Femminielli – Chauffeur

Araignée – Silvia

Lie: Edmonton doesn’t have summers. It feels like it, though. And as we enter into another forever-long snowy paralysis, the leather pants and busty corsets begin to hide behind North Face and Sun Ice and I’m forced to question: what do goths do without summer? Segue into Postcards debut cassette on Montreal’s everything-they-do-is-beautiful Fixture Records. Postcards have little to do with goths or their creative-leathers (that I know about), but they have secretly found the intersection between The Cure and Beat Happening and it’s the real soundtrack to The Lost Boys; dreamy summery backings that push weary, emotional murmurings into popular heights, breaking all shadows cast by beach pants and trench coats. It’s the weirdest depresso party album gleaning creative vices at undiscovered crossroads. It’s also got plenty of angular pop lurking around all 12 corners (reminiscent of other releases on the label). What more can you ask for? Fixture Records have delivered yet another trophy in the pop foray. Go and buy the cassette while I make another leather beach-ball.
Postcards – Gum
Postcards – Tell Them
Postcards – I Died

Daring portrayals of angular pop lurk around every corner of A Building. Montreal’s Brave Radar perfected the immensely difficult and hugely rewarding dialectical synthesis of jarring tonality and warm, sunday afternoon coffee-in-triplicate pop. Thus, it’s fitting they released a beautifully designed digipak on Fixture Records, Canada’s finest boutique fringe-pop emporium. Within the swirls of keyless harmonies and wasted guitar-mockery lay hidden phrases of pop’s greatest secrets; Brave Radar discovered music’s reticent obsessions and they’re not afraid to wrap it in audible mysteries, drowning them in seas of lo-fidelity. Dive right in, reveal their secret leviathan, and find yourself addicted to the manic portrait of known sounds.
Brave Radar – Field Guide
Brave Radar – For Sport
Brave Radar – Steep Side

Somewhere deep within the Montreal subway system lurks the one-man-chamber that is Dirty Beaches. I say “deep” because I cannot imagine Horror being recorded outside of some disturbing corner previously forgotten by civil servants and hobos. Harking back to the cavernous solitude of Arthur Russell, Horror departs from the reverb-bellowing to relish in minor-key melodica and hazy room-scapes. Anyone who has ever picked up a melodica has wanted to make this record. They’ve also realized how difficult it is to actualize these sounds; invitational rhythms to a ruptured dystopia built on echo and cosmic background radiation. You could play this in the most horrific and terrible place on earth and we’d still be curious enough to bare the environment just to see what’s going on. Excellent material courtesy of Fixture Records.
Dirty Beaches – Window Rail Seats
Dirty Beaches – Sea Drift

I was not prepared for Cresting’s beautiful basement-pop macabre. I had a fist-full of spaghetti (dinner related) half-way through An E.P. when I suddenly realized my whole environment had changed. The combinations of cassette-warmth and sharp, repetitive percussion drenched in brilliant grey-scale low-end formed continuous sequences of pop hyperbole too advanced for my supper preparations. With this in mind, An E.P. is suitable for: late-night/early-morning bike-rides, not being homeless and waking up in a park at 2pm, realizing you got punched in the face because you’re 16 and deserved it, blowing cigarette smoke into a flashlight so you can pretend you’re film-noir, and contemplation. I’m at the contemplation stage of my Cresting cycle so let me gush: this album is thoroughly convincing, clever, innocent, wonderful, pastiche, subtle, and vivid. Do the right thing and listen while you’re sitting down. And make sure you purchase the beautifully packaged CD from Fixture Records whose aesthetic reminds me that compact discs are still a viable format.
Cresting – Sashes
Cresting – Sprained Ankle