Maximum rotation. Moody, easily aroused song cycle about a long-lost relationship that belies its' quickly-written-and-recorded pedigree. Weightless strings and ethereal keyboard textures dust these fucking intense songs like a dirty garnish of icing sugar on a black forest cake. Heartrending guitar ballads spar with summer sambas like the indescribable Signature of Marilyn Churley. Rythmic conspirators Mark Mariash and Maury Lafoy float like a butterfly and sting like a Bbmin11. I might be biased because he plays guitar with me, but this is already my album of the year, and it's only July.

It's really good to have him back, although the tracks are straight-edge folkie and a little bit bo-ring after the ambitious, laid-back N'awlins grooves of his six-year old You'll Never Get To Heaven. But there's more sweet little details, twists and turns in these stories than a dozen Lovers Leaps. And his voice keeps getting better and better. What mic did they throw up in that studio? Damn.

Speaking of voices that keep getting better and better, Dominique is the focal point of these sinewy textures in a way she hasn't been before. There's so much keyboard happening in a deceptively complex mix, it's layered and atmospheric in a new, almost edgy way (for them at least) but those Chase/Schlesinger jingly-jangly hooks remind you this is an Ivy record. Fantastic sleeve art, too.

From Ivy to Alvy... Andy should produce these guys. There are superficial similarities to previous clients Tahiti 80 (front guy Reid's breathtaking croon and swoon-worthy matinee-idol looks, an incredibly supple rhythm section) but the hooks are classic pop without the fey allusions to indie, and English is clearly their first language... some real nice poetry set to music. Imagine Nick Drake on steroids backed by Sloan. Or something.

Picked this CD up in Tokyo. I've loved a 1976 Arista vinyl copy of this for ten years, so when I saw it on CD I freaked and bought one for Akiko my A&R lady. Then I went back to Tower and bought one for me. This is 70's white-guy solipsistic singer-songwriting with almost freakish soul, the deepest shade of caucasian persuasion. It's hard to believe some major label savant thought this would sell in mass quantities. Extremely odd lyrical concerns: children's misperceptions of the adult world, endless waters flowing to the seas, Vietnam, heroin and buggery. And a lost classic: One Fine Day, sung guy-style where he sounds like the lost Stylistic. White chocolate genius.

Head-scratching title aside, this beguiling platter has the sneakiest hooks, like sleeping on a waterbed with coil springs. And sleeping is what Hawk's intent on doing, you betcha. As Prince might put it (in), we're talking soft and wet. This is a seduction record of the best kind, where you let yourself be talked into it because you really wanted to anyhow.

Galbraith be damned. These eleven songs "for and about the time we live in" (that's what it says on the sleeve! oh, for the self-assured didacticism of the seventies!) strike a crafty balance between their sixties jingle house beat-group arrangements and their earnest, protest singer dynamic. Sort of like if Ben McPeek had filled in for Van Dyke Parks on Randy Newman's first album, or even better, if Phil Ochs had cut All The News That's Fit to Sing as Pleasures of the Harbor. You know what I mean... Each little NFB vignette is coupled with a really neat orchestral pop miniature, circa 1971. The second track Coloured Plastics is fucking genius, you'd be singing it in the shower for weeks if this wasn't on an obscure Canadian indie label with probably not a chance of ever being reissued on CD. Anyone have the masters for this in their basement? Gene Lees' phone number? (He wrote the liner notes). Hell, if enough of you email me, I'll encode it and throw it on the server.

Caught myself singing "And That Was Yesterday" in the shower and dug this one out of the stacks. I couldn't believe this album is 12 years old. Was I really old enough to get this at 19? This is so good, 11 tracks of acoustic guitar (Marty Willson-Piper) and vocals (Jules) recorded in wintry Stockholm...

pereclese struck aesop
several blows about the head
i can guarantee you it was nothing aesop said
mute from birth old aesop took to the sweet young phaedra
evening tea
slipped in a potion
made of bark
fairest phaedra fell asleep
what ensued was read
by pereclese in aesop's gleam

leave town
leave town
find a new well to fill your cup
cause everything's ruined that you haven't used up

How the fuck do you argue with that?

Also from Sweden (Malmo, though) this hasn't left the CD changer in well over a year. Scandinavian pop that warms cold hearts better than a cup of Glög (sorry). A couple of years back I tried to talk Adam into putting out their last CD Vivé Le Difference on Scratchie but he didn't bite and that's his loss, but you really owe it to yourself to listen to the first of their CD's to be widely available in the USA. This is a french comp of their 3 LP's and singles, and as such I might have made a few alternate selections myself BUT any record with the aching melancholia of Birds in Cages and the insane stop-start power poppy If You Say deserves your $20. Plus I don't have to go fishing through two stacks of CD-EP envelopes to hear the PERFECT Summer and Looking For A Job anymore.

They kind of rush through Ron Sexsmith's divinely glacial April After All, but otherwise this is a beautiful (but not obsequiously pretty) VOICE surfing through the mixed tape of a songwriter's dream. Wise choices from Revolver, The Visitors(!), two slow ones from Pet Sounds, an inspired Waits/McCartney segue, all interspersed with prime EC--including rescuing "I Want To Vanish" from Costello's pompous, Lion King-like vibrato on All this Useless Beauty. The obvious antecendent being the timeless Rifkin/Collins pairings In My Life and Wildflowers.

Which brings me to a rant I've brought up before: Where the fuck is my generation's Judy Collins? Marti Jones tried to sneak a handful of 90's alt-songsmiths from the margins to the mainstream with her beautiful, husky voice but she didn't have any hits with their songs either. Remember how Elvis pretended to hate Linda Ronstadt's Alison? What a fucking ingrate. Personally, I can't wait for Kreviazuk sings Bryk...

Ran out of time, but also digging

NOVA SOCIAL, The Jefferson Fracture
RON SEXSMITH, Blue Boy
DANNY MICHEL, In The Belly of Whale
BY DIVINE RIGHT, Good Morning Beautiful
HAYDEN, Skyscraper National Park
CHINA CRISIS, What Price Paradise
TOM T. HALL's Greatest Hits
GEORGE MICHAEL, Songs from the Last Century
MONEY MARK, Push the Button
PRIMAL SCREAM, Exterminator
HEFNER, We Love The City
BEN'S SYMPHONIC ORCHESTRA, Junk Shop
THE WEBB BROTHERS, Maroon
LOU CHRISTIE, Lightning Strikes
QUASI, The Sword of God
OF MONTREAL, The Gay Parade
PEEPSHOW, The Cartoon Diary Of Joe Matt (not a record)

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