Cherry Chapstick

Cherry Chapstick The Line
Cherry Chapstick Precious Necklace (Remix)

Cherry Chapstick are a Montreal-based trio who got in touch earlier today with a couple of recent tracks. Members Nigel Ward, Evan Mullen, and Julian Flavin operate in the preternaturally talented world of unabashed pop music that's been percolating in Montreal for the past couple of years, amongst groups like Blue Hawaii, Pop Winds, the Silly Kissers, with some stylistic nods to groups like Lo-Fi FNK and The Avalanches. Kind of makes sense that second track here is a remix of the Silly Kissers song from the recent Arbutus Records 10" of the same name.

New Sounds From Pop Winds

Pop Winds Feel It

Pop Winds Little Sister

The only Easter candy I received this year around was an e-mail from Devon Welsh featuring two new songs from his group Pop Winds' new album The Turquoise. I posted their song In Harmony in mid-February and grouped them in with a number of (what I saw as) similarly sounding groups, like the Sincerely Yours roster (Air France, the Embassy et al.), but noted an undercurrent of industrial production techniques and sensibilities that, really, pulled them from the wreckage of a genre that I don't have much love for. That undercurrent seems to have really come to the surface on these songs: the jerky stop-start dynamics, as well as the arpeggios, in Feel It remind me of Flux Information Sciences (albeit blissfully free of their pranksterish nihilism).* The new album was recorded by Chris Ploss at 1616 (CORRECTION: not Mark Sandford at Mastertone as I erroneously reported.) Little Sister is from their Understory EP.

To see how it holds up live, the CD release party is here in Montreal on April 16th with Blue Hawaii and the Silly Kissers. Before that, Devon will be going solo, opening for (of the Silly Kissers) as he marks the release of Movin On Up In Society tomorrow night at Club Lambi. Sean Nicholas SavageFurther details at Arbutus Records.

William de Samman is a former short film festival programmer, current communications genius, and also the resident DJ (along with Heidy Pinet) at Movement - a night of house & disco (deep and otherwise) that takes place Fridays at Kafein in a part of Montreal poorly served by great DJs such as those two. As Heard From Mars had him curate their 2nd podcast, which I highly recommend checking out here. I've had the great pleasure to DJ a couple of times with William, and I have to say, the guy's got great taste (Paperclip People!) to match his straight-up robot-like beat-matching skills.

* I just re-listened to some Flux Information Sciences after five years and I have to say that it's not as similar sounding as I thought. Damn my faulty memory.

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