes cynical, sweetness. There are multiple mentions of ghosts, snow, and darkness, which any record about Manitoba would be obliged to include, but beyond these lyrical references, the mostly acoustic folk-rock presented here is warm and welcoming. This is in no small part due to Samson’s voice, a charmingly imperfect instrument with an expressiveness and honesty that few other singers possess.
With opener “Highway 1 East” Samson enters Winnipeg, relieved to have left Saskatchewan and accompanied by horns to accentuate the poetry of this brief prologue. The line “some sarcastic satellite says I’m not anywhere” wryly portrays the frustration of a GPS that doesn’t pick up Winnipeg and the more important fact that this is home. Sure, we’re an insignificant city that’s just a dot in the middle of Canada’s vastness, but can’t that satellite signal at least recognize how much this place means? “Heart of the Continent” immediately transports listeners to the intersection of Memorial and Portage and the old United Army Surplus store at its corner. The iconic building has been torn down and replaced with a new one that contains University of Winnipeg classrooms and offices, a restaurant, and a small art gallery, but what’s happened to the stories and people that used to fill this long-time Winnipeg institution? Samson’s nostalgia is fleeting, though; he’s just passing by this corner on his way to somewhere else, but the dusk seems to bring out reflection when all the occupants of the building are closed for business. He questions why there’s “no sign to show you when you go away” [and leave Winnipeg], and in doing so makes a poignant point about endings. Beginnings (of cities, and of businesses and buildings) are always announced and celebrated, but endings go unmarked and in many ways overlooked.
“Cruise Night” focuses on the Winnipeg summer ritual of drivers and their vintage muscle cars cruising up and down Portage on Sunday evenings, complete with spectators lining the street with their lawnchairs. This cruise night, though, is one from decades past and told from the perspective of a kid on his bike. Not yet old enough to drive and participate fully, he’s relegated to peddling around “while jacked-up rides idle at me.” Also on Portage Avenue is “Grace General” or Grace Hospital where on this song someone drives through the midwinter cold to visit a loved one who is sick and hospital bound. The final refrain of “what will I do now” seems to express the despondency with which this person approaches both the rest of the day and the rest of his life without his loved one.
The pace picks up again to an early Weakerthans-esque clip with “When I Write My Master’s Thesis” and a character that spends his time alternately playing video games at home and researching his paper on the Ninette Sanatorium, a tuberculosis hospital in the village of Ninette that operated from 1910 to 1972. A (fictional) letter that he finds while doing research is the subject of “Letter in Icelandic from the Ninette San.” Even though Samson came up with the contents of this letter especially for this song, its words ring eerily true in lines like “In another year I’ll be buried or shivering here/Coughing at the grey spittoon/Painted orange by the harvest moon.” Accented with emotive violin lines, this letter from a person ill with tuberculosis could very easily have existed, as could have a student researching and discovering it while working on their master’s thesis. This pair of songs beautifully bookends the existence of one of Manitoba’s buildings that exists to Samson only in family anecdotes and archival evidence. How is it that knowledge of something so real to past generations of Manitobans is reduced to books in libraries and ghosts in the lives of young Manitobans today? What happened to those people? What happens to those ghosts?
“Longitudinal Centre” again brings us to the highway and the precise middle of Canada while “www.ipetitions.com/petition/rivertonrifle/” is both a song and an actual URL for an online petition to admit Reggie “The Riverton Rifle” Leach, Riverton-originating NHL player and Manitoba icon, into the Hockey Hall of Fame. Leach fans can add their names to the petition by clicking the above link. “The Last And” is a plaintive memory of a short-lived relationship (an affair?) between, presumably, a schoolteacher and the principal of the school she works at. It’s devastatingly sad and resigned; Samson’s hushed delivery of the line “I’m just your little ampersand” and the realization that this relationship is ending lend the song a heartbreakingly intimate glimpse into memory, nostalgia, and love. Back in a (broken-down) car for “Highway 1 West” and stranded in a ditch outside of Winnipeg, we are given one last dose of the road before settling in again at home on “Taps Reversed,” a duet with Samson’s wife, musician Christine Fellows. Home, of course, is filled with household chores and things that need to be done, though that doesn’t detract from its incredibly strong pull and the feeling of belonging, of rightness, that only happens when at home.
