Thursday 14 January 2010
If my love is an axe, you’re the tree
(photo: myspace.com/thewheatpool)
Yet another of 2009′s great records that slipped by me is Hauntario, the sophomore album by The Wheat Pool. In commenting on the choice of title, Robb Angus says, “From the very beginning, the first songs possessed a haunting quality, dark subject matter and melodies that wouldn’t get out of our heads.” Guitarist Glen Erickson goes on to say, “Ontario wouldn’t go away, as a lyric, as a destination, or as the home base in our industry. For a western band it remains a necessary evil, a difficult girlfriend to win over, yet on a different level it possessed so much of what we love about our country.” You hear this collision quite clearly in the lyrics of the LPs second track, “Lefty”: “So goodbye Toronto/so long Ontario/maybe tomorrow/when we go west/to start a new home/on our own”.
The Wheat Pool strike the perfect balance between rock grandness, folk sentimentality, and alt-country passion. Their songs, like beautiful “Evangeline” and “This Is It”, seem to arrive perfectly crafted, with little effort. In the hands of a lesser band, the emotional weight of the songs would crush any sense of hope or redemption. The Wheat Pool know how to work a song, though, and they manage to wring heart-piercing guitar sounds that hit your square in the chest and make you feel what you hear. On first hearing Hauntario, each song kept getting better and better, drawing me in deeper and deeper. It’s not very often that an album keeps building up without hitting a plateau or two along the way.
No matter how much regret I’ll feel about not having listened to the record any earlier than now, it’s far outweighed by the joy I’m experiencing now that I have. Go curl up with your favourite blanket and beverage of choice, sit back and give Hauntario a spin, but be sure to grab yourself a box of tissues, because as teh band sings on “One of These Nights,” “we’ve got a lot of crying to do.”
MP3: The Wheat Pool “This Is It”
Myspace: The Wheat Pool
This entry was posted on Thursday, January 14th, 2010 at 11:30 am and is filed under MP3. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Paul Corby January 23rd, 2010 at 9:10 am
I’ve played every song on my show, Corby’s Orbit CKLN 88.1 T.O., bought the disk times and burned it for colleagues x more. I drove to New York with it on and couldn’t wait to get to it on the way home. I believe that, as gorgeous as the front line is, the special quality is hidden in the production by James Murdoch and the absolute artistry of the drumming.
Lofty music.