- Carlo Meriano
- Independent
- Three stars
Carlo Meriano lives in Toronto and knows his ways around some of the dark corners of life. If you doubt, listen to Denton on Doomsday, the most ambitious number on this nine-song debut album. The song opens with a sweaty evocation of a drunkard’s dry-mouthed morning, moves through an instrumental break whose many harmonic changes presage a narrative full of surprises, through to a showdown rich with distorted guitar and mocking yowls from lap steel. In this and other songs, Meriano shows his gift for laying down a compelling groove, while muttering his scuffed lyrics up his sleeve like a gambler breathing on his dice. The bright jangling accompaniment of To Serve Man aptly portrays the wired alertness of the insomniac in the lyrics, which drift toward rapping as the silt builds up. “I want to be a truck driver on the highway called Nothing to Lose,” Meriano sings in Plan B, and you can smell the exhaust. Robert Everett-Green
POP: I Can’t Keep All of Our Secrets
- Rae Spoon
- Saved by Radio
- Three stars
“Trans” is sometimes used as shorthand for transgender. It’s also a prefix, with the meanings of across, beyond or changing thoroughly. Rae Spoon is a transgendered, transplanted indie musician – a woman who identifies as a man, a Calgarian newly based in Montreal, an alt-folkie turned soulful electro-popster and a human who has devoted a shimmering, high-and-forlorn-voiced album to a passed friend. A transition, then, one exemplified by something like Ghost of a Boy, a silky and spooky pledge about keeping spirits alive. Promises is girl-group music, but with sharper eighties angles. I notice on the album’s press release that Spoon is referred to as “they.” Yeah, the only things awkward about this unique artist’s changeover are the pronouns. Brad Wheeler
Rae Spoon tours Canada, beginning Jan. 19, at Montreal’s Casa Del Popolo (see raespoon.com).
BLUES: Tim Bastmeyer
- Tim Bastmeyer
- Independent
- Two and half stars
Tim Bastmeyer is a Toronto-area blues musician at his best when he colours slightly outside the lines. So if his version of the standard Going Down is tired and inessential, his own What Ever Happened To? asks pop-culture and personal questions in a stylish, gliding manner. Julian Fauth – a Canadian treasure of a piano-man – rolls atop that track and others with a flair that is unique, but never gaudy. Bastmeyer’s voice is thin, and while his lyrics often hit, they sometimes miss (the rhyme-o-matic chorus to Cancer Blues). But there are nice moves here, including the jazzy walk-and-talk of Corporate Crazy and a few Doorsian flourishes that really click. B.W.
Tim Bastmeyer plays Toronto’s Gladstone Hotel, Jan. 13, with more Ontario dates to follow (see timbastmeyer.com).
JAZZ: Run Stop Run
- William Carn
- Mythology
- Three and a half stars
If amplifiers marked the biggest change for jazz in the sixties, “effects” – a catch-all term covering everything from simple loop pedals to laptop-based sound processing – are the game changer now. Where Carn’s last album, 2007’s Lessons Learned, was a straight hard-bop outing, this finds him plugged into a Metheny-esque post-fusion sound, looping his trombone into short, brooding tone poems and playing off the electronically enhanced palette of Don Scott’s guitar. The textural range is impressive, from the cool, contemplative soundscapes of Q’s Idea to the snarlingly aggressive Murphy!, but it’s the interplay between the four players that keeps Run Stop Run going. J.D. Considine
Carn’s Run Stop Run plays the Rex Hotel in Toronto on Jan. 12.
