Cocooned in a Soft Solitude: Andrew Keese and The Associates' Desire

Apparently, Australia isn't all about Nick Cave, The Go-Betweens and Modular anymore - I was sent a debut album entitled Desire by a band called Andrew Keese and The Associates that caught my attention. This four-piece from Melbourne has blended chamber pop with country/folk and added some thoughtful, often poignant, lyrics to splendid effect. As its apt title suggests, this self-released album is full of unfulfilled yearning, sometimes to the point of regret, and these emotions are brought to the foreground by the Morrisseyesque vocals from frontman Keese. At times, Keese's vocals shift from warm tones to raspy desperation and they often verge on maudlin grandeur. In turn, the poetic lyrics reflect a position that can be fragile, bitter, resigned and sublimely romantic all at once.

Opening track, Mercy, is a short instrumental featuring only the piano and brave pauses, and it sets up the understated album quite nicely. The album then takes a slightly unexpected turn as Little Possessions fills out the sound with hovering Hammond organ and broad strokes of piano, culminating in a folk-tinged lilt complete with a twangy guitar solo. The next track, Transmission, moves a little differently over a tumbling undercurrent of melodic guitars and bubbling vocals while one of my favourite tracks, Blessed Are the Meek, shelters under an arcadian canopy of violins and features the brilliant line "they think it's a clarion call, but it's only semaphore." The lyrics get even more careworn and wistful with The Shadows, a track that rolls along to driving guitars and Keese's soaring vocals. Then comes another favourite of mine: The Burden of Proof. This melancholy ballad documents a soul-chafing, lonely night in which the narrator laments "there's nothing left but the words in my mouth" and expresses regret over a relationship somehow misspent, where proving oneself becomes the biggest burden. This is followed by Ameline, a wry ballad that reminds me a bit of Elvis Costello, and which features another fantastic line in which the narrator compares his ex-lover's words to both vintage wine and alkaline.

The following two tracks, called Singapore and Sertraline Hydrochloride respectively, work like companion pieces and together clock in at twelve minutes, featuring a languid snare to bind them in romantic misfortune. They both burn as slowly and sorrowfully as the embers of the narrator's cigarette in the former track, and the latter track, named for an anti-depressant, ends up mimicking an increasingly numb struggle beneath heavy limbs and an even heavier heart. The first real spark of vitriol appears in the snide lyrics and sneery vocals of the track Someday in which the narrator derides an ex-lover and promises a karmic comeuppance; however, even with this vengeful tone, the song manages to remain beautifully self-wounding. The record ends with title track, Desire, which picks the mood and tempo back up again with a jauntiness that belies the realistic, albeit cynical, outlook on the limitations of love affairs. After the song builds and builds against the quivering organ, an ever-mounting whirlwind of emotion, it concludes the album back where it started with a solo piano.

The entire album is available for streaming and free download via the band's Web site, but it is definitely worth purchasing, especially since it includes four bonus tracks not available on the free version. Andrew Keese and The Associates take the gentle cadences of classical elements and marry them to the mournful essence of country/folk to achieve a record of exquisite longing cocooned in a soft solitude, filtering memory like a twilit blindfold.

Blessed Are the Meek - Andrew Keese and The Associates

The Burden of Proof - Andrew Keese and The Associates

I ♥ Mother Mother: Mother Mother's O My Heart

Oddly enough, the first time I heard of the Vancouver band, Mother Mother, was late last year when one of my professors, who was teaching us media studies, mentioned them (well, actually gushed about them). I didn't check them out at the time (I hadn't been in the habit of taking musical recommendations from my professors), and then sort of forgot about them. Then I heard they were playing Winnipeg during the Jazz Festival, and I ignored them again without any real reason for doing so, opting not to see them live. I really had no idea what they sounded like, and so had no basis for any attitude, indifferent or otherwise. Now that their sophomore album, O My Heart, is being released today, I realize the error of my ways, and will attempt to rectify it a bit through this post. In an attempt to put O My Heart into some sort of context, I listened to their first album, Touch Up, and I discovered there's a sweet schizophrenia to their style, which spins between folk and soul and pop and indie rock like a child full of new ideas, playing make believe outdoors, pairing airy, innocent-sounding male and female voices with lyrics that are archly witty. They're like a less theatrical Bodies of Water with some slight hints of New Pornographers, Pop Levi and Sarah Slean, and this new album delivers more of their gentle, melodic brand of wryness.

The title track opens the record and falls less on the folk side of the fence, but more on the powerpop side with its driving rhythms and hiccuping melody, utilizing as many metaphors for a heart as they could fit into one song. Burning Pile builds upon an oscillating guitar for a catchy pendulum-like tune, which gallops along to a vaudeville melody in unexpected places. Their voices meld and soar while still maintaining a sort of earthiness and frankness. The album takes yet another turn as Body of Years begins like a more straightforward rock song with synthy elements as vocalist Ryan Guldemond uses his idiosyncratic unhinged style to quirk out lyrical lines into little curliques. Try to Change tones the mood down into a moodier acoustic number with beautfiul brass accompaniment, burnishing the mournfulness into something much warmer and soulful. Wisdom continues this more mellow, muted brass sound, but kicks it up with drums as it seems to revel in the blissful ignorance of youth and the avoidance of advice. Body slides and wiggles all over the strings of violins in a folkier version of Sparks while the tempo fluctuates with a mind of its own, or perhaps with the narrator's mind which seems prone to change and might be the last piece of his/her body surrendered in the song.

I was so impressed with the song Ghosting that I included it in my autumn weekly mix this week; with its plucked guitars, it definitely evokes a hazy, mellow autumn day for me and had me singing the chorus after only one listen. The mood shifts back to urgent as Hay Loft kicks into a speedy gear with almost a hip hop aesthetic for the verses - rather than gangstas with guns it's just Papa creeping through the hay loft in his longjohns, toting a gun. Wrecking Ball takes gentle banjo to a Deconstructionist/Dada approach to art while Arms Tonite stomps about in a glam posture, putting a new offbeat spin on the classic "dying in your arms" theme. Miles drifts along to piano and acoustic guitar in a pure dream of escapism, lulling you in a hammock of . The album concludes with Sleep Awake, a subtle song of childlike vocals, which has a lullaby feel at odds with the lyrics which convey the epitome of the expression "sleeping with one eye open."

So, we've all learned a little something from this post. Don't ignore a band without even having listened to them at all. And professors sometimes actually have decent taste in music.


Body of Years - Mother Mother

Arms Tonite - Mother Mother

Rekindling My Words: Kingfishers Catch Fire

I'm in one of those exhausted, used-up moods. With a bit of writer's block thrown in for grim measure. Blogs are a lot more work than I anticipated - I truly admire those who manage to blog everyday and yet have something substantial and interesting to say. I'm having one of those weeks where I just want to curl up with old music because all the newer stuff isn't inspiring me at all. I'm also still in the middle of cutting my 100-page thesis down into a 12-page paper to present at a conference next week. So I'm caught between a writer's block and a difficult headspace.

Despite my frantic scrabbling through some of the promotional emails I received in the past couple weeks to see if I could find something to write about, I came up empty-handed. However, through the serendipity of MySpace, I did manage to find a band that cleansed my brain of some of its cobwebs with its romantic, pastoral music. London duo, Kingfishers Catch Fire, which features William Robertson and Lucinda Godwin (not to be confused with the Australian band of the same name) is named for a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, and captures my imagination in the way any sort of decadent/romantic literature does. While their music may just be for the sake of a creative outlet without any intention of selling it to anyone (it's too early to tell and there's something distinctly personal about it - as though you've stumbled across some poet's secret hideaway), I would definitely purchase it if it were ever for sale.

As stated in their MySpace profile, the songs are personal, presented with the fragility of a candied violet. Lily on the Grass begins with an acoustic guitar and a strain of violin that capture the simultaneous exhilaration and temporality of a beautiful moment: "But I can't help but sing/Foreboding notwithstanding/Lily on the grass, I'm delighted." It is the ephemeral nature of these sublime moments that makes them so perfect in the first place, and this song gently breathes that sentiment like sun-warmed grass. Thérèse has a darker undercurrent to it as the vocal swings between bittersweet melancholy and howling passion and electric guitars buzz in the background. Namechecking Rudolf Arnheim, the German art theorist/perceptual psychologist, Between Light and Dark sounds like a ramble over a forest floor blanketed with leaves in dappled autumn sunlight while the song actually entitled Autumn is delicate as lacework and fills my nostrils with the smoky, crisp scent of fall. The poetry of the lyrics in Autumn transports you back to a time when poetry was unabashed and ornamental and when language was wielded skillfully: "Boy wonder, torn asunder;/Blind mirror of a mercurial Nature./Sunrise 'phemeral world alive in amber/With a redwing in flight from the shade of a bower." Kingfishers Catch Fire's music makes me feel a Victorian picnic by a bubbling brook. A decadent garden party at a manor house. A place where Bright Young Things can congregate in the last hedonistic summer of their youth, where simply looking divine gives you immortality. Somewhere where people love and feel too deeply to survive very long.

It's nice to know that when I'm at a loss for words, music can gently coax them back.

Kingfishers Catch Fire's MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/williamofellington

Thérèse - Kingfishers Catch Fire

Between Light and Dark - Kingfishers Catch Fire