Colleen Brown, Dawn to Dawn, and Quilting
Colleen Brown
Winging It // Flat Car Records
Colleen Brown’s Winging It is a hauntingly beautiful album about breaking up, and building yourself up again. Every track on this album is arresting, hypnotic, and impossible to ignore. Birds are a smart motif.
The first track, “As the Crow Flies,” features mournful guitar with a soft voice. The song is catchy, and absolutely devastating at the same time. There is a twang that showcases the texture of the song. The lyric that stands out is “how many heart to hearts / before the final beat?” The song is both sweet and syrupy, but sorrowful at the end.
The second track, “The Practice,” will absolutely take your breath away. The chorus features the line “With all this practicing of loving / you think I’d have it now.” The song is about practice, and the repeating chorus is a form of practice in and of itself. Relationships are about building, much like the track and its layers. The piano is optimistic, leaving a glimmer of hope.
The third track, “I’m Leaving and (And That’s Okay,) brought me to tears. With lines like “I’m letting go of treasons / no one needs them.” The song normalizes the mixed emotions entangled in a break up. The vocals are explosive, and beautiful simultaneously.
The fourth track, “Happy on my Own,” features sparse lyrics which emphasize enthusiastic abandonment. The song is mournful, particularly with the piano pieces. The song is an ode to learning how to accept your situation
The fifth track, “I Remember,” features sharp rhymes. The song features devastating lyrics, such as “to always be flying, and never be falling apart.” Another stand-out track is “the promise of summer / the promise he’s coming my way.”
The sixth track, “What’s Old is New,” features energetic guitar. It is a captivating song that sways from soft to hard guitar. Although the song is gentle it awakens the listener rather than sedates them.
The seventh track,“Ain’t Been on His Mind,” is a gentle song ,which had me swaying back and forth. There are two voices that are layered which helps to emphasize sadness. It is a sad realization that love with a man she is interested in is one-sided. A sense of abandonment permeates the song.
The eight track, “The Wrong One,” is a hypnotic track. A stand out lyric is “sometimes the wrong one /shows you what it’s like.” The brass instruments add to the song, fleshing it out, that escalates the somber and swaying song.
The ninth track, “Strawberry Blonde,” tore my heart out of my chest. The lyrics that make the song memorable are “I thought I’d end up with you / and then you got married / and I went on tour.” The song also captivatesthe listener is “music and medicine failed to come through / they both failed you.” The song also includes Billy Joel’s “Piano Man,” because the song mentions it is related to karaoke. Having that song embedded in her own song is clever, and masterful.
The tenth track, “Tumbleweed,” is about seeking refuge. The lyrics bolster this theme, such as “Oh, Canary bird / Build your nest inside a tumbleweed.” It is about survival in any way possible. Just as the canary seeks refuge, the speaker of the song searches for a home of her own.
The eleventh track, “I Don’t Envy You,” features an old time sound. The song keeps echoing the word “alone,” but it appears unheard. If a tree falls in the forest did it make a sound? Luckily the song carries the theme beautifully. The song also fades out beautifully, cementing Brown’s sorrowful songs in place.
- Kyra MacFarlane
Dawn to Dawn
Postcards From The Sun To The Moon // SSURROUNDSS
Montréal electronic trio Dawn to Dawn have just released their debut album, and it certainly scratches the itch for fans of Tess Roby’s other work — though, Postcards From The Sun To The Moon may be a little more solidly dance-oriented. The record’s nine tracks all glow from the inside. Roby’s voice is utterly magical as it stirs and awakens to the velvety backdrop of an expertly-wrought synthscape, her words in no hurry as they move languidly through their atmosphere.
The mood flows along with relatively few ups and downs, a river rushing — quiet and controlled through a deep gorge, its path already known to it but no less mythic for it. The sounds used by bandmates Adam Ohr and Patrick Lee give off the soothing aroma of experience, neither overdone nor too sparse, and are selected carefully to help sculpt the group's sonic identity that straddles dream-pop and another more ethereal, dance-y realm. Postcards From The Sun To The Moon delivers the goods consistently throughout its aural universe, but several tracks stood out to me, perhaps (guiltily) because of their catchiness. Whether synthesized or crafted organically by Roby’s voice, I would repeatedly find these little nuggets of melody lodged in my head over the past few weeks.
“Meridian” begins in a darker, more contemplative place, the vocal verses three-dimensional as they occupy the air around them. The track opens up and is supported by bass-y warmth from beneath as Roby sings the word “meridian” comfortingly into space. There is a break and rebuild using punchy, rhythmic vocals that are gradually overlaid with the main vocal hook, bringing the track to a sophisticated close. “Ecology” is more of a tripped-out late-nighter, pulsing murkily with inertia as it patiently builds hooky synth arpeggiations and feeds off of the hypnotizing vocal performance. And “Stereo” is a summery banger in its own right, twinkling staccato synths punctuating Roby’s queen-of-pop voice as the band cruises along the Rainbow Road through a black and nurturing night.
Dawn to Dawn offer a warm breath of fresh air into the Canadian autumn with their first and surely not last full-length — Postcards From The Sun To The Moon. Give it a few listens and you won’t be putting it down any time soon. Tess Roby is one of the best artists working in Montreal right now, and it shows. Can’t wait to hear what’s next.
- Nick Maas
Quilting
Quilting // Telephone Explosion Records
You are standing on the dusty floor of an old Catholic church. The church is in a small town, near a lake, near an ocean. There are four other people in the room, sitting in a circle, facing inwards, towards one another. The band is Quilting, and you are about to hear them perform their self-titled debut album.
The Nova Scotia band, at first glance, might not appear to be made up of folks cut from the same cloth. But nonetheless, on their debut self-titled album, the quartet stitches together their sensibilities seamlessly. Composed of four performers— Kim Barlow, Brian Borcherdt, Màiri Chambeul, Sahara Jane Nasr— the group patiently layers their spacious, virtuosic explorations, woven together to be every bit as lovingly textured as their name would suggest.
A ghostly sound, barely audible, introduces us to the mysterious pastoral landscape of Quilting, and Chambeul’s fluttery harp arpeggios are met with the weeping swells of Nasr’s beautiful sārangī on “Streaming”. The springy articulations of the mouth harp drone and jab as strings pluck and scrape at the contours of “Tambora Sisters,” and metallic feedback roars right to the brink of losing control. By the closing movement of “Two Suns,” every instrument appears stretched to its limit, the very nature of their construction brought to question as they are plucked, hammered, and coaxed into life by their players.
More than sound for the sake of sound, the performers are clear in their emotional investment in the making of this album, as Brian Borcherdt describes: “We were sort of quilting: four corners of fabric, texture, sewing threads, telling a story, all making one complete piece while drinking a few beers. We could've also called it ‘Therapy’.” The members were brought together as a result of the pandemic, away from the noise of the city, and found in each other’s company a common language to express this togetherness. This intimacy is palpable in the music, and it is ultimately what invites you to come back again, to lean a little closer, listen a little deeper. There is always more to hear.
- Harman Burns
