REASONS TO LIVE
This week: synth-pop duos reign supreme, and an upbringing amidst the heyday of 1980s electronic pop music continues to cast a long shadow. 1. Trust, TRST (Arts & Crafts). I politely brushed aside an accusation during Canadian Music Week from someone close to the event of being an unquestioning Arts & Crafts supporter, but I suspect the friends who started and/or record for the label will tell you it’s been awhile since I publicly freaked out over an album they put out. May I, then, now publicly freak out over the recently released debut album by Toronto’s Trust? It’s not for everyone, TRST, but its frigid, Goth-wave dread more than capably scratches the same, ragged itch that Cold Cave’s Cherish the Light Years and Austra’s Feel It Break scratched last year: exactly the pall of unremitting hopelessness, then, that the misanthropically inclined will want to cast over the promise of a new spring. Austra percussionist Maya Postepski, by the way, makes up one half of Trust, and the two acts aren’t worlds apart. This is far grimmer stuff, however, lent an extra layer of sickliness by Robert Alfons’s tormented baritone. The anthem is “This Ready Flesh.” It professes Trust’s belief in “nothing.”
2. Tanlines, Mixed Emotions (True Panther/beggars). My girlfriend spotted Mixed Emotions sitting on the coffee table the other day. “What’s Tanlines?” she asked. “Electro-pop from Brooklyn,” I said. She just laughed, picked up the CD jacket and waved it in my face with a derisive: “Ya think?” So, yeah, I guess Mixed Emotions is pretty much exactly what you’d expect from the wistful/arty/ nerdy black-and-white two-shot of Eric Emm and Jesse Cohen that graces its cover, even though I’m at a loss to explain what exactly it is about such a pose that screams “sad boys with synthesizers.” Tanlines, in any case, aren’t nearly as predictable as one might think another electro-pop duo from Brooklyn might be, even though they fit the standard, ’80sindebted bill to a tee. Nor as sad, either, if you’ve had the pleasure of the positively jaunty “Lost Somewhere” needling its way into your head. Tanlines have a plethora of insidiously catchy tunes at their disposal, and emerge from this debut sounding much like an Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark that has learned how to transform the doleful into something a touch more whimsical and fun with the judicious deployment of tropical percussion and house-music basslines. I’m not the first reviewer to hear Yeasayer and a bunch of John Hughes soundtracks echoed here, but I will add that this and Nurses’ recent Dracula aren’t the worst companion pieces for your next Geek-funk Night In.
3. Chairlift at the Horseshoe Tavern, Wednesday. Not quite as tight nor as we-are-having-fun-onstage fun as the set I caught at the South by Southwest festival in Austin exactly two weeks ago, but still a contagiously lively and propulsive onstage realization of the sculpted, synthetic electro-dramas Caroline Polachek and Patrick Wimberly dreamed up within the confines of their studio for this year’s spectacular Something. Surprised the gig fell short of a sellout, but once that album has a little time to breathe and to assert itself into the broader consciousness through word of mouth — which will happen, trust me, because it’s a slow grower that’s all hits once you have a proper moment with it — Chairlift will no doubt be back and playing a bigger venue. With any luck, the duo’s slightly-unsteady-but-necessary evolution into a five-piece touring band will then have hit full stride. In the meantime, dig up “I Belong in Your Arms” and tell me I’m wrong to love them.