BeatRoute Magazine B.C. print e-edition - April 2016

FEATURED CONCERTS
VICTORIA, BC
THE
ZOLAS
PLUS LOUISE BURNS
FRI APR 8
SUGAR NIGHTCLUB
LONGWALK
SHORTDOCK
PLUS THE RIGHTEOUS RAINBOWS OF
TOGETHERNESS AND APPLECAT
FRI APR 15
SUGAR NIGHTCLUB
AN EVENING WITH...
SLOAN
THUR APR 21
SUGAR NIGHTCLUB
JASON
COLLETT
PLUS KALLE MATTSON
WED APR 27
LUCKY BAR
WE HUNT
BUFFALO
WITH WAR BABY AND
BUZZARD
SAT APR 9
LUCKY BAR
MIKE EDEL
PLUS THE PROVINCIAL
ARCHIVE
SAT APR 16
LUCKY BAR
JORDAN
KLASSEN
PLUS MEGAN BONNELL
TUES APR 26
LUCKY BAR
GROSSBUSTER
PLUS GUESTS
FRI APR 29
LUCKY BAR
FOR FURTHER CONCERT LISTINGS & TO
PURCHASE TICKETS, PLEASE VISIT:
WWW.ATOMIQUEPRODUCTIONS.COM
to songwriting, aesthetically and thematically echoing
The Band’s The Last Waltz. Luckily for us, that
was far from the end of that, and Waltzed in From
the Rumbling keeps pace with Plants and Animals’
rambling, rose-smelling career. Orchestral, but not
over-produced, this album explores new ground sonically
by taking familiar folk-rock clichés like a strumming
acoustic guitar, or a catchy singable hook, and
forcing them to the background. This has allowed
them to build on the foundation they’ve worked
hard to construct, without repeating themselves. The
band has become masterful at guiding the listener’s
emotions by using the common musical language
of midcentury American rock and roll as the raw
material to express a vision, which is enormously
more complex. In an age of profound egotism and
instantaneity, this album makes lasting progress in
art while still paying tribute to its ancestry - lighting
fireworks with Rolling Stone magazines.
• Rob Pearson
Poliça
United Crushers
Mom+Pop
At their core, Poliça has always been an intensely personal
band. Give You The Ghost and Shulamith were
personal to the point of being claustrophobic, lead
singer Channy Leaneagh and company writing electronic
ballads that were suffocating and intoxicating.
United Crushers is the third full-length from
the Minneapolis synth-pop group, and it builds
on Poliça’s ability to make atmospheric synth-pop
with political teeth. United Crushers is a bleak, dour
record that manages to be a joy to listen to.
Poliça continue to hone their fairly distinct formula
that has heavy emphasis on percussion and bass.
Drummers Ben Ivascu and Drew Christopherson
weave together syncopated drum beats that sound
as if they were coming from one drum set. Bassist
Chris Bierden and band leader/producer Ryan Olson
do an amazing job to build a dour atmosphere that
doesn’t suffocate the listener.
In an interview with DIY Magazine, Leaneagh
says that she “saw this record as my last chance.”
Indeed, this record feels more urgent than past work.
Songs like “Wedding” feature political territory like
police brutality that the band didn’t deal with in the
past. It feels like the logical next step for a band that
continues to excel.
• Jamie McNamara
Poor Nameless Boy
Bravery
Chronograph Records
Despite what most people will tell you, there is a
lot you can tell about a record by its cover. Poor
Nameless Boy does himself an incredible disservice
by including his baseball capped self on the cover,
looking disinterestedly off into the distance in
greyscale, the boring title of Bravery slapped on with
digitally eroded letters. The problem inherent isn’t
that Poor Nameless Boy’s music doesn’t match the
sad-boy bro-country aesthetic the cover connotes,
the slow-burn country tracks inside fit that description
eerily well, but rather that the actual product is
so finely polished and pretty that Poor Nameless Boy
might as well be wearing a suit on the cover. The title
track and opener introduces a strong, earthy guitar
tone that permeates the entire record satisfyingly.
The instrumentation introduces itself slowly without
drawing attention to itself with massive bass drones
and brushed drums laying the groundwork for a
distant violin to play around in. The record opens
with a one-two punch of the charming “Bravery”
and hooky “Atlantic Ocean,” demonstrating its tonal
range very quickly. It runs out of steam soon after
however, when the electric guitar of “River & Trees” is
unplugged, the rest if the record is mostly drab slow
songs, with an especially uninspiring cheesey piano
closer. Regardless, nuanced production and a strong
first half make Bravery a commendable exercise in
bro country.
• Liam Prost
Sanctums
Migrant Workers
Modern Math
Art is a product of the environment it was created
in. For Dan Solo and Evangelos Lambrinoudis, that
environment was the grey, bleak reality of working
on the oil patch to make a livable income. Their
surroundings led them to start thinking about
conditions faced by migrant workers and a dystopian
industrial future. Solo and Lambrinoudis used that
experience as inspiration for Migrant Workers, their
second album together as Sanctums.
Sanctums earn their keep with an atmospheric
blend of ambient techno and other paradoxically
linked genres. Some of their past work could sit
next to Burial, with a focus on cinematic sounding,
beat-oriented tracks. The duo are more interested
in ways to compel than they are with the use of
beats, leading to an album that rarely feels like it
belongs anywhere else than near a nightclub. Instead,
Migrant Workers unfolds much like a movie score. It
is a heavily moody record that can be compared to a
hypothetical midway between Junior Boys and John
Carpenter.
Lambrinoudis’ work as Corinthian is abrasive
and nerve-wracking. A toned-down version of that
overblown aesthetic appears on this album, but it
feels as if the producers are unafraid to make their
music beautiful. Standout track “All Around Us” is a
warm, lush synthscape that brings to mind Tycho’s
sun-soaked electronica. Not to mention, it is one of
few songs on the album that embraces melody and
genuinely feels upbeat. It is a well-deserved break for
the listener, a moment where the perpetual dreariness
subsides and some brightness shines through.
That’s not to say that the bleak qualities of the record
are any less enjoyable. “A Thousand Mile Stare” is a
beautifully minimal track that is coated in a dense
brain fog. Its darkness is hypnotic and enticing, its
synths pulsing slowly drawing you in deeper and
deeper into its grasp.
It isn’t until halfway through the album’s runtime
that “Sentinel” finally embraces the duo’s dance-floor
tendencies. The track is a seven-minute stunner that
features swirling atmosphere that slowly builds itself
into a brooding 4/4 techno slow burn. It’s amongst
the best work either of the producers have ever
released, separately or together.
Migrant Workers is a downright impressive record.
It’s the product of two veteran producers who know
exactly what mood they are trying to achieve with
their records. It isn’t as accessible listen as Sanctums
previous works, but instead it rewards repeat listens
that reveal something new to enjoy every time.
• Jamie McNamara
SUUNS
Hold/Still
Secret City Records
Mental breaks, realizations, anxiety attacks, and
sedation: these are the kind of cognitive atmospheres
that inhabit SUUNS’ new album Hold/Still. Opening
track “Fall” begins with loud gnarls of guitars at unease,
and from here the remaining ten arrangements
juxtapose one another by zig-zagging from heavy
bevies of bass to beating bits of synth to shrill squeals
of strings to swells of swirling sound. It’s all over the
place, yet it is extremely concentrated. In its entirety,
listening to the album makes you feel as if you’re in
the inside of a mind that is going every which way,
ultimately finding itself lost within its own confliction.
But that’s exactly how the mind can be, and this
is what makes Hold/Still a complete fixation, the fact
that it identifies and hones in on the nature of such
conflictions in order to make it an audible speculation.
This is an album that makes you really think,
and even after you’ve taken your headphones off,
you might just notice that the sounds of SUUNS has
tilted your perspective in one way or another.
• Hannah Many Guns
Tokyo Police Club
Melancholy and the Infinite Radness (Part 1)
Dine Alone Records
Tokyo Police Club probably write hooks on the
cold sides of their pillows while they sleep. 2014’s
Forcefield was such an effortless exercise in perfect
indie-dance-rock that moments of it actually
started to feel like they weren’t trying. Regardless,
three records of infinitely fist-bumpable music under
their belt and a couple solo projects underway
from its membership, what exactly Tokyo Police
Club was going to become was a bit of a mystery.
Melancholy and the Infinite Radness (Part 1) is the
awkward stepsister to Forcefield that I’m not sure
anyone was asking for, but it rocks no less than
Tokyo Police Club fans should expect. It opens
strong with “Not My Girl,” whose clean hooks and
mumblecore lyrics tickle the teenager in us all. The
only awkward moment comes from “The Ocean”
which goes headfirst into contemporary pop far
enough to include a half-hearted beat drop. The
cheesey keys and synths on this song are the only
serious missteps on an otherwise charming EP.
Whatever Part 2 of this project brings, it may not
be unprecedented, but it is certainly more than
welcome.
• Liam Prost
Van Damsel
Van Damsel
Independent
Sunlit and glazy indie-electro-pop, bubbling with
a razzy, mouth-filling micro-froth. A quagmire,
perhaps, Van Damsel presents their debut LP, Van
Damsel, full of wiggles and sniggers primed on reflective
tranquillity. Perpendicular in its parallels, lax
as an intense mineral bath, yet explosive like being
tickled by fireworks, the jams are snappishly sweet,
the hooks smartly sticky, and harmonics tightly
knotted. Literally. Van Damsel fucks the fuck out of
finicky forced fun, flips you over and heaves you into
a furious, fevered, naked, pancake breakfast dance
party in a government-subsidized cafeteria with
cinnamon buns to die for. Of course, this sounds
kind of preposterous. There’s an outside chance
that what you just read might look like unabridged
jibber-jabber, but what else can a person say when
an album sounds like the memory of a spectacular
feeling and you didn’t even need to snort a bunch of
blow to get there?
Lowering the volume on this (while that’s never
really an option, ever) would be a forfeiture, both for
the senses and the perceptions, as the crescendos
ascend; the cadences fuss happily into vast, wide
open spaces; escaping the drudgery and drifting on,
to the next dimension.
• Lisa Marklinger
32 APRIL 2016 •
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