#flemish eye

[nofatclips]

Dana Gavanski‘s live session for Flemish Eye

Good Instead of Bad

One by One

Catch

[weimar-dancefloor]

Weimar Dancefloor's Best Of 2016 Selection » Preoccupations by Preoccupations

Jagjaguwar, Flemish Eye / Canada

[dustedmagazine]

Blessed — Circuitous (Flemish Eye)

Photo by Heather Saitz

Circuitous by Blessed

In 2021, Canadian art-rock quartet Blessed released the excellent iii EP. Its cover of loosely stacked wooden shapes is a fitting visual analog for the music, which brings intricate instrumental patterns into satisfying tessellation. Their second album, Circuitous, nods to its labyrinthine construction in its title, and its cover features a cute yet sinister robot boy, smoothly engineered but with what looks like heavy shadows around the eyes. Blessed’s music is, by turns, beautiful, frustrating, exciting, and exhausting.

Opener “Redefine” is sure to draw in Radiohead fans with its “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi”-style guitar parts. The song unfolds gradually, each section building on the last, more than earning its six-minute runtime. Elsewhere, Blessed draw most often on a colder, math-rock- and post-metal-influenced sound palette. The architecture of these songs is certainly complex, while the performances are delivered with an aggression that fails to find a cathartic outlet, instead circling around on itself, simmering and stomping. Within this musical architecture, vocalist Drew Riekman struggles to convincingly find space. As the protagonist of this science-fiction drama, Riekman, perhaps fittingly, sounds ground down by the musical world his band has created.

“Trust,” “Peeling” and “Guillotine” lead with the angular propulsion of the rhythm section, the coda of “Trust” in particular seeming to take its cues from the post-punk stylings of contemporaries such as Preoccupations. “Provoked” has perhaps the most interesting construction of all, its glimmering verse guitars alternating with bass-heavy passages. The song eventually gives way to a prog-influenced breakdown, leading into an isolated moment of calm featuring rippling delayed guitars, prompting the realization of just how tense and relentless the majority of the album is. After its 42 minutes are up, Circuitous leaves the listener with the feeling of having experienced something impressive but forbidding.

Tim Clarke

[thejoyofviolentmovement]

New Video: JOVM Mainstays Preoccupations Share Brooding and Lysergic Chad VanGaalen-Directed Visual for "Slowly"

New Video: JOVM Mainstays Preoccupations Share Brooding and Lysergic Chad VanGaalen-Directed Visual for "Slowly" @pre_occupations @Flemisheye @grandstandhq @supercatpr @chadvangaalen

Canadian post punk outfit and JOVM mainstays Preoccupations —  Matt Flegel (bass, vocals), Mike Wallace (drums), Scott Munro (guitar) and Daniel Christiansen (guitar) — just released their fourth album Arrangements today.  Longtime label home Flemish Eye will handle the release throughout Canada while the band will self-release the album outside of Canada.  Initial work on Arrangements began in…

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[thejoyofviolentmovement]

New Video: JOVM Mainstays Preoccupations Share Atmospheric and Brooding "Death of Melody"

New Video: JOVM Mainstays Preoccupations Share Atmospheric and Brooding "Death of Melody" @pre_occupations @Flemisheye @grandstandhq @supercatpr

Canadian post punk outfit and JOVM mainstays Preoccupations —  Matt Flegel (bass, vocals), Mike Wallace (drums), Scott Munro (guitar) and Daniel Christiansen (guitar) — will be releasing their fourth, full-length album Arrangements on September 9, 2022. Longtime label home Flemish Eye will handle the release throughout Canada while the band will self-release the album outside of Canada.  Initial…

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[dustedmagazine]

Yves Jarvis — The Zug (ANTI- / Flemish Eye)

Montreal-based artist Jean-Sébastien Audet, who releases music under the moniker Yves Jarvis, is a proudly independent musician who writes and records everything himself. The Zug is his fourth solo album, and follows last year’s collaboration with Romy Lightman, Banned. In tone, The Zug sits somewhere along the continuum between Banned’s experimental rock, and the glimmering psych-pop of 2020’s wonderful Sundry Rock Song Stock.

At its best, The Zug shimmers with invention, melody and humor. Opener “At the Whims” matches the upbeat energy of its tom-heavy rhythm section and acoustic guitar strumming with lyrics describing a state of creative ecstasy: “Countless and boundless, all knowing, ebbing and flowing… Without any trace of both feet planted firmly in one space.” “Prism Through Which I Perceive,” which arrived accompanied by a fittingly trippy Chad VanGaalen video, manages to pack more into its 60 seconds than most songs several times as long, its guitar melodies spiralling off in all directions. The ebullient sway of “Bootstrap Jubilee” tells the happy tale of Jarvis growing up with sufficient encouragement from those around him to follow his chosen creative path. And late highlight “Projection” canters along manically on the back of tetchy snare rolls and spidery guitar lines. 

Though it has a similar runtime to Sundry Rock Song Stock, The Zug feels longer than its 32 minutes. There are stretches when the pacing feels a little sluggish where slower tracks are sequenced back to back, or the songs jam on ideas that don’t feel quite as inspired as elsewhere. “You Offer a Mile” has a similar panicked energy to “Projection,” but tethered to a less compelling tune. The disorientating verses of “Gestalt,” built around a meandering bassline and echoed muttering, outstay their welcome, but thankfully bloom into harmonized voices in the chorus. And “Why?” is essentially 76 seconds of Fender Rhodes noodling with a field recording of kids in the background. 

Despite its ups and downs, The Zug is another intriguing record from Yves Jarvis. Given his creative method of continually jamming with himself, he’s probably well underway making the next album or two. 

Tim Clarke

[dustedmagazine]

Lightman Jarvis Ecstatic Band — Banned (ANTI- / Flemish Eye)

Photo by Jeff Bierk

Banned by Lightman Jarvis Ecstatic Band

On his 2020 album Sundry Rock Song Stock, Yves Jarvis crafted a gorgeously hazy half-hour of canny songwriting, multi-tracked vocals, folky strums and hallucinogenic synths. Just a year later, Jarvis is back with this new collaboration with Romy Lightman, one half of the duo Tasseomancy. Lightman Jarvis Ecstatic Band doesn’t tap into drum circles, guitar shredding or New Age peace-seeking. Instead, theirs is the kind of ecstasy that comes from following your muse wherever it may take you, whether it’s wrapping up an idea neatly in a couple of minutes, or allowing the groove to unspool in loose, meandering jams.

For the most part, following the muse serves Jarvis and Lightman well, creating a sound akin to Olivia Tremor Control or their successors, Circulatory System. “Olamim” is a nicely pitched opener, with tip-toeing bass and pedal-faded guitar leads. The steel drums, bongos and tape effects of “Red Champa” create a pleasingly burbling backing, over which Lightman and Jarvis harmonize “I can understand!” This sound palette is revisited on “Becoming,” which acts like “Ambrosia” from Sundry Rock Song Stock as a wordless palate-cleanser. The tom-toms and bass on “Bone of a Hound” are almost anthemic, but in a shrugging, lo-fi way, and single “Rubber Band” has a nagging guitar riff and celebratory melodic arc. You can feel Lightman and Jarvis reaching for an epic sound but settling into something more modest and endearing. 

When the Ecstatic Band’s experiments fall flat, it can feel like missing out on a group of stoners’ inside joke. The pseudo-hair-metal guitar tones on “Nymphea” and “Lift My Heart” are amusing at first, but grow tiresome on repeat listens. Together, “Slick Oil” and “Stomach Pit” comprise around nine minutes of chattering vocal improv over lacklustre backing — but then, in the final minute of “Stomach Pit,” redemption arrives with some lovely gospel-style voices and handclaps. This moment serves as a microcosm of this frustratingly uneven album: hang in there, ride out the bumpy passages, and something lovely is likely to happen; until those moments pop up, expect to have your patience tested. 

Tim Clarke

[dustedmagazine]

N0V3L — NON-FICTION (Flemish Eye)

NON-FICTION by N0V3L

N0V3L’s songs bound out of the gate on febrile bass lines, a shushy tension of cymbals underpinning the rhythms. Dual guitars agitate in trebly tangles, throwing off shocks of electricity as they cross. But the Canadian six-piece sounds a good deal more assured and fluid here than on the debut EP from 2019. The singing is a good deal smoother and less spiked with yelps. The production is sharp and spare, but it captures the music with a visceral depth and resonance. If they were jittering across two-dimensional space before, the band is now operating in a full three dimensions.

You can hear the difference right away in “FALLING IN LINE” (all the song titles are in all-caps), as the singer fairly croons over the stutter and sting of post-punk instruments. A saxophone drifts in languidly as guitars and bass buck and dart in syncopation. The sonic distance between the long buzzing bass lines and the exclamation-pointed guitar offbeats is wide and tall and you can hear all the sounds and the space in between them in a remarkably clear mix. On the EP, the debt to late 1970s post-punk bands like Gang of Four and Delta 5 was heavy; here the band seems to be carving out an oddly ominous sensuality. There’s a bend and sway in N0V3L’s ferocious discipline, a haunting human tunefulness in its right-angled wireframe architectures.

“STRANGER,” one of the disc’s best cuts, opens with piano, a pensive spray of chords braced by punching drums, stabbing guitars. More than one member of the band is singing. There’s a giddy thread of sax threading through hard rhythms. The song is, as always, an indictment of modern sterility and the corporatist state, but it’s also a call for connection even in dystopia. Its final lines urge listeners to, “Nurture a stranger, stranger a friend.”

Other cuts are sharper, more confrontational and politically explicit. “VIOLENT AND PARANOID” sputters with alienation, cold synths framing a litany of dissatisfactions, including a cameo from our own former guy (i.e., “Loose-lipped and Undignified/White Pride POTUS Justified?!”). N0V3L is from Vancouver, where the opioid crises has raged (though where hasn’t it?), and their song, “PUSHERS” wastes no time in naming names and laying blame (“SACKLERS make a killing from Over-prescription/Lucrative loophole hustling legal addiction/PERDUE has us eating from the palm of their hand/Pushers in lab coats built an opiate wasteland”).  It’s not that they’ve gone soft, more that they’ve rounded the corners and polished the rough bits; if anything, the barbs land with more sting when you can hear them clearly.

It's been a pretty good year for sharp, jittery, adventurous post-punk already, with solid entries from Black Country, New Road, Squid, Black Midi, Dry Cleaning etc. In my book, NON-FICTION is the best of them, taut and rigorous, clear but not too clean and though on fire with rage, touched with a little bit of grace.

Jennifer Kelly