The first time I heard Andy Shauf was during a supporting performance for Aidan Knight at The Rio Theatre in 2012. As with most shows in those years, I didn’t think much about the opening acts before the night began; “hopefully they don’t suck,” was more or less my comprehensive philosophy on the subject. Shauf sat center stage on an old armless chair with his guitar tucked beneath his shoulder. Between songs, he would make longwinded, slowly delivered jokes and self reflections on how it’d taken him years to complete his first album, “The Bearer of Bad News”. Not every intermediary monologue garnered a response from the audience.
The aural courtship was not immediate. Perhaps the distance placed by sitting halfway-back in the long, movie theatre style seating arrangement of The Rio obfuscated Shauf’s devastating emotional intimacy; or perhaps the myriad acoustic tiles dulled the sting of Shauf’s most barbarous lyrics; or perhaps I was simply too naive in my musical journey at the time to appreciate the unique performance that was being shared. I enjoyed the performance, but afterwards, I found myself more interested in him as a fascinating, awkward human being than in his music.
After several months of engrossing myself in Aidan Knight’s “Small Reveal”, I happened onto Shauf’s album, “The Bearer of Bad News”, online during a long night of essay writing for school. I played the album twice in immediate succession before buying it online that evening. I’m Not Falling Asleep in particular captivated me with it’s piano, oboe intro and sparse drum patterns.
“The Bearer of Bad News” is now an album I hold very dearly. It inspires me to create quieter music, write simpler melodies, and stay true to an inherent tendency towards intimacy for which I previously had no reference. I’ve enjoyed watching both the album and Shauf’s rise through the Canadian music scene, highlighted by his signing with Canada’s prolific ARTS & CRAFTS label last year.
Days ago, in collaboration with his new Canadian and International labels, Shauf released a first peak at his second album “The Party” by way of it’s first track, The Magician.
It’s so hard to judge the parenthetical single naked of it’s complete context, but at first blush it seems a natural successor to Shauf’s 2012 aesthetic: the faithful acoustic guitar, bass, piano, oboe combo returns, now flanked by a string section (hopefully resurrected directly from scoring Orson Welles’ noir films), and featuring an electric guitar and a synth pad (the later of which will need to justify itself to me as the album progresses for me to fully embrace its initially startling existence). Shauf’s vocal tenderness is similarly a focus, now building to even greater heights as the chorus of “Do do’s” showcase an attractive falsetto.
Also, that semi-tone fall at the end of the verse’s melody is delicious.
With the compositional elements of this opening track seeming so strong, I’m mostly at an ease with my anticipation for this album (which will release May 20th, 2016). My remaining fears will fall at the feet of ARTS & CRAFTS, whom have consistently mastered their releases over the past five years to cater, in regressively compromising fashion, to small speaker systems. The Magician, if indicative of the full release, seems to follow a similar unfortunate fate as with Feist’s “Metals” and Timber Timbre’s “Hot Dreams” of over-compressing, and strictly limiting the frequency spectrum of each instrument to the point where a pervasive hollowness plagues the mix when listened to on headphones or hi-fi systems (most egregious in this single is the piano, which sounds paper thin and unnaturally removed from the mix by it’s limited frequency range).
Mixing and mastering gripes aside, I’m in a fever anticipating this album. Andy Shauf has come to represent so much of what I think is most beautiful in music today, and getting yet another glimpse into his musical mind is something that I greet with an intense joy. Do-do do do, do-do dooo.
