Use Ether To Subdue Robber

Pop Winds In Harmony

Montreal's newest Great White Hope for pop redemption, the Silly Kissers, will be launching their new 10" Precious Necklace this Friday in the definitely unromantic concrete-bunker of the Torn Curtain. Along for the ride will be Grimes (that's Claire Boucher, who just released a cassette of her own), and Pop Winds. I've already covered the Silly Kissers and Grimes, as well as the solo work of Sean Nicholas Savage in previous posts (here, here and here), so my focus right now is the trio Pop Winds, who seem to be cut from the same cloth as Air France, Lemonade, Tanlines as well as other Sincerely Yours groups: re-formatting Afro-Caribbean poly-rhythms for the less-than-temperate regions of the earth. As superficial as the sampling or adopting of these 'tropical riddims' might be, it's nothing to get your Bermuda shorts in a bunch about - it's pop music, and it rarely gets as lyrically distasteful as 10cc's Dreadlock Holiday or the Bill Wyman song I posted yesterday (Je Suis en Rock Star). If anything, the song that comes to my mind is Siouxsiee & The Banshees' Hong Kong Garden.

So yes, fine, there are the vocal acrobatics and loops of Animal Collective, and those rhythms, but the sentiments and songs are expressed through the production and composition techniques of two very much-maligned genres - 80's industrial and goth. Whereas the post-electric explorations of musicians of that time (Death in June, Current 93 et al.) led to them marching in the wilderness of a martial-pastoral folk almost anti-modernist in its adoption of acoustic instruments, Pop Winds are more comfortable with studio technology, and (in so far as I can tell) less inclined to fascist imagery. And yes, we have a saxophone. (Say what you will about the excesses of the sax-drenched 80's, there's a sonic place the instrument occupies that no other instrument can really move around in.)

It's appropriate that a lot of the lofts and re-appropriated workspaces that house these musicians and events are dank, ranging from the cavernous to the claustrophobic. It's the perfect place to dream of tropical escape in the middle of a bleak Montreal winter. If you're in Montreal, you can catch Kyle Bennett, Devon Welsh & Austin Milne of Pop Winds in just such a place this Friday.

UPDATE: Via Twitter, Pop Winds are recording a new full-length right now at Master Tone in Montreal.

Silly Kissers / Grimes / Pop Winds
DJ sets by Why? Alex Why? and Rough Shape.
Friday, February 19th at the Torn Curtain

Glumly Strummed Guitar Sounds & Ubiquitous Ukulele

Postcards Free
Postcards Dark Clouds
The Hoa Hoa's Postcard

Where do the cross-currents of the breezy Pacific and the cryptic coldness of the north Atlantic meet? Here, above the 49th parallel, in a city on the St. Lawrence named Montreal and, if you want to be very specific, with a group called Postcards.

Key reference points appear to be Felt, C86 cassettes, Young Marble Giants, and with Dark Clouds, maybe the Current 93/Death in June/Sol Invictus axis of post-industrial neo-folk. For all of you concerned about the steady undercurrent of Fascism in all glumly strummed music, I suggest that you can put your mind to rest with regards to Postcards - preliminary investigation on the group reveals much less ambiguous treatment of Fascist themes and imagery than the aforementioned reference points.

As befits the post-punk aesthetic, the group has a cassette available on Fixture Records. The stand-out track is Nowhere, which you can preview on their Myspace page.

If you're in Montreal, the group will be performing at L'Escogriffe for Toronto psych-poppers The Hoa Hoas' album release party along with Omon Ra on Saturday, December 12th. And coincidentally, they have a song called Postcards.


Trending! The Sounds of The Yogurt Commercial Ukulele!

It might just be a latent hatred of, but the too precious digital-age calypso mess of the embarrassingly intercapped tUnE-YaRdS (fuck, it annoys me to look at it, nevermind type it - I can practically smell the stale confines of a zine library at a liberal arts college) is really, really not doing it for me. Have any of you been subject to the broadcast television recently? If you have, you'd realize that every single yogurt commercial is scored by music like this. In many ways, I should really trust my judgement more - just as with Girl Talk, which I inadvertently listened to a couple of weeks ago after avoiding for many years and ended up absolutely loathing... After immersing myself in pop/indie music or what not for many, many years, it becomes relatively easy to know at a glance whether I'll like a band or not based on the aesthetic cues they leave scattered around, and so with tUnE-YaRdS.