Tag: 2012

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Vinyl

Vinyl love: Amos the Transparent “Goodnight my dear… I’m falling apart”

(Vinyl Love is a series of posts that quite simply lists, describes, and displays the pieces in my growing vinyl collection. You can bet that each record was given a spin during the drafting of each corresponding post.)

Artist: Amos the Transparent
Album Title: Goodnight my dear… I’m falling apart
Year released: 2012
Details: Gatefold sleeve, white vinyl

The skinny: I’m already a couple days and a handful of great live performances into this year’s edition of Ottawa Bluesfest – the local music festival that blasts through pretty much every genre of music over the course of a week and half. I’ve been attending this thing on the regular for just over a decade now and one of the great things about it that hasn’t changed much is the organizers’ promotion of local talent. One such band that I discovered at one of the first few times I attended is Amos the Transparent, an indie rock collective led by Jonathan Chandler. I’ve since seen the group a number of times* and bought all of their albums, my favourite of which was their sophomore LP, 2012’s “Goodnight my dear… I’m falling apart.” For those of you too far afield to have heard this album, it is an excellent, big, Canadian indie rock record in the vein of “Funeral” or “Set yourself on fire”, but in addition to the orchestral elements those two albums sport, Amos throws in some traditional folk instrumentation for fun. I picked this original pressing in white vinyl up from the band’s merch table the last time I saw them perform live, back in 2018 at the Ottawa Dragonboat festival, and it’s one I slip on to the turntable with regularity.

Standout track: “Sure as the weather”

*And I will see them one more time this coming Thursday at Bluesfest.

Categories
Vinyl

Vinyl love: Spiritualized “Sweet heart, sweet light”

(Vinyl Love is a series of posts that quite simply lists, describes, and displays the pieces in my growing vinyl collection. You can bet that each record was given a spin during the drafting of each corresponding post.)

Artist: Spiritualized
Album Title: Sweet heart, sweet light
Year released: 2012
Details: Limited edition, 2 x LP, white

The skinny: Spiritualized’s latest record “Everything was beautiful” ended up on the top of my list of best albums for last year and to celebrate, I decided to kick off this new year with a ‘Vinyl love’ post featuring that very same record. Then, I thought, why stop there? And so, you’re now in for a prolonged Spiritualized ‘Vinyl love’ series, starting their 2012 release, “Sweet heart, sweet light”*, and going backwards chronologically from there. To be honest, this one is the least played in my collection. Not but because I dislike it, understand, but because it was nearly the last one to be added to my shelf. I remember seeing it on the merch shelves when I saw Jason Pierce and company touring for the record, thought about, but opted instead for a copy of it on CD because I was still very new to collecting vinyl and didn’t yet have a turntable. I’ve often heard that the only regretted purchases are the ones not made and I definitely did regret leaving that record there. I finally remedied my error a few years ago at a record store in Toronto.

Standout track: “Hey Jane”

*I’ve already featured Spiritualized’s 2018 album “And nothing hurt” in this space.

Categories
Tunes

Best tunes of 2012: #1 Of Monsters And Men “Little talks”

<< #2

What is it with Iceland, this tiny island country with a population hovering between 300,000 and 400,000, that keeps producing not just talented, but groundbreaking musicians? Is it something in the volcanic ash or all those dang waterfalls? First, it was The Sugarcubes and Björk in the late 80s, followed by Múm and Sigur Rós in the late 90s, and then, in 2012, Of Monsters And Men were suddenly the darlings of the indie rock world.

The group formed in 2010 when singer/songwriter, Nanna Bryndís Hilmarsdóttir decided to flesh out her sound with a full band and flesh it out she did. By the time they were signed to Record Records in 2011, they were up to six members and typically added a couple more on stage for good measure when performing live. Their debut album, “My head is an animal”, was actually released in 2011 in their home country but it wasn’t long before they were generating buzz outside the small island’s borders, mostly on the back of the song that is the reason for today’s post. I’ve included “Little talks” as my number one favourite song of 2012 (despite being released the year before) because this is the year it was officially released in North America and just a few months earlier was when I came across them and quickly fell for them.

I actually have work colleague, Jean-Pierre, to thank for turning me on to Of Monsters And Men*. He mentioned their band name one day as we passed each other in the office hallway, as we were wont to do, back when we were actually working in the office. Indeed, we often shared the names of bands and especially, the names of songs to which we were currently listening and typically, name dropped other band names as points of reference. In this case, The Decemberists and Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros set off alarm bells in my head so I made a mental note and set about investigating later that night.

As I already hinted above, “Little talks” generated tons of buzz with the indie hipsters, on the net, in blogs everywhere, and on college radio. And with very good reason. “Little talks” is one of the catchiest pieces of pop gemstones that you might ever hear. It definitely benefitted from the surge of interest at the time in indie-folk music, mostly generated by bands like The Decemberists, The Lumineers, and Mumford And Sons. “Little talks” shared some of the qualities of these types of acts (“Hey!”) but the female/male vocal interplay also had me drawing comparisons to The Beautiful South and the varied instruments and big sound was reminiscent of Arcade Fire.

It’s a beautiful, whimsical, and uplifting song. It’s happiness. It’s magical. It’s timeless. It’s love.

“Though the truth may vary
This ship will carry our bodies safe to shore”

Amen.

*Although, given how big they became, I’m pretty certain I may have noticed them eventually.

For the rest of the Best tunes of 2012 list, click here