Saturday Oct 8th
Jim Bryson, the Beths and The Golden Dogs walk into a newsletter...
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
Jim Bryson
Country Wifi
The pandemic was tough on a lot of musicians, but it’s not entirely what you think. After two years either away from gigs or playing on the box, everyone seemed to burst out of the gate at once with shows booked, albums made and pressed. It became a crowded world filled with triumphant returning bands you knew and loved and a few new ones who managed to press their way into view, and putting out a new release was both a blessing and a curse. Not even those trusted to direct our tastes could keep up, and, in the end, some fine records were lost to circumstance.
Such was the case with Jim Bryson’s gorgeous albumette “Country Wifi,” which should have swept listeners into its fold, but was kept at the edge of the auditorium owing to the sheer tempo of the business. At 7 songs, it’s a slight release, but not mild, with the emotional acrylic of the music based in regret, hope, defeat, and wonder that echoes the aching lyricism of Gord Downie-- “I am the ghost/leading you home”-- and the swanning beauty of Lambchop or Iron and Wine. Almost every instrument is sparing in its approach-- a single piano note played over and over; a cello’s bow stroked in the same pattern; two chords, then a third; and parcels of words like the kind your father only spoke to you once, then never again. Even better-- and compared to a lot of modern Canadian music-- the songs of “Country Wifi” don’t beg you to love them while leaping up and waving their arms. The quiet grace of this album-- Bryson’s voice is sometimes delivered in but a hoarse whisper-- uses fragility as its strength, and poise its power. We’re sometimes so quick to hear the next that we forget to hear the last.
Buy the record on Bandcamp HERE
The Beths
Expert in a Dying Field
Such was the stellar quality of this album’s early-release tracks-- “Expert in a Dying Field,” “Knees Deep” and “Silence is Golden”-- and so fun and good was their pop-in at a sold-out Lee’s Palace this past summer that expectations were high for this whole work to spill across streaming platforms and appear in cool neighbourhood record stores. Now that it’s here, New Zealand’s The Beth’s latest LP can be taken whole, a prolonged autumn-after-summer-after-spring listening experience, crossing seasons in measured moments of pleasure, which is how it goes down these days. The act of “dripping” tracks is meant to build anticipation, and it does. But it’s a complication when intimacy with a handful of tracks makes everything else seem just a little colder and slower to burn.
I like this album a ton-- I like it’s dear lyricism, it’s tight Fastbacks guitars, it’s glowing power pop, and Elizabeth Stokes’ swing set melodies and best-friend vocals-- but my fondness for the three songs that helped me sail through the summer make me feel as if the trailer showed too much of the movie, and I’d already chewed a lot of the taste out of the album’s flavours. It’s almost unfair to the rest of the songs that the band led with three brilliant and varied compositions— two other tracks, “Passing Rain” and “Change in the Weather” are lovely in their own right— and I’m not sure if I’m at the point where I’ll stop listening to previews, but something is lost when a record moves into your life piece by piece: first the chair, then the sofa, then the fridge. That art deco lamp maybe isn’t as beautiful seen without everything first. This album review started as a rave and then became a lament and it’s not my purpose here. You’ll like “Expert in a Dying Field.” The Beths didn’t choose the times in which they live.
buy the record on Bandcamp HERE
The Golden Dogs
The Golden Dogs
Ok you’re the mayor, no, the premier, no, the prime minister, no, the king, no, God, and you’re able to deign any band that band and you’re struggling with naming either The Dears or The Golden Dogs, but because you live where you live, you choose the one closest to you, which, in my case, is The Golden Dogs, who have a new record out called “The Golden Dogs”-- their first in 12 years-- and even though this is only a review and not a holy writ, I’ll also name them because this album is so good I believe it should be heard by all of my friends and some of my enemies, but mostly all of those people in-between who never rallied to make them as popular as, I don’t know, Arkells, and while I hope this newsletter isn’t becoming a thing where I simply give Arkells a hard time, “The Golden Dogs” is fine in ways that other records I like a lot are also fine— “The Soft Bulletin's” tide of voice and guitar; bits of “Nilsson Schmilsson’s” baroque pop; “In the Aeroplane over the Sea’s" bursts of choir and piano; the melodies of Abba’s “Dancing Queen” on the gorgeous “Stay Over Martha”; "Thinking Fellers Union 182’s" lyrical pathos; "Sgt Pepper" calliopes; and songs that build from the whisper of an acoustic figure to a great wall of song, like on “Cheers,” which sounds like the musical cousin of an Emily St John novel. Listening to the middle-LP track “Howl,” I was reminded of something from another of my favourite records, Super Furry Animal’s “Rings Around the World,” and, listening further, there’s a Furry’s track to end the disc, “Juxtapose With U,” which, if it leads to the brilliant Welsh band reappearing after decades away, would recommend The Golden Dogs for some sort of cosmic musical citation. These are results deserving of such a masterpiece.
Buy the record on Bandcamp HERE
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