Fuzzy Empire
March.18, 2023
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
If you want to subscribe to the print edition of the West End Phoenix, just head over to www.westendphoenix.com and subscribe for a full year of local, independent print journalism!
By Divine Right
Otto Motto
On Thursday, I pedalled to Ontario Place on a day that yielded 5 C not 9 C as promised, and so my spring Kenora Thistles (dinner) jacket was betrayed by the March Tease and a breeze with bite; snow upon rocks upon the shoreline; fancy dogs in woollen harnesses, their owners in Raptors hoodies; and four-person work crews gathered around roaring generators holding shovels and dreaming of lunch. I’d come down here having banked a review on the week’s JUNO ceremony, about how, and why, people are still choosing to skid in the poop-trail of Nickelback and whether or not someone bum-rushing the show with SAVE THE GREENBELT written between their shoulder blades could be considered progress. But my idea soon faded like the potentially-doomed Eb Zeidler grounds, having spent the afternoon with the latest record by Toronto’s By Divine Right, which, as I wheeled around the Cinesphere, the small pebble beach empty for one woman with her collar pulled up nursing a coffee, the silent white caterpillar bridges and glass pods triangulating in the ghost-Spring, had me punching my leg for being the doofus that I am— that the JUNOS are; that we all are— having taken too long to give it a chance in my headphones to become our Record of the Year.
This album— “Otto Motto” —touches all bases (Tom Cheek voice) with the weight and dexterity of a seasoned player; never too hard on the ground, never too gone in the air. The opening track, “Problems of the Professional,” is an urban gospel that bathes singer/songwriter and guitarist Jose Contreras’s voice in reverb before it’s released to howl above the water, the band chunking expertly behind and with him, sounding as unified as any of BDR’s iterations. “Fuzzy Empire” (Contreras is the master of a good song title) echoes The Dears and Guided by Voices in as much as those bands share an innate, and tried, melancholy pop sensibility while making it sound alive in the immediate, fighting for whatever the bass, drums and guitars believe in, which, we learn across 14 tracks, is mostly rock and roll. Lyrically, the album gets us to motels and parties, and parties in motels-- “We’re keeping it real in 432/San Pellegrino, here’s looking at you”-- but we often leave these settings alone and doubting what’s next, trailing ghosts of experience, scars of knowledge. “The Weeping Man” is like a delicious lost Zombies track, and the album’s entree, “Smokies and Cannonballs,” reminds me of Super Friends/NRBQ/Mott the Hoople and other favourite things. This album drives with its head out of the window. It’s rock music, but there is air surging through the mix: partly the result of the breathy delivery of the singers and partly the result of an approach that’s slave to the song, never filling the backdrop with too many ribbons and mirrors. A composition like “The Volcano”— terrifying and beautiful in its choral ending-- might be too ornate in another musician’s hands. But BDR saddle the Mothra and let it carry them to the light. That it occasionally leads to darkness makes this an even more compelling journey.
Buy the record on Bandcamp HERE