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Donovan Woods, Hard Settle Ain't Trouble, Picture You, Put On Cologne, Radical Face, Shane Burke, The Amazing, The Breathless Boy, Welcome Home
Let’s take a mellow moment and turn our ears to the acoustic side of poprock. Our four featured songs have a stripped down feel, unhurried, and certainly not cranked to eleven. The Amazing are an example of the neo-folk roots revival apparently going on Sweden over the past decade (I’m thinking here of other Swedish acts like The Tallest Man on Earth), though their most recent Picture You album expands their sound in a more poppy direction, both melodically and instrumentally. But “The Headless Boy” is more a throwback to their earlier material, a delightful, almost Donovanesque tune with some lovely harmonies in the chorus.
Donovan Woods is one those breathy singer-songwriters with whom you can pull up the covers and settle in for the night. And while he might sound a little bit like those breathy others, his subject matter is decidedly different, tracking a bit deeper and more realistically the actual ups and downs of relationships and life’s disasters or disappointments. His most recent album, Hard Settle, Ain’t Trouble features the beautiful and moving “They Don’t Make Anything in that Town,” which is pretty self explanatory. A great song exemplifying his Canadian roots (Sarnia, Ontario) is “My Cousin has a Grey Cup Ring.” But featured here is “Put on, Cologne” from his 2013 record, Don’t Get Too Grand. Why? Because it’s wonderfully weird. The title? No, I’m not sure what it means or refers to. All that is clear is that he has got a real problem with somebody’s ‘stupid European boyfriend’. It is a song that seems to really capture the irrational frustration of unrequited love.
Radical Face have put out a number interesting records, including their just-released The Leaves. But the song here, “Welcome Home,” comes from their 2007 album Ghost. There is something otherworldly about this tune, the way the march-like drumming and swirling vocals combine, which is probably why they used it in French TV’s The Departed, a creepy enigmatic (but riveting) show about people who died but somehow inexplicably returned years later. And I love the cover of this album.Welcome Home
Last up is Colorodoan Shane Burke, a man with an amazing voice. Generally, a lot of his material would not really fall under the poprock mantle, but “I Go Crazy” has a great rollicking feel and a trebly guitar intro and leadline that threads it way through the song. A worthwhile boundary stretch to finish things off. I Go Crazy
You can explore more of what The Amazing, Donovan Woods, Radical Face, and Shane Burke have to offer on their websites and Facebook pages.
I was minding my own business enjoying John D. Macdonald’s The Quick Red Fox when the protagonist Travis McGee pulled into Sausalito as part of his latest adventure and suddenly I was thinking of a song I hadn’t thought of for decades: Diesel’s “Sausalito Summernight.” I distinctly remember hearing this song on the radio in 1981 and playing it at some of the first high school dances I deejayed for a mobile sound company. Diesel joined the lonely ranks of Dutch hitmakers in the United States, groups like the Shocking Blue (“Venus”) and Golden Earring (“Radar Love,” “Twilight Zone”). Looking back now, the song sounds incredibly tightly focused and executed – the addictive lead line that propels the song never lets up, the multilayered vocals are drenched in reverb, and so on. It’s like a soft drink that is just too sweet. But I still love it.
Portage and Main is a downtown Winnipeg intersection, which turned 150 years old just last month. Portage and Main, the band, reside in Vancouver and sport a laid-back country feel on a lot of their material but “Better Man” breaks out from the pack with a Blue Rodeo-like punch: great organ, super electric guitar lines, catchy tune.
Whitehorse is the capital of the Yukon territory and the largest town in Canada’s north. It boasts 20 hours of sunlight on summer days. Whitehorse, the band, can be found in Hamilton, Ontario, offering up a sound that borrows from roots and vintage 1950s twang electric guitar but with songs that defy categorization. “Sweet Disaster” is from their 2015 Leave No Bridge Unburned album: a cool mood piece that builds from some sparse drums, piano and rumbly electric guitar into a breakout chorus.
Django Django caught my ear for their totally unique songs and sound – one part New Order bass synth, another part oddly retuned Brothers Four vocals, strung together with some killer Ventures-like guitar lines. It all sounds vaguely familiar while being completely original. It is hard to single out just a few songs to feature from their records, despite the fact that it is still a rather sparse catalogue (just two albums, an EP, and some remixes).
Everything Everything are another band with a unique sound that attend closely to songwriting, taking songs places you don’t expect. Their best material builds out a song from some interesting ideas, putting them together and taking them apart repeatedly. Key examples would include “Kemosabe” and “Duet” from 2013’s Arc. The transitions between the verses and pre-chorus and chorus of the former are exquisite, pivoting on careful vocal arrangements and the word ‘hey’. The latter kicks off with a string section that reminds me of Kate Bush’s “Cloudbusting” in general ambience, transitioning on the phrase “but I don’t know what’s real or what’s going on” into a very different sounding song, then shifting again into the chorus. 2015’s Get to Heaven continues to develop their sound with great singles like “Distant Past” and “Regret” but the song that really stuck in my head was the more unusual “Spring / Summer / Winter / Dread” with its intimations of both joy and dread. There is something 1980s going on with it, though I can’t quite put my finger on what it is.
Though it was released in May of 2015, is it really too late for Cheers Elephant’s “Airliner” to race up the charts? There have been slow building hits in the past. Crowded House’s “Don’t Dream It’s Over” did not take off on its initial release, only catching on with radio months later. “Airliner” is certainly deserving of such late recognition. The opening verse is delivered with a compressed vocal sound that channels 1970s AM radio and holds the listener in check until the chorus drops with a killer hook. As the band drops out momentarily, a rainbow-like harmony vocal sustains a chorus of longing for escape from the mundane ground in favour of the ease of flight on an airliner. As the chorus laments, “I walk around kicking trash up off the ground and I say I want my seat on an airliner …” The graphic for the single riffs off the 1960s ‘flight as party’ motif recently re-popularized in TV shows like Mad Men.
Poprock Record 