Sunday, June 29, 2025
late great love songs I can't remember/they say "love songs follow the weather"
Sprint - Descartes
Folk Bitch Trio - Moth Song
Madi Diaz - Something to Burn
Bruce Springsteen - The Little Things
late great love songs I can't remember/they say "love songs follow the weather"
I got swooped by a crow today. In the fucking yard of my house too. Also, the farmer's market finally had fava beans. Both things that feel like they should be ushering in spring, but here we are creeping up on July.
Maybe it was because I was out of town for a lot of May or maybe it's because the winter weather was so mild, but it hasn't really felt like we had much of a spring at all. I guess that's okay, because this is really a summer town.
Mercifully, we don't suffer through the kinds of winters that the rest of the country gets, but it's still always felt like the dreariness of November to February and then most of the spring is something you simply endure to get where we are now.
In university, I had friends from Ontario who called the summer tours that UBC ran for prospective students "the great betrayal" because you show up when Vancouver's impossibly beautiful, commit to 4-years of being here, and then after two weeks in September, everyone you know is suffering from SAD.
But we made it to summer again. Something that's always felt like a time of rebirth in Vancouver. You made it through the hard part, here's your reward. Take a new path.
Album of the week
Laura Stevenson - Late Great
Sorry, if you tried to contact me over the last 72-hours. I was busy listening to this Laura Stevenson "I broke up with my partner/the father of my child" record and letting it hold me down like a weighted blanket, thanks very much.
This one came billed as a break up record and while lead single, "Honey," pointed at what we were getting ourselves into, I wasn't ready for just how intensely fucking sad this thing is.
The follow-up single, "I Couldn't Sleep" (linked above), is about building up a new romance in your head so much that you're tossing and turning at night with anticipation, but still being so fucked up that you're actually relieved when it ends up being underwhelming. Very fucking sad!
But the one that really broke me in half was "Middle Love," which is a song about going to sign divorce papers. I would say it was the "click of a pen and the stroke of a hand and there's no longer you and me" part that got me, but I think it's actually that it just ends so abruptly after the second refrain of "I can't fathom how I'll get to the car." There's a piano line that just cuts off, half finished. It's a neat little arrangement trick, but it's also a devastating one.
Emerging from all the melancholy is Stevenson's most sonically beautiful record to date. The instrumentation runs the gamut between extremely sparse (like just the piano and Laura's voice on "Middle Love") to these full, lush orchestral numbers (like on "I Couldn't Sleep"), but it all fits--every song sounds like it's dressed up (or dressed down) just the way it should be. To hear her describe it, this record was the first time she took full control of how all her songs should sound:
“It’s a document of loss for sure, but it also draws the map of this exciting precipice that I’m standing on. I am making my own life now. With the record, with everything, this is the first time I get to call all the shots.”
Late Great starts and ends with the same song... sort of. "#1" kicks the record off and "#1 (2)" ends the album like a little postscript. They both start with the same verse, but the first version builds with a big, full arrangement behind it and double tracked Lauras belting out the refrain of "baby, you're the one" to close it out. The second rendition features just an acoustic guitar, some soft sounding horns, and a really close mic'd, single vocal line that more or less sums up the album's previous 37 odd minutes: it wasn’t easy, but she's still here.
It’s the little things that come first
Like the struggled closing of a dress
But it gives a little comfort when they start dissolving in the mess
Heavy like a year
Slung low, the sunflower heads
Standing there all soaking wet
Say their prayers and go to bed
Late Great is out now on Jeff Rosenstock's Really Records
Song of the week
Sprints singer, Karla Chubb, said this song is about how she uses songwriting as a tool to process the world, which makes sense because the world currently seems like it's bursting into uncontrolled flames in many different places at any given moment and this song sounds like it's burning with the heat of 100 spontaneously combusting Teslas. A real fuckin' ripper.
"Descartes" is the lead off single for Sprints' forthcoming sophomore LP, All That is Over, out September 25th.
Classic of the week
Carly Rae Jepsen - All That
Carly Rae Jepsen's E•MO•TION (I'm going to avoid typing that title out again, cause what the fuck) turned 10-years-old last week. Grace Robins-Somerville wrote a nice piece about the whole album for Stereogum, but I wanted to zone in on "All That," the record's shimmering centrepiece and still very easily my favourite CRJ song.
Co-written with Dev Hynes, it's this synth driven throwback ballad that feels like it was beamed straight from the 80s. It's slinky and sexy sounding, but that sound is also a bit of a ruse.
There are so many love songs about "I need you" or "I want you"--songs about yearning. And while a little of that yearning's still here, the central theme of "All That" isn't about what you want from someone, it's about what you want to be for someone: a support, a lighthouse when they're lost at sea (lost at sea), someone to help navigate, well, everything.
Sonically, it's screaming Prince, but the desire's not that kind of desire, there's no aura of confidence, and there's definitely nothing playful. In fact, the lyrics build to this extremely earnest climax of "I will be your friend."
Maybe that's not as cool as "I wanna be your lover," but it might be more romantic. You can't start a fire without that first spark of lust but there's so much more depth to the invitation: tell me that you want me, show me that you care, and I'll try to give it back ten fold.
Plus it makes me want to put my arms around someone and dance her around the living room and that's just a nice feeling, man.
More heat
Blood Orange - The Field (feat. Tariq Al-Sabir, Caroline Polachek, Daniel Caesar, and the Duretti Column)
Speaking of Dev Hynes, here he is back with a host of friends in tow (one of them, Caroline Polachek, put out a nice little one off from the Death Stranding 2 soundtrack last week as well). I read someone complain that this song "is pretty but it doesn't go anywhere." And it really does just feel like a series of textures. But it sure sounds good swirling around itself.
Clipse - So Be It
It's not really surprising that Pusha Terrence came with grade A bars, but Malice sounding so good after a decade and a half away is a true delight.
10/10 band name obviously. And I liked the first two singles fine enough. But this sparse, drum-less number finally has me really excited for the album. Around 3:50 when the violins start swelling up behind the harmonies? Give me that all day.
Almost every Madi Diaz song is about heartbreak and they can all pretty much be filed under either "I fucked up. Fuck me" or "You fucked up. Fuck you" (complimentary). This one's the latter.
Slow Crush - While You Dream Vividly
A song that's best described by the band's name. Bury me at MakeoutBV creek.
Oh, and also when you get an extra 5-hours, there's 83 previously unreleased Springsteen tracks that are mostly way too good to be throwaways.
now playing: Bruce Springsteen - I'm On Fire
