REASONS TO LIVE
This week: Lots of love for the new Train album! Naaah, just kidding. More Toronto awesomeness!
Lioness, The Golden Killer (New
l Romantic). It might as well have been the Paleolithic Era when Lioness rose from the ashes of controller.controller and No Dynamics to release its debut EP back in 2008, such is the speed with which “hype” comes and goes these days. The Golden Killer should swing some heads back in the Toronto trio’s direction, though. It’s the big, doomy dance-rock you figured they’d make, maybe even a little bit bigger. Subtlety isn’t really Lioness’s thing, after all; the band fills every available space here with pure, gnawing sound and then propels it through you at a relentless disco chug. Even when the proceedings slow down, as they do on the grandiose Goth power ballad “They Clip the Wings of Birds,” the arrangement and the production remain all-engulfingly gigantic. It’s a touch exhausting, but that’s kinda the point, I think. Vanessa Fischer howls like a wild animal throughout, Ronnie Morris sounds like he’s playing nine basses at once and drummer Jeff Scheven must have arms like steel cables by now. Perfect for your next haunted dance party.
Catl, Soon This Will All Be Gone
l (Weewerk). Catl’s third studio album is its best by far, which is something of a bittersweet achievement considering founding drummer Johnny Larue left the band pretty much the moment the thing was done. He’s since been ably replaced by Quest for Fire/deadly Snakes beatkeeper Andrew Moszynski, but the catl captured on Soon This Will All Be Gone really comes into its own as a recorded entity so that parting must have been truly painful for all involved. This is a pretty sweet souvenir, in any case. It’s the first of the trio’s records to really whup you in the face with greatness the way a night in the basement with catl at the Dakota Tavern does. Keyboardist Sarah Kirkpatrick steps up as a charming vocal foil for Delta Blues-worshipping guitarist and frontman Jamie Fleming — she pulls quite a strutting star turn on “Gotta Thing for You” and the two make a sweet duet couple on the crackly outro version of “Goodnight, Irene” — while Detroit garage-rock producer extraordinaire Jim Diamond throws some serious muscle behind the blistering, bug-eyed boogie of “Cinderblocks” and “5 Miles.” Couldn’t have turned out better.
Digits, Death and Desire (Digits
l Music.com). Toronto’s loss has been London’s gain — and maybe soon Berlin’s, too — in the case of Alt Altman, better known to a growing number of international electro-pop fans as Digits.
The online “mixtape” Death and Desire is the latest in a series of choice Internet giveaways from him, and a good place to start if you haven’t yet chanced across this super-talented singer, songwriter and producer. It mixes some slightly older Digits material — including last year’s smashing “Rachel Marie,” a slick pop hit from a parallel-universe 1980s — with some terrific new cuts and a couple of tunes from Altman’s other project, Bad Passion.
The latter, a smouldering slowmotion robo-r&b undertaking with Lesley from Powers, gives us the best nu-skool “trip-hop” track I’ve heard this side of Sissy’s March of the Humans in “Liquid Fire.” Digits, meanwhile, considers his exploration of all things sullen and self-loathing from the fringes of the dancefloor, sounding frostier and more hard-bitten than ever on “Because It’s Wrong,” wherein he threatens “I’ll turn you into salt/ And you won’t even feel a thing” with credible bile. This kid’s about to blow up.