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This newsletter is an extension of the 2022 Summer Album Guide, and will evolve to include writing about the community, the city and the world in areas other than hot vinyl and vital music. But for now consider it a gesture to continue the art of the album review, forever disappearing from our print newspapers. - Dave Bidini
5 p.m. Saturday
Weyes Blood
And In the Darkness, Hearts Aglow
It gets late early now – that’s part Yogi Berra, part Northern truth – but the winter weekend afternoon yields excellent seasonal listening hours. Just after dusk, you un-sleeve the new album from Weyes Blood – it dripped tracks over the summer and was recently framed by a New Yorker profile of the songwriter Natalie Wering – and the title suggests what it delivers: warmth in dark tones that makes the falling cold of the hour feel less daunting before heading into it. The record turns out to be more Dog and Butterfly than Blue, but it’s arriving at the right time, and you know you’ll be visiting with it through the winter, returning to its fine duvet of piano, strings, Ringo tom rolls, sleigh bells and Natalie Mering’s voice: long mature notes that fall on the good side of hall reverb. Time to think about dinner? Pour a beer, slip on your Glerups. You love your stereo.
Purchase on Bandcamp HERE
6 p.m.
The 1975
Being Funny in a Foreign Language
Too early to get high? Wait: It’s Saturday! You’re out in the garage, then back in the kitchen. I meant to write about this album when it first appeared last month, but records by The 1975 take time to know, owing to their promenade of styles and “Day in the Life” aspirations in everything they write. I’m reminded of Craig Taylor’s two books, The Days and Nights of London Now and Londoners, where shimmering portraits are rendered in small measures: the perfect grab of a phrase or clothing detail or way of moving that brings the characters into view. This album makes you excited to be out in the world because its lyrics are so closely trained on the world, where imaginations explode beyond what you see on a screen. The record’s closer, “When We Are Together,” starts with “Our first kiss was Christmas/In the Wal Mart toy department,” then goes on to talk about cows in sweaters. So far, the evening is going pretty great.
Purchase on Bandcamp HERE
7 p.m.
The Black Halos
How the Darkness Doubles
Time for the Leafs game. You catch a glimpse of the action on TV while listening to the venerable Black Halos, from B.C., where the hometown Canucks are trying to climb from an early-season hole of their own digging. The guitars come at you hard, but the Halos are more of a big slobbering dog that you lean over to pet rather than one you run from in a narrow alley. Still, their noisy dump truck of sound is a reminder that you live at the heart of a city, and while the neighbours eventually left for Thorold, you stayed, and because you stayed, you can have this kind of night: albums, beer, weed, food and a downtown adventure. The Black Halos sound like the kind of friends you meet outside a club. They'd put you in a headlock, flick away their smokes, then move together under the doorframe. Fast chopping chords fuel your energy. Mitch Marner scores again. Let’s go!
Purchase on Bandcamp HERE
8 p.m.
Avril Lavigne
Love Sux
It gets dark early now, so leaving the house at 9 p.m. feels like you’re leaving at midnight (you don’t go anywhere at midnight). You fasten headphones to your toqued head and tap “Cannonball” by Avril Lavigne on your phone screen. In way earlier days, you’d walk the streets carrying an AM radio with you. In later days, it would be a Walkman, and later still, a CD Walkman. But you live in a time of magic – light and dark– and, as curtains part on the evening, you choose this first track on an album you don’t really love because you don’t have to take out the cassette and start again if it doesn’t get you to where you want to go. And because “Love Sux” is all about disposability, from its stale-gum production and borrowed melodies to its thesis that no attachment is worth the emotional sacrifice, you can splash around in “Cannonball’s” kid-pool pop/punk without being tethered to it. The band explodes and Avril does her screaming/singing and for two minutes you’re lost in an impassioned make-believe rock and roll world in the same way that the Wizard of Oz was make-believe: brightly glittered and fleeting. The winter becomes a fantasy and its snowflakes are diamonds. You’re moving. You’re zooming. You power chord at a streetlight. It’s freezing and you’re free.
Listen HERE
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