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 in our print newspapers. - Dave Bidini
Mah Moud
Abdalla
In the West End, you’re always two streets over from an Eritrean story. I heard a memorable one twelve years ago while driving home from a PEN Canada event in Barrie, Ontario alongside Aaron Berhane, the writer and editor of Meftih, the longstanding East African newspaper (Berhane died of COVID on May 1st, 2021). Aaron told me of trying to escape from his home with three other journalists in 2002, their lives threatened by the country’s totalitarian government. One of the journalists was killed, the other captured, while the third, Aaron, broke free. His story of being breathlessly pursued through the jungle by police and soldiers stayed with me, as did his tale of leaving behind his wife and young children, one of whom he hadn’t seen since birth (the boy had just celebrated his eighth birthday). He spoke weekly to his wife who, he told me, was working to identify the government agent whose job was to surveil and prevent them from escaping. Once she knew that person, he said, they could pay him off.
A few years later, I called Aaron to catch up. He said that his wife had finally managed an exchange-- cash for freedom-- and that they were hoping to arrange eventual transportation to Canada. A few weeks after that, I called him back and the writer was, at that very hour, leaving his apartment on his way to the airport to meet the family he’d left behind. Aaron expressed how happy this made him feel, but regretted that the friends with whom he’d fled would never have the same opportunity.
Then, in 2017, the West End Phoenix applied for, and received a Toronto Art Council Refugee-in-Residence grant to employ a former journalist for a year. One of the applicants was a man named Semret Seymoum, an Eritrean who’d arrived in Canada after a stay in Stockholm. When we first met him, we asked about his life as a journalist. I felt a shiver course through my frame when he described how, along with two other journalists, he had once tried to escape Eritrea, only to be captured and imprisoned by soldiers. A journalist had been shot, another had managed to wrest free. Semret Seyoum was one of the writers in the story Aaron had told me in the car.
I’ve been thinking of these two men-- sadly, I’ve lost contact with Semret; his email and phone now gone silent-- while listening to “abdalla,” the tour de force album by Toronto performer and occasional Shad collaborator Mah Moud. A few things stand out over the nine songs, among them the singer’s astonishing range-- one moment deep growl, the other angelic falsetto-- occasionally alternating English with Tigrinya. Better than that, production treatments-- see the first track, “1167”-- playfully plug-in the voice to another level of ether despite sitting in the acoustic weeds: strummed guitar and a cello sawing in the corner. The album flowers as it proceeds-- thicker arrangements, more playing-- but, perhaps as a levelling device, conscious or conceptual, the Eritrean National Anthem is dropped into the sequence: a complex statement on colonial authority, aging dreams, and the distant echo of a land from which too many have had to run. This album is a gift to us, and to the diaspora. We should make room for it in our lives.
Listen HERE
Julian Taylor
Beyond the Reservoir
I listened to this new record on a European train filled with light, which is how one should hear any new record. Trains have their own industrial rhythm-- even the sleek, nearly soundless Bullet that I rode across France-- but they produce a visual rhythm, too. At one point, a dark-haired teenage girl visiting her grandmother on the Cote d’Azur pressed her phone’s lens against the glass while we passed a stone wall tangled with bougainvillea, and the screen flickered in time with patterns red and green, brick after brick, a continental abstract film by Norman McLaren. Later, there were curving red beaches and then the hint of a city-- Nice-- rising from the shore. The record-- Julian Taylor’s transformative new album, “Beyond the Reservoir”-- had nothing literally in common with what I was seeing, but as the train found its groove, I found mine, as a listener. The songs were my companions. The singer was the narrator of two journeys.
The music on “Beyond the Reservoir” pulls into mind other fine expansive folk/pop records-- Mojave 3’s “Excuses for Travellers,” slabs of Leonard Cohen, Willie P Bennet’s “Trying to Start Out Clean,” and the affecting personal work of “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road”-- but Julian Taylor’s songwriting has its own teeth-marks, from his essayist’s tendency to favour story over rhyme, and singing that feels like a conversation exchanged across a pen-knived picnic bench against the hum of a sleeping city. The opening track, “Moonlight,” is a heartfelt emotional colossus about growing up with converging identities-- Taylor is Afro-Indigenous-- and at first you worry that he’s written a novella for the book’s first chapter, but the lyricism and storytelling is spread about evenly (the second track, “Murder 13,” is a tragic memory of youth and baseball). Compared to the singer’s much-loved and praised previous album, The Ridge, the arrangements here are more brightly-replete with strings, making the work seem, for the lack of a better term, expensive. But Taylor’s vocals are so plaintive and without shiny filigree that there’s room for the gorgeous sweep violins on “Moving” and the overcast cellos on “I Am a Tree,” which is the kind of a song that might sound trite in another writer’s hands, but comes across here like what would happen if the Penguin Cafe Orchestra accompanied Tom Wilson.
Our train found its station-- arc-roofed, steel-boned, smelling of roasted coffee-- the teenager found her grandma, and the record ended with “100 Proof,” which, after the map of scars traced by the album’s narrative, cheats towards a celebration of art and life and affirming kindness and humanity. We gathered our bags and hustled down the train’s steps, moving into the new city.
buy it on Bandcamp HERE
The Secret Beach
Songs from the Secret Beach
You have to hear the song “God Is.” Go find it, I’ll wait. The Secret Beach are from Manitoba, and I don’t know much more than that, but there’s “secret” in their name, so maybe the whole front is purposefully evasive. But this song-- and, in a general sense, this album-- tapped me on the shoulder, and we ended up talking for hours. I love it the way I love the Burning Hell’s “Amateur Rappers,” John Prine’s “Jesus: the Missing Years” and “It’s the End of the World As We Know It”: stanzas so deliciously long and literate (and fun) that you’re following along the way you might read a favourite comic or watch the routine of a gifted acrobatic repeating the same deft move in the same pocket of air, yet never seeming less amazing despite the duration. “God Is” is a couplet-fest-- “God is checking socials for a reason to believe/God gets shot inside a classroom by some angry teens”-- that wanders a vast lyrical geography while remaining a songwriting flex that never feels boastful, owing, perhaps, to the kind-cousin delivery of singer Micah Erenberg, whose voice settles easily at one’s feet. It’s the kind of expert song that should establish a band’s strengths to a broad range of listeners, but we live in funny times where there are as many cracks in the musical world to fall through as there are apple crates to stand on. But you have to hear the song “God Is.” Go find it, I’ll wait.
Buy it on Bandcamp HERE
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