(photo: Facebook)

I was listening to Ontario Toady on CBC Radio 1 the other day, when they had a woman, born and raised in Ottawa, lovingly and reverentially talking about her hometown.  I loved listening to her discuss how our nation’s capital has transformed over time into a mini metropolis with a rich cultural life that reflects ethnic diversity, artistic creativity, and (sometimes) thoughtful public policy and decision making.  Ottawa is the one city in the entire country that I would move to in a heartbeat.

Part of the allure for me is the fantastic music that is coming out of the city.  The radio clip reminded me about Amos The Transparent, the Ottawa-based band I first posted about back in February 2007, but has been absent from these pages since.  It’s been well over a year that the band released its debut, Everything I’ve Forgotten to Forget, a fantastic meld of introspective folk, pop, and rock, and high time I got around to discussing it.

Where once they randomly swelled and shrank in ranks like cheeks on a fat kid sucking on a puffer, Jonathan Chandler, Christopher Wilson, Mark Hyne, Dan Hay, and James Nicol have now solidified into the core of the band.  Their early offerings on Myspace hinted at the depth and range of their playing, but you truly appreciate how effortlessly they swing from multi-part harmonics to drum machine spiked arena pop, often within the same song.  Some of the arrangements follow a “go big or go home” mindset that isn’t always as rewarding as the quieter more delicate moments, but on record, Amos The Transparent come across as a band in the middle of an amazing transformation.  What comes next from them is any one’s guess, but chances are it will have moments of beauty, strength, urban sensibility and pastoral charm, much like the city they call home.

MP3: Amos The Transparent “After All That, It’s Come To This
(featuring Amy Millan)”
Myspace Amos The Transparent
Buy: Amos The Transparent Everything I’ve Forgotten to Forget

(photo: Jenny Lewis)

It’s underscored by a haunting, hollow buzz that conveys fear, uncertainty and nervous energy.  The repeated lyrical motif, “my heart keeps beating like a hammer,” is a bit too literal next to the rhythmic pulse of the static drum track, but there’s enough variation in Emily Haines’ delivery and the song’s arrangement to keep things interesting.  Although it’s fresh to my ears, “Help I’m Alive” is unmistakably the work Metric, and I for one am willing to lend a hand.

There’s a sense from this song that Metric are awakening from a dormancy, and reminding listeners and fans that they are still very much a going concern.  That’s understandable, given that it was June 2006 when we last heard anything new from them.  That was  the release of the very first album they recorded, Grow Up and Blow Away, which predated their first ever actual release, Old World Underground Where Are You Now?, so actually we heard new old material that the band had originally deemed to be unrepresentative of their musical evolution.  It all sounds a bit complicated, but the long and the short of it is that the last time we heard anything really new from Metric was back in September 2005, when Live It Out simultaneously scared and titillated us with it’s muscular, brainy pop.  Sure, Haines has graced us with some gorgeous solo work in the interim, and bassist Josh Winstead and drummer Joules Scott-Key get an A for effort with their side band, Bang Lime, but 27 months is an awfully long time to be absent from the scene.

You would expect Metric might do more then just tap us on the shoulder to let us know they’ve returned, but making a scene has never been Metric’s mode of operation.  Even their brashest hook-filled tunes, Metric never hits you over the head with their songs.  There’s is a subtle seduction.  They prefer to creep into your psyche, to get under your skin, and plant a seed that begins to grow and take root.  Their songs bloom over repeated listens, revealing delicate flowers ringed by sharp thorns.  Get can close enough to experience the sweet fragrance, but if you get too close, you’ll prick your finger on one of the sharp thorns.  Metric have always existed as a dichotomy; dangerous, beautiful, subtle and bold.

There’s always pleasure in the pain when you’re dealing with Metric, so I’m anticipating that their as-yet-untitled new album is going to hurt so good.  “Help I’m Alive” has begun to grow on me after repeated listens, and it has prompted me to go back and listen to their back catalogue some, which is always a good sign.  If you go to the band’s official site, there’s a nice little mini-documentary clip featuring Emily Haines talking about the gestation and initial songwriting period for the new album, and based on what she says there alone, I’m thinking this is going to be a highlight of 2009.

MP3: Metric “Help I’m Alive”
Myspace: Metric

(photo: Facebook)

Lest you think that Sigur Rós is the only Icelandic band to have had a very good 2008, I wish to draw your attention to Sprengjuhöllin.  Their biography reveals that the band’s fan base covers “art school hipsters, mechanics, housewives, convicts and politicians”, and since I don’t fit into any of those demographic categories, I’ve decided to add one of my own:  “lovers of great pop music”.  Sprengjuhöllin easily charmed Iceland with their arresting, effortless pop stylings with their 2007 debut, Timarnir okkar, which was one of the best selling records on the ice island last year.  They went back to work with producer Valgeir Sigurdsson (Bjork, Bonnie “Prince” Billy) for their more ambitious follow up, Bestu kveðjur.  The strings and grand-scale orchestrations knob has been turned up to 11 on Bestu kveðjur, and the effect is a shimmering sheen on a set of pop classic influenced equally by The Kinks and Velvet Underground as by Blur and The Strokes.

MP3: Sprengjuhölllin “Týnda Mín”
Myspace: Sprengjuhölllin
Facebook: Sprengjuhöllin

(photo: Nicholas Kahn)

It’s winter and it’s raining, and that doesn’t feel right.  It’s a juxtaposition of feelings, like when a person you hate does something nice for you, or your best friend makes a snarky, jealous remark about your new boyfriend.  You know it’s not improbable, but it still feels wrong.

I find that the only way to set these days, when up is down and down it out and out in back in again, is to fill them with song.  You can choose almost any old album and it will somehow fit into the fabric of the day, but today, for me, there seems to be no more appropriate album for a cold, rainy, winter’s day than Rook, by Shearwater.  From the window outside my den, I can hear the gentle tapping of rain water against the side of the house, see the stray drops fall from the bare branches of my magnolia tree, and imagine the feel of the cold bluster of wind moving those same branches in time to “Home Life”.  The song titles themselves seem custom made for days like today (“On the Death of the Waters”  and “The Snow Leopard” in particular), but it’s the haunting majesty of the music that is Shearwater’s most arresting feature (as it should be).  Jonathan Meiburg’s dulcet vocal tones become an axillary instrument next to the harp, glockenspiel and dulcimer used on Rook; you don’t necessarily care what he’s saying, but you sense what he’s feeling, and it’s heavy, heady, and haunting.  Rook won’t chase the storm clouds away, but in its own special way, it will make all that’s wrong with the outer world seem right.

MP3: Shearwater “The Snow Leopard”
Myspace: Shearwater
Buy: Shearwater Rook

(photo: Dylan Matthews)

Meursault are a band that cannot be justly described by written language.  This is not a cop-out because I couldn’t come up with any pithy quotes like the ones provided by their label’s site, it’s just that their unique blend of electronica, banjo, and ukulele creates a sonic assault that leaves you breathless and scratching your head, trying to figure out what exactly you just experienced.

These Scottish boys are no Belle & Sebastian, that’s for sure; they’re closer cousins to Mogawi, I guess, but–again–that doesn’t exactly give you a true idea about what you’re dealing with here.  Amid the drone of fuzzy feedback and slapping drum beats, there’s moments of sonic clarity that break through, where strings of all sorts give the music a humanity and warmth.  Pissing On Bonfires/Kissing With Tongues, their debut album (released by blog-turned-label Song, By Toad) is over before you know it, but buy the time you’ve gone through it and experienced the ecstatic and oddly beautiful “A Few Kind Words” you’ll want to go back and start all over again.  Because–and I’m just really getting this now as I type it–you have to hear the whole thing before you really can appreciate just how complex, how utterly accomplished this debut album is.  Once you’ve experienced it once, the subsequent listens reveal the hidden treasures and tiny details that make it a compelling listen (you’ll have to download the album yourself to experience the jewel that is “A Small Stretch of Land”).

MP3: Meursault “The Furnace”
MP3: Meursault “A Few Kind Words”
Myspace: Meursault
Buy: Meursault Pissing On Bonfires/Kissing With Tongues