[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.

From time to time, the guy behind Catbird Records posts to a forum I’m on about the latest release from his label. Catbird Records puts out mostly limited-edition versions of albums, and his work is always fun to look at because he goes completely wild with the packaging—hand-painted this and origami that and all sorts of fun stuff. Unfortunately, their latest release, a hand-painted edition of Prairie Cat’s Attacks!, is sold out of its 100-copy run, but luckily you can still grab a copy of the still-very-lovely album via Fuzzy Logic Recordings and, if you’re in a large Canadian city, probably in one of your local record stores. And if you’re a fan of charming, low-key bedroom pop, you really should find yourself a copy.

Prairie Cat is Cary Pratt (yes, I’m pretty sure that rhymes), a man in Vancouver who played pretty much all the instruments on Attacks! Cute titles like “It’s Good to Be You” and “Grumpy Forever” telegraph the sort of lazy-afternoon analog keyboard antics you’ll find in abundance on the disc, though a lovely trumpet adds that extra touch of class to the proceedings on “Grumpy Forever.” In fact, it’s that trumpet that sold me on that album, but after listening to the album it’s clear any of the tracks could’ve sucked me in. The jaunty ringaling of “It’s Good to Be You,” the warm sounds of “Better Friends Than Lovers” and the piano rock of “Payin’ the Rent” are just as infectious, if not more so. If there’s a problem with the album, it’s that it’s too damned short—18 minutes over seven tracks just doesn’t seem like enough time to get to know Prairie Cat. Here’s hoping we hear more soon.

A more melancholy state of mind for New Zealand’s Brunettes, whose new album Structure and Cosmetics is out now in North America and the home territory. The more expressive palette of “Small Town Crew” still hints at the cutesy pop foundations of older releases—it’s always going to be difficult to downplay the undeniably twee qualities of Heather Manfield’s voice—but takes a more subtle approach from the usual bubblegum shenanigans of older favourites. More evidence is present on the band’s MySpace, where half the album is available for your perusal. “Brunettes Against Bubblegum Youth,” a live staple you might better know as “B.A.B.Y” (and if you don’t, hunt down the band’s live set from this year’s SXSW), sounds as though the vocals were recorded in an old school gymnasium—a very different feeling from the immediacy of the onstage version. “Her Hairagami Set,” the first single from the album, is also a bit less straightfoward.

But lest you think the Brunettes have taken a hard left on the new album, there are two things you should know. First, the slightly more bittersweet textures work really well, and aren’t all that different from the less upbeat moments on Mars Loves Venus. And if various songs on the album frustrate slightly—there seem to be a lot of vocal effects this time around—it’s only because both Mansfield and Jonathan Bree have such unique voices that you don’t really want to hear them under layers of reverb. Second, and more important: the Brunettes haven’t lost their sense of whimsy. “Stereo (Mono Mono)” brings back the cute interplay between the two singers for a spell, and “Obligatory Road Song” is a fun little number that’s sure to get feet shuffling when the band returns to North America for a full tour later this month.

Welcome to the final long weekend of the summer, which for many people will be the last big trip to the cottage or cabin in the woods or just “anywhere but here”—an escape to somewhere quiet, relaxing, and far, far away. Of course, for those of us without such remote hideaways, we make do with what we’ve got. And it’s for those people that I bring what I think is Sarah Harmer’s best song to date.

Back before her first album got picked up by Universal Canada and she became a household name, Sarah Harmer was merely the lead singer of the mostly defunct Weeping Tile. For the teenagers who’d listened to the Kingston band throughout most of the 90s, Weeping Tile was one of those Canadian alt-rock combos that made few waves on a national scale but garnered its own small following. Luther Wright went on to form his own alt-country band, Luther Wright and the Wrongs; meanwhile Harmer decided she’d strike out on her own. Her first release was an album of covers recorded for her father, Songs for Clem. Released as an afterthought after friends told her it was actually quite good, Songs for Clem eventually led Harmer to try her hand at an album of her own material.

In the summer of 2000, Harmer announced on her website that she’d finished You Were Here. She was hoping a couple of stores would carry it, but in the meantime you could send her $15 and she’d mail you a copy. I figured it’d be a lot easier to mail her a cheque than wait for a Toronto store to carry the album, so I sent out my request and received in return a CD with an inkjet-printed cover illustration and a plain pink CD with the tracklist printed in purple. That album, along with a bunch of other CDs, came with me to a friend’s cottage up by Lake Erie, where we celebrated the death of our petty high school dramas and stared unflinchingly into the abyss of our impending university careers.

It’s there that I discovered just how magnificent “Coffee Stain” sounded when accompanied by the sound of waves splashing on the beach in the early afternoon; how “Around This Corner” livened up a bright, sunny morning spent lazily reading; and how “Lodestar” could bring you out of the deepest funk and tell you everything was going to be alright. You Were Here signifies, for me, that one week I spent pretending the world was nothing but deck chairs, sand, and calm water out to the horizon.

Not long after I returned from that trip, I packed all my things and moved to Kingston to start university (and perhaps find Tom’s Shoe Repair, the store that inspired a Weeping Tile song of the same name). Not long after I got there, Universal announced that because of the massive response to Harmer’s album, they would give You Were Here a wide release, and just like that you didn’t have to worry about finding it in stores any more. And though you’ll be hard-pressed to find the quaint, partially handcrafted album I hold dear, all of You Were Here’s charms remain intact on the glossy-booklet Universal version.

And thus endeth a month of songs with trumpets. Yes, a whole month. Did you notice?

From the calmer, gentler end of the Elephant Six spectrum is the Ladybug Transistor, purveyor of immaculate, charmingly retro chamber pop and occasional bigger brother to the Essex Green (who put out one of last year’s best albums, Cannibal Sea). Though the lineup has changed greatly over the years—most recently with the sudden passing of drummer and longtime member San Fadyl, who suffered from complications arising from his asthma—the band’s sound has largely stayed close to home. Gary Olson still sings most of the songs in his unmistakable deep voice, and the luscious, organic arrangements—organs, pianos, violins and trumpets all playing major roles—still dominate.

The lush setting displayed on the cover art of The Albemarle Sound, with the band members lazing on the hillside beside some babbling brook, mirrors the atmosphere of the music itself—unhurried, relaxed and pastoral, content to soak in the quiet grandeur of a spring afternoon. The whole album, as most of the Ladybug Transistor albums, was recorded at Olson’s home studio at Marlborough Farms—if that doesn’t sound positively picturesque, I don’t know what does (although the reality is it’s just the name of a house in Brooklyn, though it is fairly large and right beside a park). The Albemarle Sound set the benchmark for future albums, the band’s orchestral vision and pop sensibilities coming into bloom thanks in part to the addition of several players. This is the album to start with if you’re new to the band.

Sweden’s Club 8 was on a roll for a while. Over the course of five years around the end of the century, the duo of Karolina Komstedt and Johan Angergård put out four albums and three EPs of material, gaining them a cult audience in the States around the time record labels like Kindercore and March were leading the indie pop brigades to ever bigger audiences. And then, almost as suddenly as they appeared on the scene, Club 8 vanished. Their absence probably did little to speed up the decline of fey, unassuming indie pop; with the collapse of Kindercore and the resurgence of loud guitars and electro, indie pop didn’t stand a chance. Nevertheless, Club 8’s sudden exit was yet another sign of the twee pop apocalypse.

“Whatever You Want” is another vintage Club 8 track, at first blush. All the basic elements are there—Komstedt’s cool vocals over light electronics and perky acoustic guitars make for a effortlessly breezy sound and an endless summer vibe that serves as Club 8’s trademark. Like most of the Club 8 songs I find, I had no idea which album “Whatever You Want” came from, but I assumed it was from somewhere in the late 90s, around The Friend I Once Had territory.

But “Whatever You Want” isn’t a decade-old track from a mostly forgotten Swedish pop band; it’s a new track from an upcoming album poised to take advantage of the new surge of interest in Scandinavian indie pop. In typically unassuming fashion, the band quietly noted they were finally working on a new album after years of silence, and then just as quietly popped the new track onto MySpace. If this is the start of another five-year burst of energy from Club 8, then Scandinavia lovers should be in for quite a treat.

Working for a volunteer-run, small Canadian magazine is not exactly lucrative—the running joke at Shameless headquarters is that our offices are the living rooms and bedrooms of the people who create it. But there are plenty of perks besides the healthy glow you get from supporting something you believe in; there’s also the launch parties, which are usually great chances to meet people you’ve only talked to via e-mail. They’ve also been great for seeing cool bands I’d never heard of. Last year it was Laura Barrett; a couple of weeks ago it was Forest City Lovers.

By sheer coincidence, the band had played a couple of nights previously with a friend of mine, who plays guitar with Entire Cities; I’ve been horrible at getting downtown to see him play so I didn’t actually see the show, but the name Forest City Lovers was still floating around in my head when they set up shop in the NOW Lounge on a bright spring Saturday afternoon. It’s always a pleasant surprise to me that the magazine is able to convince cool people to come play awesome music for us for free, and Kat Burns and company delivered in spades. The breezy, unhurried slices of guitar pop are enchanting on their own, but their vibe meshed perfectly with the lazy afternoon spirit of the day.

Burns has recorded two CDs of material already, but has yet to put out an album with the full band; apparently that album’s coming in September. “Doorsteps,” off last year’s The Sun and the Wind, sounds pretty good even without the band, which bodes very well for the fall. Until then, for the full effect you’ll have to see them live—they’re playing a couple of dates around Ontario before heading out west for a spell. You should go—if not for the charming music, then for Burns’s gorgeous robin-egg blue guitar.

The number changes slightly but the idea is always the same: general publishing wisdom has it that even if a book and its buyer are a match made in heaven, it will still take that buyer about five impressions before he or she finally buys the book. That means your average buyer has to see the cover in an ad, read the title in a review, or see copies in the bookstore five times before they’ve gleaned enough information to pull the trigger. Of course there are exceptions; I’m sure everyone waiting for the Harry Potter book didn’t have to be told twice, let alone five times. But it’s an interesting metric nonetheless, and one publishers are always trying to bring down.

For Greenwich band Lucky Soul, my number was three. Number one: Frank, whose lead post on the Long Blondes—which, by the way, is yet another ace UK band you’ll want to check out—segued into an enthusiastic paragraph and a link to impression number two, courtesy of Popmatters. I skimmed the review—that’s right, didn’t even bother to read it—before discovering impression number three, a YouTube video for “Add Your Light To Mine, Baby.” After that I hit the Amazon UK site, and am currently pondering the checkout button. But if there’s a lesson in all of this, it’s that recommendations from people you trust are far more effective than ones you don’t, because while checking my inbox for a prior Amazon UK e-mail, I discovered a two-week-old e-mail that serves as a belated impression number four:

We’ve noticed that customers who have expressed interest in “The Deep Blue” by Charlotte Hatherley have also ordered “The Great Unwanted (Ruffa Lane)” by Lucky Soul. For this reason, you might like to know that “The Great Unwanted (Ruffa Lane)” will be released on 9 April 2007. You can pre-order your copy for just £9.99 by following the link below.

Is this a sign that Amazon’s recommendations are actually beginning to work? They’re certainly right about Lucky Soul—the syrupy 60s orchestral pop of “Add Your Light to Mine, Baby” and “Lips Are Unhappy” is just the ticket for the spring-turning-to-summer that’s just around the corner. Everyone’s already covered the Saint Etienne/Cardigans/Pipettes angles, but Ali Howard’s helium vocals remind me most of an old Swedish pop band called Cinnamon, which means Lucky Soul hits lots of sweet spots for me. Not only that, but anyone that knows me understands that I’m a sucker for pop music with trumpets—call it latent guilt for dropping my trumpet playing halfway through high school. One of these days I’m totally going to buy a trumpet and annoy the neighbours with my impromptu re-enactments of early Motown and Burt Bacharach tracks, but until then the likes of Lucky Soul will do just fine.

As for people like myself and Frank, who are theoretically here to point you to music you don’t necessarily know about yet, I don’t think we need to watch our backs too closely yet. But clearly their recommendations-bot is closer to sentience than we thought; if it pulls a Skynet we’re all in trouble.

Anna Padgett is a Brooklynite, but her songs sound like they were written and recorded in a prairie homestead. Such is the quiet wonder of the Naysayer, consisting of Padgett and a rotating cast of friends including labelmate Kendall Jane Meade of Mascott, Karla Schikele of Ida, and Tara Jane O’Neill. Their involvement in past Naysayer albums should give you an idea of the territory we’re in: gently reassuring, stripped-down folk-rock.

The title track from Smoke Reality (which was, in fact, recorded in the woods of Oregon) is full of texture, from Padgett’s soothing vocals to the delicate but insistent drums. Tara Jane O’Neill’s production lends an organic quality to the instruments—everything’s given room to breathe, allowed to work their own groove. Taken as a whole, “Smoke Reality” is three minutes of almost otherworldly beauty, like a big slice of that Oregon forest transplanted to NYC.