Lee Paradise/Danny Bell & His Disappointments
Lee Paradise
The Fink // Telephone Explosion
The Fink, the sophomore album from Toronto’s Lee Paradise allows its listeners to embrace their sombre reality and their desire to dance simultaneously. While radio-ready dance music is too often chalked full of pleasant cliches designed to help the dancers forget about reality outside of the club, and outside of their inebriated state, Lee Paradise’s brand of post-punk “cyborg funk” doesn’t shy away from the dark side. On his second solo album under the moniker Lee Paradise, Dan Lee attempts to conjure a “wasteland, where the sun doesn’t shine and humans have long ceased to be relevant” having ushered in their own destruction. While the music may illustrate a bleak future after mankind’s impending war against sentient machines, on The Fink, machine-produced synth sounds, samples, and noise mix with more organic instrumentation and a hopeless, brooding vocal to create something beautiful amidst the rubble.
On the surface, Lee Paradise brings to mind post-punk groups such as Clinic and A Place to Bury Strangers, or fellow Canadian groups like Suuns, Women and Preoccupations, but this is in fact a solo project. Lee Paradise’s sonic tapestries are far from minimal, but the songs have the signature of a solo project in that the percussion and bass keep simple grooves going steady while calculated guitar lines and waves of noise fuse with the vocal melody to keep the songs from sounding repetitive. In this way, Lee Paradise has more in common with the likes of Caribou, or even Panda Bear. On songs like “Message to the Past” and “A Present to Ponder” the rhythm section components lay down a groovy, mostly unchanging foundation as the other instruments give shape to the various sections of the songs. The fact that the songs feel alive rather than mechanical and monotonous is a testament to Lee’s ability to compose parts on various instruments that complement each other nicely.
As much as Lee exhibits this winning formula on various songs, the varied beats and interlude recesses keep the album from falling into a rut. Daniel Lee isn’t a one trick pony, and even though The Fink is a cohesive record, Lee taps into different modes throughout its twelve tracks. The fast-paced groove of “Hollow Face” embraces Joy Divisionesque post-punk, while the uptempo dance flavour of “Boogie” recalls of Montreal's dark disco days from a few years ago. “Medicinal Magic” might be the most diverse track moving between sections of pulsating synths and jittery experimentation with a disembodied vocal to strummed acoustic chords and crooner vocals à la The Magnetic Fields. The final piece, the free-form noise interludes, complete with sampled voices, could be from a different project altogether, but they provide pleasant respites between grooves. Even though the grooves are nigh impossible to stay still to, Lee Paradise avoids crossing the threshold into EDM like his Canadian electronic counterpart Caribou has been known to do from time to time, and that helps to retain the album’s insidious darkness.
“Cyborg funk,” the genre term used by Dan Lee to describe his new record, sums up the album brilliantly. The Fink benefits from mechanical beats, and adept manipulations of noise-making machines from its creator Dan Lee, but the human element is never lost. Lee uses the machines at his disposal to satisfy his impulses like a cyborg who must rely on mechanical limbs. The funk part of “cyborg funk” is just as essential since the infectious grooves are part of what sets Lee Paradise apart from some of the project’s post-punk peers. The Fink is a dark record that makes you want to dance. It’s a record for dark times, and it’ll fit nicely in the post-apocalyptic future that it envisions, if there are any humans left to enjoy it.
- Devon Dozlaw
Danny Bell & His Disappointments
Songs for the Town // Good Egg Records
It’s always refreshing when a singer-songwriter picks an instrument of choice that isn’t the guitar. Danny Bell’s jaunty accordion playing is folksy, engaging, and as deceivingly simple as his poignant lyrics about small-time musicianship and living in a small Canadian town. The formula is nothing new, especially in Canadian Folk, but it’s also one that is timeless when done right, as Danny Bell does it: irreverent humour that functions as a trojan horse for social commentary, despair, and crafts the universally mundane into something poignant and special.
Songs for the Town, the second full-length album released by Danny Bell & His Disappointments through Good Egg Records, it’s written and recorded in a way that you can picture exactly what the live show would be like. While singing about cowboys, scrap yards, and pulp mills, Bell paradoxically conjures to the listener’s mind, images of aging hipsters drinking craft beer, young punks at hall shows, and thrifting in rural towns. In this way, there is something about Danny Bell’s writing that captures a fundamental dichotomy of the Canadian experience, and in some ways calls that dichotomy into question.
Songs for the Town is mixed cleanly and vocals driven, leaving room for Bell’s voice and writing to drive the project. The record is unapologetically Canadian, and Bell is not afraid of niche references, such as the unique stink of his home town on “Shitty Town”: “they say it’s from the pulp mill but these people reek”. Also, a main theme of this project is the experience of small-time musicianship, with a humorous ode to sound technicians in “Doing Sound,” and DIY tour life in “Bookers,” where he wonders in the chorus if a show booker in a far away town will ever get back to him, something many musicians will surely be able to relate to. The unifying theme on Songs for the Town, however, is Bell’s blue collar sensibility, what he refers to as carrying “the feelings and stories of the down and out everywhere.”
Songs for the Town is characterized by a sense of belonging that comes from a very specific place and experience of that place, but also that transcends that specific experience to give a feeling and relatability to the broad reality of living in a small town, being a musician, being “down and out”, or simply just being Canadian. Danny Bell’s songwriting takes folk roots and expands on those with punk and country influences to create a project that is easily accessible, engaging, poignant, and succeeds entirely at capturing and translating a specific moment and experience of Canadian culture.
- Devon Acuña
