AM radio. If you’re like me and whoever wrote up the bio for Todd Fancey’s lovely band, Fancey, the phrase AM radio conjures up a very particular kind of sound—the more upbeat precursor to adult contemporary, perhaps, or maybe just a fuzzy, pop-fueled feeling of generic warmth and good times. I always think of Maria Maldaur’s “Midnight at the Oasis,” probably because of all the Time-Life Music commercials I saw as a kid for AM Gold compilations featuring the song along with 36 more of your favourite AM hits from the 70s.

Of course, one term that probably won’t come to mind when you think of AM radio is “challenging.” It’s not exactly cutting-edge music, and it’s not going to earn you any cool points. But not every piece of music has to push the boundaries; there’s still plenty of room in the world for the unassuming radio-friendly tunes Fancey specializes in. Two albums in, it’s pretty clear that Todd Fancey and company have plenty such songs in them, and less than a year after Schmancey’s release, word is that the band’s prepping a third album for this summer.

So if you’re not afraid of a little soft rock schmaltz, but don’t want the full-on Christopher Cross treatment (or the burden of explaining your “Sailing” fetish to your friends), try putting on a Fancey album on your next lazy sunny afternoon.

For a very long time, Mates of State served as my highwater mark for tweeness. The first album, My Solo Project, captured the duo at the height of their overwhelming cuteness—Kori Gardner and Jason Hammel shout out lyrics like giddy teenagers atop enthusiastically played organs and drums. The album is bookended by Gardner’s sister singing into a tape recorder when she was a kid. Oh, and did I neglect to mention the duo got married the year after My Solo Project came out? And have since left their mark as indie pop’s most adorable couple ever?

Well, at least they used to be, for now I have found an even more adorable couple: Lullatone. The more subdued, half-Japanese contemporary of Mates of State wins top billing in the cuteness sweepstakes for a number of reasons. First: Jason Hammel gave up medical school to keep touring and playing music with Gardner, which is pretty cute. But Lullatone members Shawn James Seymour and Yoshimi Tomida faced a transpacific divide: they both went to university in Kentucky, but Tomida was an exchange student and had to return to Japan when she graduated. So Seymour said fine, I’m coming with you. That’s even cuter.

Second, Lullatone’s sound—or lack of sound, in a sense—developed because Seymour used to compose music at night, and didn’t want to wake his significant other. Also adorable. Third, the music itself consists largely of toy instruments, found sounds (”The Bathroom Beat,” off their latest album of the same name, uses various bathtub noises for percussion) and Tomida’s gentle, hushed vocals—a classic tweepop recipe if I ever heard one, though not in the same exuberant fashion as Mates of State.

Finally, if you’re still not convinced, here is the promo video they put together for their Australian tour. Yes, Seymour and Tomida even put together the stop-motion.
And the US tour last year:

Dear lord, the cuteness. It’s enough to make you utterly sick to your stomach. I won’t even mention their flickrstream or blog because honestly, I don’t think humans are capable of taking in so much cuteness at once.

Meet Thao Nguyen. According to her bio, Thao started playing the guitar when she was 12, and perfected her technique while working at the laundromat her mom ran while dreaming of Lilith Fair. While working towards a sociology/women’s studies degree in Virginia, she met up with some of the people who would eventually form her upstart backing band, the Get Down Stay Down. And now they all travel across the country singing jaunty little ditties located near the intersection of bluegrass and twee pop. I think that just about covers it.

As you can probably already tell, certain elements of her story—I’m thinking the teenager with the guitar in the laundromat with dreams of outdoor folk festivals in her head, really—have a certain down-to-earth fairytale quality that adds just that extra little touch of wonder to Nguyen’s recorded material, though I doubt she came with with the likes of “Bag of Hammers” while sorting change or selling little bags of laundry detergent. We Brave Bee Stings and All is Nguyen’s second album, though her first for Kill Rock Stars and as the leader of Thao with the Get Down Stay Down.

The first couple of reviews of We Brave Bee Stings and All mention the bluegrass connection (as do I, but bear with me for a second). I don’t know about you, but when I think of bluegrass, I think of the likes of Gillian Welch, who you may have heard from the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack or perhaps from “Orphan Girl,” a lovely tale about a little girl who’s lost her entire family. Most of Welch’s career has been spent down at the depressing end of the spectrum, what with songs about morphine addiction and rape in her repertoire. But more importantly, Welch’s music always seemed very much a product of a different age, and though it is very good, it never quite seemed alive. I figured this was just a component of bluegrass music in general, the same way a jazz newbie probably thinks contemporary jazz simply retreads the likes of Davis and Coltrane. So I naturally assumed that reviewers attaching the “bluegrass” label to We Brave Bee Stings and All would mean the same thing: an almost claustrophobic adherence to a dated aesthetic.

But in fact everything I’ve heard so far of Nguyen’s recent work says exactly the opposite. It’s refreshingly carefree, lively and upbeat, even as it hangs on to some obvious bluegrass markers (hello banjo). So if you’re allergic to bluegrass for the reasons I stopped listening to Gillian Welch, give this one a chance. You may be pleasantly surprised.

Let’s say you’re an artist and you’ve got a track that’s begging for a different kind of remix. Maybe you don’t want the dancefloor treatment because that’s been done to death. The rock remix works alright sometimes, but you’re afraid the end result will sound like it belongs on drive-time classic rock radio. Maybe you’re looking for something a little less ordinary, something you don’t hear quite so often. In that case, might I suggest you give your song to Cornelius and let him sort it out?

Keigo Oyamada’s performing name is well known to Japanese music fans, especially those particularly attuned to his sample-heavy style of bubbly organic electronica, but far less so in the States despite backing from Matador Records. This is probably partially because Matador hasn’t bought into the Japanese trend of putting out tons of compilations between proper releases—people don’t seem to buy artist comps nearly so much in North America—meaning the latest Matador release was in 2004, a DVD video compilation accompanied by a disc of remixes from Cornelius’s 2001 album Point (which was released on its own in Japan as PM). Cornelius has since moved to a smaller label for his American releases, Everloving Records, for his 2006 album Sensuous.

What’s missing from the North American discography is CM2, a compilation that collects a number of Cornelius remixes of other artists. The effervescent remix of Tahiti 80’s “Heartbeat” is on the disc, as well as remixes of Blur’s “Tender,” the Avalanches’ “Since I Left You,” and this remix of Japanese producer Towa Tei’s “Butterfly.” The original track was exactly what you’d expect from the Deee-Lite member turned DJ/producer, a nimble Shibuya-kei-influenced dance pop track. Cornelius turns it into a sublime slice of glitchy folktronica more at home in the living room than the dancefloor. It does sound a bit like an outtake from Point, but that’s not at all a bad thing—especially if you’re already a Cornelius convert.

I know, I know, Mother Nature just dumped 50cm of snow on us in the space of a week. This afternoon I saw a snowplow dozer spin its giant wheels trying to clear the snow from the service lane behind my house. It’s been cold, wet, windy and nasty these past couple of days. So bear with me for a minute while I try to convince you that spring has arrived early.

Exhibit A: Casey Dienel, aka White Hinterland. Wait, where are you all going? Don’t leave, I can explain! I know White Hinterland sounds like an awfully chilly name. You there, in the back, you’re nodding your head yes. You’ve heard of Casey Dienel? Then you understand.

Two years ago the Brooklyn-by-way-of-Massachusetts singer-songwriter put out her debut album Wind-Up Canary under her own name. The world isn’t exactly hurting for piano-playing female singers, true, but unlike most singer-songwriters of this particular type Dienel doesn’t come across as sensitive, pained, emotionally conflicted, downbeat, or any of a thousand other adjectives you could apply to the recognized leaders of the niche. Instead, Dienel’s most obvious quality is a carefree, happy-go-lucky kind of weightlessness. The closest spiritual contemporary that comes to mind is early-career Mirah, back when she was taking her clothes off for meteor showers and breathing carburated sighs.

Since then, Dienel has played a bunch of shows all over the place, and then fell oddly silent for a couple of months. All she promised during that time was something new and different. Then, at the beginning of the year, she said Casey Dienel, the recording artist, was dead. In its place is White Hinterland, a project that, at least at first glance, doesn’t appear to stray too far from Dienel’s solo work. This is a good thing, because it’s that happy-go-lucky spirit that’s so essential to making songs like “Dreaming of the Plum Trees” work. It may remind you of the Peanuts theme at first, but even after that association fades there’s still the sense that Dienel could make a killing providing new soundtracks to old Sesame Street segments and cute community theatre plays. Give it half a chance and “Dreaming of the Plum Trees” will lift your spirits like a helium balloon riding a breeze of crisp, fresh air. It just might even have you imagining that spring has already sprung. Seriously, any more of this and flowers will shoot through the snow.

Phylactery Factory comes out in March.

[review 2007: favourites]

I can give you a list of reasons why I shouldn’t like Neptune City. First: it’s a Columbia release. Columbia is not only a major label subsidiary, but it’s also owned by Sony BMG. That would be the same Sony BMG that tried to install rootkits on your computer and then told you not to worry, you probably didn’t know what a rootkit was anyways. In other words, when I bought Neptune City from Ms. Atkins when she opened for the Pipettes in October, I unwittingly gave money to the worst record label of all the majors. Second: Nicole Atkins has her own American Express commercial wherein she lounges on a comfy hotel bed in her bathrobe and offers to fly friends out to her show. Girl’s got cash to burn, I guess. And finally, there’s the matter of Neptune City itself. Atkins managed to score a whole orchestra for the recording sessions (which may explain why this isn’t a Nicole Atkins & the Sea release, though her backing band does play on the album as well), and the result is an album that’s perhaps overfull with instruments and produced to within an inch of its life. Not that I could, but if I had to change one thing for Atkins’ next release, it’d be to tone things down a bit—she really doesn’t need all the horns and choirs and strings jockeying for attention.

Okay. Now that that’s all out of the way, let me tell you why none of that should matter to you. First, it turns out Atkins told the American Express people that the hotel thing was completely unrealistic. “I was like, ‘We usually stay at the Econolodge,’” she said. “‘Uh, that doesn’t look too good on tv.’ Ok, whatever.” Since she was, in fact, living at home with her mother at the time she shot the ad (a condition I will always remember as the Fiona Apple condition thanks to a New York Times article about Extraordinary Machine), she gets a pass on the bathrobe lounging.

And what about Neptune City? The production distracts, for sure, but when Rick Rubin came in at the last moment to remaster the album, he knew what to focus on: Nicole Atkins’ majestic voice. Her live show is a great showcase for that voice; listen to her sing “The Way It Is” live and you’ll be shaken to the core. Imagine, say, Neko Case back when she was more fun and didn’t write such oblique songs about car crashes, and you’re starting to see the appeal of Nicole Atkins. Other people (and Columbia’s PR people, natch) have compared her to the likes of Loretta Lynn and Roy Orbison. Those are pretty hefty names to be associated with so early in your career, but when you watch her win over entire audiences, it starts to make some sense. I saw a woman in the audience cry when Atkins sang “War Torn.” I’m convinced, and if you catch a concert you probably will be too.

Neptune City is pretty evenly split between faster rock songs and out-and-out torch material, and she’s versatile enough to score points with both. On the rock side of the ledger: “Maybe Tonight” is quite possibly the best album opener I’ve heard all year; it has a heady sense of anticipation to it, and despite having played the album something like twenty times over the past month it’s just as invigorating as the first time I heard it. “Love Surreal” is the spunkiest track of the lot, with a skittering beat inviting you to try a couple of dancefloor moves. And then there’s “Brooklyn’s On Fire!,” which sounds to me like Atkins trying to capture some of that Arcade Fire-esque communal euphoria feel and doing a better job than anything off Neon Bible.

The torchier songs that focus the most on Atkins’ vocal performance, to great effect. I’ve already mentioned “The Way It Is,” which was a pretty good choice for first single, and “War Torn,” which finds just the right level of heartfelt passion to keep the song’s central metaphor from dipping too far into melodramatics. But my favourite track on the album—at least, one of my favourites, because I seem to have so many of them—is the title track, an ode to Atkins’ hometown of New Jersey that perfectly captures the melancholic nature of nostalgia: fondness tempered with an acute sense of loss. Really, it’s a song that works for anyone who’s ever left home for greener pastures.

There isn’t a weak song to be found on Neptune City, and by the time you get to “Party’s Over” and its irresistible chorus, you’ll wish it wasn’t (even if, in the song, she does). Luckily, with Atkins playing shows left, right and center next year to support Neptune City’s recent release (she’s planning to go back on the road with the Sea early in the new year), it looks like there’ll be plenty of parties to attend in the future.

[review 2007: honourable mentions]

I may as well admit it now: I listened to The Reminder in February, three months before the album was actually released. And though my limitless supply of PR industry e-mail contacts supply me with tons of artist bios, headshots, YouTube links and even the occasional MP3, it did not supply me with an advance copy of Feist’s latest album—as usual, album leaks took care of that.

Let it Die became a pleasant late-night companion during the summer of 2004. The syrupy easy listening lounge concoctions sounded pretty good during the day, but really came into their own around two in the morning. The Reminder is equally tied to time and season in my head, but this time around it’s the frigid winter that seems to best suit Feist’s third album, not the summer, which is why its February leak was such a happy accident: The Reminder just doesn’t sound as good in May as it does in February. Stripped of its loungey production, The Reminder takes on a wildflower soul quality that was largely missing from Let it Die, save that disc’s “When I Was a Young Girl.” Not surprising, because the raw quality of that track carries over to some of the best songs on The Reminder.

You almost have to imagine that when Feist went back to the drawing board for the new album, she decided to tone everything else down—the production is less showy, the arrangements less complex, the sound more intimate and bare—in order to show off her voice. “The Park,” one of the best songs on the album, is a prime example of this philosophy. Feist is left to sing at turns delicately and passionately over a sparsely strummed acoustic guitar, a bit of trumpet, and the sound of birds chirping, all recorded to what sounds like a public school tape recorder. The song is barely there, practically a ghost save for Feist’s splendid vocal work. “The Water” is not so resolutely lo-fi, but the result is the same—to showcase Feist’s wonderfully acrobatic voice above all else.

As a showcase of singing talent, then, The Reminder works very well. But the approach of suppressing everything save Feist herself occasionally does the album harm; “Intuition” is another lo-fi track in the style of “The Park” that doesn’t actually go anywhere, and “Brandy Alexander” doesn’t really coalesce for me. “Honey Honey” is a track that either hits a sweet spot for you or leaves you cold, so minimal is its sound and progression. Luckily, The Reminder doesn’t always stick to the vocals-only philosophy, as you no doubt have heard thanks to a fleet of iPod commercials. Though “1234″ still sounds stripped compared to her Let it Die material, Feist’s biggest song to date relies on a chorus of players and singers, finishing with almost Broken Social Scene-levels of flourish.

Generally speaking, though, The Reminder is more intimate, raw and novelty-free than Let it Die. If anyone had doubts after Let it Die that Feist wasn’t here to stay, this should put them to bed; free of adornments, Feist still impresses.

[review 2007: odds and ends]

Sometimes you can write entire screeds about an album. And sometimes you can barely write a sentence. For whatever reason, here’s some of the albums this year that had me fresh out of new perspectives.

Brunettes - Structure and Cosmetics. Album #3 from the New Zealand band is less enthusiastic and more mild-mannered than previous outings. While on the one hand this makes them sound a bit more like pastoral pop bands like the ever-so-lovely Essex Green, on the other hand the loss of cute numbers like “Too Big for Gidget” and “The Record Store” is palpable. “If You Were Alien” and “Stereo (Mono Mono)” retain some of the cute, while “Small Town Crew” is a cinematic slice of chamber pop heaven.

[review 2007: crimes and misdemeanours]

Let’s get the Word out of the way first: difficult. Yes, White Chalk is difficult. And yes, I didn’t like it so much because it was difficult.

But White Chalk wasn’t difficult to listen to; not at all. For that, the reviewers gave us little credit. As if an album without drums or guitars would somehow put people off, when Joanna Newsom was such a hot name barely a year ago. Harps, people. Harps. PJ Harvey banging away at a piano (and, yes, a harp on one song) and singing well above her usual register cannot compare to the oddity that is Joanna Newsom, and if Newsom’s second album, more convoluted and epic than the first, could win near-universal praise, surely White Chalk wouldn’t be so difficult.

A lot of reviews made White Chalk out to be more difficult than even Harvey’s 1998 left turn, Is This Desire? You might remember that album as a claustrophobic techno-gothic nightmare, and I mean that in the best way possible—Is This Desire? is my favourite PJ Harvey album, and the idea of returning to that fertile ground was appealing. But in hindsight, despite the presence of off-putting electric dronefests like “Joy” and “Electric Light,” Is This Desire? wasn’t as peculiar as originally thought either. After all, “A Perfect Day Elise” charted pretty well, didn’t it? Maybe it only looked so difficult because of what followed—2000 Mercury Prize winner Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea, one of Harvey’s biggest commercial successes to date behind To Bring You My Love. Maybe the same would be true for White Chalk as well.

First impressions, in fact, are quite good. The first three tracks offer ample insight into the world of White Chalk and offer enough emotional grit to keep the songs in your memory long after the album is over, like good ghost stories that keep you up at night. “Grow Grow Grow” is especially spellbinding, and perhaps the most overtly sinister song of the bunch. (As someone who loved the oppressive qualities of “Joy” and “Electric Light,” this makes a certain sense.) By the time you get to “Broken Harp,” though, you have a very good idea of how the rest of the album will go. Songs begin to blur into each other, and by the time you get to “The Mountain” you’ve lost track of where you are in the album. White Chalk’s range of moods is even narrower than …Is This Desire?, meaning you have to be in a fairly particular mindset to get the most out of the album. This isn’t a bad thing, but it does limit the replay factor significantly unless you live in a frontier forest cabin perpetually lit by candlelight.

That said, Harvey gains points for once again painting a very vivid atmosphere with her songs, something that was missing from 2004’s Uh Huh Her. It’s only because you wouldn’t want to live in White Chalk’s haunted world very often that the album suffers. So, difficult? Not to listen to, for sure. But to identify with? To live with? To immerse yourself in on a regular basis? Maybe there you’ve got something.

Recorded together as part of the same session, Ida’s two turn-of-the-century albums, Will You Find Me and The Braille Night, were the product of every independent band’s dream: record an album on the company’s dime and then release them on your own. Except that’s not exactly how it turned out for the NYC-based slowcore band; the band was dropped from Capitol Records without putting out a single release due to a regime change, leaving Ida without support but (eventually) left holding the rights to the master tapes for Will You Find Me, eventually released via Insound record label Tiger Style in 2000. The Braille Night was culled from those same tapes after the band realized they had enough good songs for a second release, and was published a year later.

Ida called bands like Low their contemporaries; in fact, you could think of Ida as Low with fewer experimental tendencies and more harmonization. The duelling vocals of husband-wife duo Dan Littleton and Elizabeth Mitchell are the band’s calling card, their harmonies casting a thousand-watt light across the often haunting folk landscapes that might otherwise feel forlorn and lonely. Whether this strategy agrees with you may depend on whether you like forlorn and lonely music or not; for those who prefer to live more fully in the darkness, like-minded folk artists like Tara Jane O’Neil might be more up your alley. But there’s a compelling case to be made for Ida’s tendency towards harmonization: it is, in a word, gorgeous. Where the formula might quickly grow tired in a different context—say, straightforward indie pop—the melancholy nature of some of the backing tracks adds just the right amount of bitterness.

After 2001, the band took some time to record a follow-up thanks to a litany of one-off releases and side projects; midwestern post-emo stalwarts Polyvinyl Records put out Heart Like a River in 2005, and word has it Ida’s preparing another album for release sometime in the next year or so. Or something like that.