Home Front, Beatrice Deer, and Teen Daze
Home Front
Think of the Lie // La Vida Es un Mus Discos
I think most of us can agree that the early 2020s thus far have been a miserable experience overall, and so it makes sense that they would bring us so much output from bands of one of the most miserable genres in popular music: post-punk, that product of the educated working class whose relevance has not been lost in time; in fact, if anything it has gained more relevance in recent years. Among the releases that made waves in 2021 was a late entry by Edmonton’s Home Front, a band only a few months old but made of veterans of the local music scene. The release in question is Think of the Lie, a 6-song EP that according to the band hearkens to a very specific period in post-punk where it made the blurry transition into new wave.
If you had an ear on both bands, you would think that Home Front was exchanging notes with Vancouver’s Spectres over the course of the pandemic - Think of the Lie’s sonic character is remarkably similar to such tracks off of Spectres’ Hindsight as “Pattern Recognition” and “Provincial Wake”, complete with the shout-sung vocal style, embellishments of synthesizer, and occasional appearances of social commentary. The major difference between the two releases is that while Spectres find themselves transitioning through musical styles, Home Front content themselves in just the one and stretch it as far as their imagination can take them. Flashes of Killing Joke and Modern English appear among elements from other classic bands that balanced themselves on top of the fence dividing aggressive and experimental post-punk from accessible and pop-oriented new wave.
If you’re on the lookout for new Canadian post-punk and new wave (or promising new Canadian bands in general), Think of the Lie is definitely one of the releases you should give a listen to. Catchy at times and hard-hitting most of the time, this is a strong debut release.
- Ty Vanden Dool
Beatrice Deer
SHIFTING // Self Released
SHIFTING by Beatrice Deer perfectly summarizes for me what it feels like to go on a long road trip through the grand land we live in. From the nostalgic twang and poppy melodies, this is an album that most anyone can enjoy. It’s vastly different from any indie-pop records you may have heard in recent times, or any time for that matter, because of its multi-linguistic nature and heavy delve into indigenous cultures. Deer herself is half inuk and half mohawk and was born in Nunavik, Quebec, in the small village of Quaqtaq, and the small community vibes really come out in this album, with traditional Inuit stories and throat singing, which accompanies the modern indie sounds surprisingly well.
At in and around half an hour in length, that means you can listen to SHIFTING 80 times from one end of Canada to the other, and while by the 80th listen you might have gotten sick of it, I guarantee it will take a while to be tired of this masterclass album. SHIFTING by Beatrice Deer is wholly original and new, a rare multilingual experience that I’ve gotten the pleasure to listen to. The entire album focuses on the idea of growth, and Deer herself believes that for you to be able to make a change in the world you as well must experience a change in your life, which ultimately can change your entire outlook on the world around you. With a beautiful voice like Beatrice Deer, you might be inclined to crack open your french dictionary and look up some Inuit words so you can truly appreciate what it is she’s singing about.
Please give a listen to the new album, SHIFTING, by the highly acclaimed and awarded Beatrice Deer. Truthfully I’ll have to plug my headphones in and bop out to this expertly crafted ‘induindie’ album, with its gorgeous traditional and modern sound.
- Kaden Peaslee
Teen Daze
Interior // Cascine
At the helm of a variety of musical projects spanning dancefloor anthemics to glacial ambience to contemplative folk, BC-based artist Jamison Isaak is nothing if not prolific. For almost 12 years now, these projects have taken him down many paths of exploration, both sonically through his profuse catalog and across the globe. His latest album under the name Teen Daze is called Interior, and although the title might suggest a less expansive scope, these tracks are anything but. While we may not be packing dancefloors like we used to, the songs on Interior open to us a virtual portal, one that takes us into hazy dimensions suffused with utopian warmth.
Album opener “Last Time in This Place” sets the stage for the world we are entering: the motif of water (lapping waves processed, sampled, phasered-out) is the glue that connects the songs together, establishing a pastel beachside aesthetic complimented by the accompanying visuals populating Interior’s music videos. Bitcrushed squiggles materialize from a digital oceanfront, and we are met with feature player Joseph Shabason’s birdsong saxophone lines rising and falling as they delay across the horizon. The song ends as it begins, a palindrome washed away by the tide.
“Swimming” kicks off with an upbeat but delicate house sound that is as uplifting as it is deceptively simple. As something of a French House polyglot, Isaak is familiar with the tropes and flourishes that elevate tracks like this into heady and infectious earcandy, and the result is as healing and sunny as a day at the beach. Stand-out banger “Nite Run” is a masterstroke of vocal chop-suey fantasia, intoxicating the stereo field with swirling samples and a breakdown at the half-way point that would make Daft Punk blush. “Nowhere” switches into cruise control, taking a demure detour along the highway— a song for when you have nowhere to be, nowhere to go. The title track delivers maybe the funkiest moment on the album, with its patient intro kicking into a disco-dirty bassline that locks into a deep groove with a rocksteady kick that hits hard. Next, emerging from the polygonal jungles of a first-gen PlayStation game, “Still Wandering” is a vaporwave vignette that is brief but evocative, roaming in pixel-rich texture before it dissipates into the mist. Feature vocalist Cecile Believe brings an effortless cool on “2 AM (Real Love),” breathily affirming the lyrics over some of the album’s heaviest percussions, whose driving low-end rounds out with choppy synth edits and a signature bassline that swaggers with disco finesse.
“Translation” is a culmination, with its reverby synth pads pulsing to the central kick, swinging high hats skipping and ticking over the warm bassline that climbs up and up and up for a full five minutes and twelve seconds before blast off. Ecstatic horn samples raise the revelatory fist-pumping into new heights, and it's a hell of a climax.
After surviving one of the most dystopian years of recent history as a collective species, we are more than ever looking to artists for reprieve, for consolation— to be lifted by another person’s imagination, to be shown a way out, a way through. Art is survival, as essential as water and air, and while we remain inside our own homes, what Teen Daze offers us on Interior is an open window, and I must say the view is fucking beautiful.
- Harman Burns
