Vivir al dia

Anna Domino Land of My Dreams

Aretha Franklin Land of Dreams

I was anticipating Beach House's latest album Bloom to be another stunning achievement, deeply affecting and moving, etc, having enthusiastically loved their prior output...  But no such luck.  I didn't loathe it, but just as with the most recent Destroyer album, it went in one ear and out the other.  Neither colourless nor terrible, just workmanlike.  I couldn't hum a melody from it with a gun at my temple.

Not so with Ms. Domino's 1986 version of Aretha Franklin's dazzling torch song...  The hypnotic guitar-interplay mirrors Felt, with a rockabilly twang on the leads, her voice is rich in character and depth.  Throaty, even!  A sweet soporific lullaby for the droopy eyed positioned between the morose ballads of Christine McVie in Fleetwood Mac and the Baltimore-bred sleepwalking hymns of (yes) Beach House and Cass McCombs.

Sadly the rest of Ms. Domino's work doesn't always add out - hopelessly dated sounding experiments with canned drum loops and an over-reliance on studio "texturing" drag it into the Lilith Fair swamp...  Actually, not a swamp - if only she had only recorded something in a backwoods bog! - but rather the estrogen-saturated chamber of some strip mall Yoga studio.  The sort of globe-trotting treacle that Tilda Swinton's character in We Need To Talk About Kevin would have on her walkman while hitchihiking through Andalusia. Jane Siberry and frozen yogurt.

Tread forward at your own peril or content yourself with her album East and West and a late period contribution to Stephen Merritt's project, The Sixths.

Catch up with D'Angelo. A great piece on the soulful recluse by Amy Wallace for GQ.

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.