The Burning Hell, Jonathan Kawchuk, and Young Guv
The Burning Hell
Garbage Island // You’ve Changed Records
After the events of the past two years, turning our contemporary imaginations toward future visions of our world has a tendency to evoke a deep and unsettling existential nausea. The Burning Hell, consisting of multi-instrumentalist DIY champs Ariel Sharratt, Mathias Kom and Jake Nicoll, charges headlong into the fray on their newest album Garbage Island, plunging into a vision of the not-so distant future of a world ravaged by war, rising sea levels, and oceans choked by trash. Recorded remotely during the pandemic lockdown and mixed in a solar-powered 1970s camper trailer, the East Coast band enlisted collaborators, family and friends to make an album for the end of the world. Braced with an arsenal of witty lyrics and undeniable hooks, The Burning Hell charts new waters into a kind of musical pop-up book, rich in illustrative beauty and laced with bitter satire.
Album opener “No Peace” is an anti-optimism anthem, and begins with the line: “The sunlight hits my face/ like a belt-strap slap from the parents.” In The Burning Hell’s vision of this near-future, even the natural world is violent. The song’s uplifting instrumentation and outright prettiness musically stands in contrast to Kom’s conversational delivery of doom-laden lyrics. In the narrator’s utopian dream, peace in the Middle East is described adjacent to Mario and Luigi defeating Bowser— as if to say that, even in fantasy, notions of solving the real conflicts of the world are no more plausible than solving the fictional ones, and are equally cartoonish in their naïveté.
The bouncy synthpop of “Nigel The Gannet” bubbles with quirk and whimsy, while “Birdwatching” steps on the gas and Kom’s words tumble out in wildly galloping lines featuring self-deprecating gems like: “I’ve read The Seven Habits of Highly Ineffective People/ I know I’m probably the liver/ Not Prometheus or the eagle.” The reference to the coast of Ohio on the sublimely atmospheric “Dirty Microphones” is one of many that paint in the contours of the world of Garbage Island, here imagined as a musicless desert where SXSW 2056 is attended by only a handful of drunk kids in an abandoned Taco Bell. The outstanding and outlandish junkyard funk of “Bird Queen of Garbage Island” is equal parts ASMR ear-candy and weirdo dance music, a perfectly executed blend of all the elements that make Garbage Island so great.
The album, while certainly bleak, is not devoid of its moments of genuine humor. Kom’s deadpan utterance calling for saxophone on “The Last Normal Day” before the sax solo rips in, and their invocation of the B-52’s on “Empty World” connects a line of inspiration to the playful antics of the New Wave giants. This is one of the great strengths of Garbage Island: within its beautiful balance of tones, the characters drag their feet, stumble and pick themselves up, remark indifferently on the death of the last radio DJ while celebrating their car with a six CD changer.
As satirists, The Burning Hell doesn’t get lost in ham-fisted preachiness, instead directing their energies to image-making and storytelling, narrating stories of resilience, of building something out of nothing. A banjo made out of a mannequin torso and nylon string, playing for the gannets floating on an island of flotsam and trash. A one-eyed polyethylene-feathered birdperson ruling over her subjects from her temple of fish skeletons.
Talking about her work animating the spectacular video for “Nigel The Gannet,” I think Sharratt knowingly described the world of Garbage Island. “[It is] a world that's like ours: full of incredible beauty, colossal waste and destruction, and hopefully some sort of happy ending." While the ending remains out of sight for the moment, the word that I’ll opt to stick with, for now, is “hopefully.”
- Harman Burns
Jonathan Kawchuk
Everywwhen // Paper Bag Records
Everywwhen is an album that could be described as a labor of passion. Or obsession? Both could be said for a highly technical album that involved multi-province trips from Toronto (and Montreal) in recording the vocals before travelling west to Alberta and playing back the recordings against a monumental backdrop: the Rocky Mountains. A product six years in the making, Canadian artist Jonathan Kawchuk asks the question: how can we become better connected with the naturalistic world around us? “In the Rockies,” begins his artist statement. “I’m so frustrated […] that my body has an ending, and the environment has a beginning. Sound is a way to blur those lines.” Kawchuk recorded the playback in Dolby Atmos, determined to capture as much as the sonic reverb amongst the trees and rocks as possible. It is an ethnographic documentation of nature and music, a concept that Kawchuk is more than happy to share via a pitch idea thrown around early in the recording process. “The only way humans can create biophonic sound is with breath and voice.” Everywhen is less of a casual listen and more of an…experience. Experimental. Hair-pulling. Emotional. It works hard to earn the trust of the listener in its inviting hums, instrumental lulls, and soothing backing beats. Overall, it’s a fantastic experiment in sounds, connection, and expressionism. Put on your headphones: you’re in for something different.
I haven’t listened to an album that felt this personal in a long time. The opening track: ‘Syrinx’, for example, feels like the vocalization of heartache. Could be a breakup. Could be grief. With headphones on, you can hear the self-soothing cries of the vocalists. It’s a touching track that pierces through you like an old memory; be warned: you’ll find yourself inadvertently carried away by thoughts and emotions you forgot you had. But this a good thing. Kawchuk’s experiment succeeds as the opening track acts as the current that keeps the emotional tide steady.
‘Look At this Distractor’ is a calm antidote to its predecessor. Whereas ‘Syrinx’ is a head-spin in emotion, this later years Brian Eno type track is a welcome moment to reflect on what the fuck just happened. (side note: much of the album is structured this way, and I suspect deliberately so: you’ll have a track that deviates into something wild and chaotic. A following beat later, there is a smaller, more concise track that allows the listener room to process. It’s a structure that succeeds. Without those smaller breaks, the chaotic spins of some of the more experimental stuff wouldn’t feel the same. But because there is a yin-yang balance between the wild and the nurturing, Everywwhen works.)
‘6th’ and ‘Openjaw’ are some of the more expressionistic tracks. Your ears catch the urgent breathes of someone gasping in the opening for ‘6th’. Gasp. Pause. Gasp. Pause. It’s as if the vocalists themselves are calling out to some guided naturalistic force. A tension worms its way throughout the song before crashing to a sudden halt midway. As a listener, you are left both frightened and intrigued. In ‘6th’, the ear catches bouncing sounds as if a ball were touching the floor. A pitter patter of something moving. A Cough? The sound engineering is fantastic. It’s crafted in such a way as if the listener is there in the environment with this unseen force. ‘OpenJaw’ extends the breathiness of ‘6th’. . The cinematic sonic movements build upon the purposeful ambience laid earlier in the album (in retrospect, having the knowledge it was recorded in Dolby Atmos, makes the clean-cut sound make sense).
Another example of the quiet solemnity of Everywwhen is the track ‘Ww’. Dulcet and uncompromising. It reminds me of sitting outside on the porch on a summer’s eve taking in the evening’s sounds. Without traffic; without the buzz of electric streetlights. Remove this imagined cityscape backdrop and you’ll find yourself transported to a place of nothingness: except within this concept of ‘nothing’, there lies something. The presence of the wind, for example, transforms into the chief character. You can hear the breathy aches of the almost-indistinguishable whistles. Personally, as a reviewer, I love this track. It feels like a compliment to all the expressionistic aspects of the album. If art is to express and invite emotion, a lovely afterword would be the silent meditations of the naturalistic world around us; this is represented by ‘Ww’.
It is fitting that the final track is the titular one. ‘Everywwhen’ is the final push as a fanatic closing number. A cacophony of sounds, heavy-hitting synth, and the (at this point in the album) familiar frenzied voices, ‘Everywwhen’ puts it all on the line. About a minute and half in, there is a small lull. Catch your breath because the track will push you; immediately following the lull, the track breaks into a heartfelt release of pulsing energy. I would say this track best describes the overall interactive experience of the album. Poignant and tense. Rapturous. An adrenaline rush. Everything is happening in Everywwhen.
- Josalynn Lawrence
Young Guv
GUV IV // Run For Cover Records
Let's face it, the pandemic was a journey of some kind for all of us. None more so than for full time artists, trying to make a go in an increasingly disparate scene. But despite the hardships, some took it as an opportunity for creative growth.
Young Guv, aka Ben Cook, out of Toronto, Ontario, found himself in this exact scenario. Having his band's US tour cancelled due to the pandemic, they ended up spending 10 months together in a New Mexico adobe. They used the time to spawn many musical germs that would later be turned into two full length albums, GUV III and GUV IV, recorded in Los Angeles. Released in 2022, GUV IV is a powerhouse tug of war between 90s indie pop inspiration and twangy alt-country brought up to date with today's sounds.
On the one hand, we have a song like "Sign From God". With its jangly guitar leads and phasey rhythm guitar, I'm reminded of bands like Sloan or The Smiths. However, you definitely hear some influence from early Beatles or even some Supertramp with a well placed saxophone showcase. The vocals are very ethereal and layered, but the melody is super musical and will stick in your heads for days.
If you're into alt-country, the standout song is "Maybe I Should Luv Someone Else". Immediately, you're hit in the face with a searing pedal steel intro and a driving drum groove pulls you through the rest of the tune. The vocals are crisp and upfront; perfect for anyone craving that honky-tonk feel. However, clever chord changes and smart instrumentation move this far away from your simple I-IV-V country hit, it really feels like a song made for today.
Although the two styles don't seem like they would be a match on the same album, Young Guv expertly threads a common musicality between them so your ears seamlessly switch from one to the other. The standout is his treatment of percussion instruments, like the tambourine and shaker, which are very prominent on every track. It's definitely a unique style compared to most mixes you hear in today's music, but it provides the perfect common tie to all the songs.
This album is full of great musical ideas, catchy lyrical hooks, and just an absolute pleasure to listen to.
- Matt Budd
