SHAPES AND SIZES - Split Lips, Winning Hips, A Shiner

They're from Vancouver, there are four of them (Caila Thompson-Hannant, Rory Seydel, Jon Crellin and Nathan Gage), and they're back with a record that's well worth your time, a treasure chest of multidirectional avant-pop/rock that's untamed, playful and, why not, also genuinely fun. People describe it as a cross between Fiery Furnaces and Volcano!, which basically means that underneath the pop wonders lie slightly deformed games, constantly prone to arty jolts, spasmodic tensions, almost math & progressive syncopations.

A self-titled debut already brimming with charm, just to take the temperature of the situation. Then came the leap in quality, the attention to detail turning almost obsessive, the shaping of a precise, surgical design, the main road of the song paved with obstacles, slits, and false bottoms. "Split Lips, Winning Hips, a Shiner" is a work that gives you no rest, forcing you to pay attention to the smallest of details, because the decisive one — the key to the secret room — could be lurking anywhere. It'll take you a while to fully decode it, but, as they say, the game is definitely worth the candle.

It's something strangely cerebral, then, this pop addicted to the game of digression, often insistent and joyous ("Alone/Alive"), with guitars that seem to stagger under the weight of Byrds-like memory ("Head Movin'"), with banjo and horns painting a canvas of arcane intimacy for a story of abuse and self-harm ("The Taste In My Mouth"), or again, with that continuous shattering of ideas that the mind delights in chasing and the heart finds damn dangerous for its own stability ("Geese").

It's the refusal to settle for the obvious that makes these tracks so intriguing and melodically elusive. And while Architecture In Helsinki do come to mind (a prime example being the march toward the sun — that unmistakable shiver down the spine, sliding along the ridge of memory — of "Victory In War", with echoes of Beirut on vacation), it's equally true that those battered guitars, which fearlessly crumple up or stretch out unexpectedly, and that goofy trombone, do everything they can to aim higher, ever higher ("Teller/Seller"). Like when "Highlife (I Had Been Duped)" moves from a choral, kaleidoscopic mutter of glorious pride to complicating its life with a whole series of frictions and ambiguities, proud of the diversity it gradually earns on the field.

The impression is of a band almost saturated with inspiration, overflowing with ideas, perhaps still lacking the right dose of "rationality" (a word that, in a context like this, is almost blasphemy...), but what a feast laid out on the table! Then, suddenly, the mathematical crescendo of "Can't Stop That (Sinking) Feeling" breaks off, and Seydel's voice loses itself in the dream, the dream itself grows hazy, something unthinkable seems to have happened (Syd Barrett materializing in front of Storm & Stress?); as in "The Horse's Mouthy Mouth", a ballad of almost unbearable languor, where the guitar, sooner or later, will stop writhing as if it were in the hands of Derek Bailey!

There's no denying, in short, the maturation of ideas compared to the still-green intentions of the debut. A maturation that is first and foremost stylistic, of course, but also evident on a compositional and performative level. Despite the treacherous shortcuts the arrangements are often forced to take, the four of them always show they know exactly what they want. They open "The Long Indifference", then, with a vivid free-jazz confab; they follow the trajectory of a noisy, eccentric art-pop; and they bow out in glory with an epic, dazzling coda of radioactive synths. Not bad at all, in other words. Really not bad at all!

Then, of course, the closing credits couldn't be missing; and so, “One, Two, Three”: slow and austere, sly and refined, showing us the hidden side of a world that only seems impenetrable.

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30/06/2007