Gluemeat

Couple of days ago, I mentioned the upcoming passage of The Field Register to Quebec City’s Rouje this Friday and how anxious I am to see how the band turns out live. Lucky me, they won’t be alone. Accompanying them on the establishment’s stage will be another homegrown wonder: Below The Sea.

It’s a side-project of Quebec City mainstay Pascal Asselin (the man behind Millimetrik), Patrick Lacharité and Victor Meyer. Below The Sea has been putting out dreamy instrumental music for the past six years. We’re talking post-rock ambiances where melancholy is at its prime. In fact, the band has even called their work as “la recherche d’un état mélancolique inatteignable”. Or, if you prefer, the search for an unattainable melancholy state. But it isn’t “melancholy as a party pooper” sound. They create lush, misty arrangements which somewhat recall Ulrich Schnauss (who actually collaborates on a track) in his more emphatic moments. The shimmering aspects eeking through the surface, like diffused sunlight through the ocean, prevent the music from bringing you down, and actually seem to empower a blissful daze which enamours the imagination.

Don’t miss them this Friday if you’re in Quebec City.

Ceremonies
Polaroids
Slow Walkers
We Waved Goodbye & Stared
Tropic of Cancer

www.belowthesea.ca 

If you ever come to Quebec City, there are two things you have to do: have a bite to eat at Zonorange and check out a show at Rouje. Rouje is the nexus of the city’s indie arts community; it’s one part gallery and one part performing arts stage, and presents daring and inspired works from the oft-splintered worlds of music, theatre, and comedy. It’s pretty much the city’s only haven for the unsigned set. I try to bum there as much as possible to 1) get the feeling that I’m cool and 2) to enjoy one of the typically great shows they have going. You can be dead sure to find me there this Friday when The Field Register comes to town.

Original Maritimers now settled into the Montreal hotbed of emerging music, The Field Register are five musicians who are quite adept at crafting powerhouse tunes which have so much atmosphere in them, they have their own ozone. I’m not quite sure what that means, myself but… well, you get the idea. Hopefully.

I’m truly a sucker for this kind of music: massive sound landscapes which start off in one direction then suddenly make a hard yet flocculent turn into reverb-generous guitars, under which flows an ebbing bassline and perfectly punctuated Ace Tone interventions. Take a song like Ceramic: one could fall into the trap and be turned off by its unprecipitated style, but it’s only when the song wraps up that you realise just how deliberate everything had been planned. As each song collapses under its own emotional structure, there’s a moment of “Oh, I see…” as the path the band wanted you to take becomes clear.

Can’t wait to see them live.

Ceramic
Lines

http://www.shipsatnight.com/SANtfr.htm

Right, so, listen to Mighty Six Ninety and tell me that this band hasn’t been formed this century. Yeah, well, they have.So now, smart guy (or gal), tell me that they aren’t British. Go on; tell me! Yeah, well, you know what? They aren’t British. They’re a bunch of Americans calling L.A. home and who have decided to plunge head-deep into what made New Wave disarmingly fun and 80s British rock refreshing.

The band itself makes no qualms about their influences, dropping Talk Talk, The Smiths and Depeche Mode right on their website. And one would be hard pressed to contest it, but don’t let their post-punkishness fool you. We’re a far cry from an “everything old is new again” groove. Despite cristalline guitar moments which come straight out of The Cure’s brightest moments and singer Rich Gardner’s smooth and mature vocals which seem to pour from a Spandau Ballet cut, they manage to sound fresh. They manage to be noisy without being brusque, melodic without being formulatic, honest without being kistchy.

So now, tell me that you didn’t tap your feet to Keeping You In Mind. Yeah, well, you did.

Keeping You in Mind
Northern Border
Leave This World
www.mightysixninety.com

Meet Gulnara Karimova: daughter to the current president of Uzbekistan, successful business woman, Harvard-educated, black belt, alledged woman trafficker, wanted in the state of New Jersey, and now… pop star. Tacky pop star.

Dipping their toes in the the realm of vaporous epic rock is Montreal’s Peppetree. Composed of four musicians who have listened to a lot of Radiohead and My Bloody Valentine, their songs are vast and encompassing, the kind which just seem to wrap themselves around you and refuse to let you splice off into a side conversation until it’s done.

Somewhere between the guitar riffs and the electronic sequences rises singer Patrick Poirier’s voice, giving life to both French and English tunes.  Flowing effortlessly from reassuringly soft to clamourously distant in a stanza, it empowers each Peppertree tune with a bold sense of drama. Paired up with the band’s deconstructive techniques, and you get a Hitchcockian feel of urgency, as if something is always on the verge of happening. And, thankfully, it never leaves us hanging.

Score one more for the Montreal music scene.

La cage appât
La bombe dans l’oeil
Wallpaper
Myriads of Stars
Brume en équerre

www.peppertree.ws

Via 3hive.

I got to hear Oshawa’s Cuff The Duke for the first time at my hometown’s OFF Festival last year. In this city of bureaucrats and sprawling suburbs, it’s hard to get events where the music offerings are adventurous and lacking the variety show format. Like a starving man in a deli, I was ready to swallow whatever the OFF chucked at us. When Cuff The Duke reached the stage at the smallish Pub Saint Alexandre, it blew my mind. With one band, one evening, I was reassured that all was well with Canadian rock. Not since the heyday of the great Halifax “Seattle of the North” era had I heard homegrown talent with such passion, talent, and inspiration.

It came in a really odd package too: Cuff The Duke churns out spacey rock-country fusion which hits you right in the middle class. The 2005 self-titled release showcases their harmonious arrangements and sonic roots with songs like the toe-tapping Take My Money And Run, or the supernal anthem It’s Over. The authenticity of the band’s art is the hook and their craftsmanship is the clincher; it couldn’t be more sound or moving.

The MP3s are tracks from their first album, Life Stories for Minimum Wage (released in 2002), which includes the quintessential Ballad of a Lonely Construction Worker.

Blackheart
The Difference Between Us
Ballad of a Lonely Construction Worker

www.cufftheduke.com

Mike’s note: this is a re-post from an other blog of mine with a tiny edit which deserved a place here on Gluemeat.