The softest attack can feel like a caress in the hands of Montreal-based Prism Shores, a jangling, white-noise sheening, power-pop-into-shoegaze outfit that recalls Teenage Fanclub, the Clean, Ride and Slowdive, depending on where you put the needle down. This third album beefs up the sound considerably from the already radiant levels reached on Out from Underneath (“a remarkably enjoyable bit of guitar pop,” according to yours truly). This one ups the ante and puts on the muscle. Compared to the last album, it’s like that scene in the Wizard of Oz where suddenly everything is in color.
It’s more or less the same crew—that is, Jack MacKenzie and Ben Goss switching off on guitar/bass and vocals, Luke Pound on drums and Finn Dalbeth on guitar. This time out, they’ve added a fifth member in Scott Munro, who adds keyboards, effects, string bass and more vocals.
But can you really attribute a denser, more visceral sound to one extra guy on synths and organs? It seems dubious, especially since the extra oomph comes from layers of guitars, as on the TFC-redolent opener “Kid Gloves” or the shoegaze wail of “Gossamer.” Everyone in the band is just playing harder, raising a solid wall of amplified sound that washes over you like a wave. And yet while there’s volume and force to spare, Prism Shores never backs off of the melody. The very Bandwagonesque “Magical Thinking” careens and thunders, but in service to the graceful curve of tunefulness. Even the rough distortions of “Faster Gun” (yes, MBV is a reference) surge around a hooky vulnerability.
This is a very good record, deeper and more visceral than the last one. If Out from Underneath was a treat for people who spent too much of the 1990s with Teenage Fanclub, the Softest Attack is a substantial meal, a record that roars and splinters into rainbow colors without ever abandoning its hummable tunes.
Laughing — Because It’s True (Celluloid Lunch/Meritorio)
“Will She Ever Be a Friend of Mine” jangles like a long-lost Byrds tune, or maybe an out-of-print single by the Jayhawks. The Sadies, at their least bluegrassy, could sometimes pull off a similar trick, putting a psychedelic shimmer on exuberant country rock, and they’re certainly not alone. Big Star, certain iterations of R.E.M., Robyn Hitchcock and the Minus Five all come to mind as Laughing’s first LP spins. Still, to my mind, the touchstone above all others is Matthew Sweet’s Girlfriend, the most effortless and heartbreaking of the genre, full of yearning harmonies and indelible hooks and some mighty fine guitar work from one Richard Lloyd. Like Sweet more than a generation ago, Laughing nails power pop’s ease and inevitability, and that’s impressive. It’s one of music’s most difficult forms, not least because it should never look like you’re trying.
This is the first album from Montreal-based Laughing though its members are mostly veterans of other bands. Notably Josh Salter, one of three guitar/bass/singers, plays bass in Nap Eyes. Cole Woods led Winnipeg’s Human Music. Laura Jeffery, the drummer, was in Fountain. André Charles Thériault, the lone exception, hadn’t been in a band for over a decade when he joined. What brought the four together was power pop and nailing its sweet but rowdy jangle-i-ness.
Well, mission achieved. Consider, for example, the single “Bruised,” with its yearning vocals (“When you said you didn’t care/I felt something inside me tear”), its rough slashes of guitar, its battering drum line, its seething harmonies, its spiraling licks. The song is nearly perfect in its roughed-up, cowlick-sticking-straight-up messiness. Barbs of dissonance jut out from its breezy choruses, like rusty wires in cotton candy; not too sweet, not too rough.
“Secret” is slower and more vulnerable—and it’ll give you a powerful jolt of Sweet-ish-ness, “You Don’t Love Me,” maybe or “Nothing Lasts.” The guitar rings like bells, the bass buzzes underneath, the drums shimmer and pulse. “Won’t you tell me something/no one else knows/let’s get as close as we can and put on one another’s clothes,” the singer intimates, echoing Girlfriend’s exuberant, “You can wear my clothes.”
That’s the final song, a silky comedown from bangers like “Easier Said” and “Sour Note.” It’s a nice ending to a near perfect summer album, which rocks and jangles and keens, balancing on a knife edge of hard and soft, joy and sadness, as all summer albums should.
Prism Shores shrouds indie rock vulnerability in shimmering washes of guitar noise. A flickering confession erupts into grand romantic gestures, as radiant jangle shimmers and dissolves into dissonance. This is the second full-length album for this Montreal-based foursome, following 2022’s Inside my Diving Bell, and they have considerably cleaned up their sound in the interim. Tight harmonies, clear lines of melodic arc and sharp interplay between the instruments bring their heartsore firestorm into focus.
“Overplayed My Hand,” for instance, rambles into the frame on a Sadies-esque psychedelic jangle, then veers off into keening, caroming romantic longing, in the bittersweet chorus. Like a lot of their songs, it is sweet and sad at the same time. Its bubbly rhythms pulse energetically in the moment but step back and they are tinged by retrospective angst.
The band fluctuates between the individual-focused self-revelation of indie pop and the more communal textures of all-hands guitar noise. The main singer, Jack MacKenzie, pulls you in with soft rumination, but he’ll be swamped before the end of the song but flaring, distorting walls of guitar. Prism Shores likes to say that they split the difference between C86 pop and shoegaze, and indeed you can hear bits of the agitated jangle of bands like Bogshed, Close Lobsters and the Pastels in their strummy flights of romance. The churn and drone of MBV rises out of cuts like “Tourniquet,” too, putting meat and dissonance under its feathery melody.
It's fun to pick influences out, but mainly Out from Underneath is a remarkably enjoyable bit of guitar pop, twee but with some muscle, bright but with shadowy undertones. A lot of bands are working this vein — most of the Slumberland roster, for instance — but Prism Shores is unusually good at it. If you ever loved that first Pains of Being Pure at Heart record, give yourself a treat. Try this one.
A month or so ago, we caught up with Jared Leibowich’s solo record, Secret Spells, an impressive piece of home-recorded anthemry of which I wrote, “Jared Leibowich’s songs sound much larger than bedroom pop, with their massed vocals and clanging, chiming guitars. [His] expansive, ebullient solo album merit[s] comparisons to the Papercuts, White Fence and Peel Dream Magazine.”
“But have you heard the Infinites?” came one or two responses, a nice change from the dead silence that typically follows a record review. And no, not then, but soon after, this second album from Leibowich’s collaborative project with Dan Levine arrived, and indeed it was very good.
This is a storytelling project, not a confessional one. The debut album featured 13 brief fictional narratives, each about a separate character, over the dreamy clarity of Levine’s guitar loops. Album two is similarly outward facing, this time taking as inspiration 12 archetypes, that is typical examples of a genre of person, a queen, a bureaucrat, a secret agent, a ghost, etc. And yet while this might seem like an approach that would lead to generalities, in fact, each song is specific and engrossing. “The Bureaucrat,” for instance, filling out paperwork is not too busy to long for romance. “The Night Cleaner” toils alone and self-sufficient, after everyone else is gone.
All this unfolds over shimmering layers of guitar and other rock instruments, a trebly romantic onrush that recalls, again, The Papercuts, Wiretree and, in certain lights, post-new wave bands like Tears for Fears. The Infinites have expanded since the debut to include a full band line-up of Ian Rundle on guitar with Levine, Miles Kelley on bass and Sam Jordan on drums. The sound is full and urgent, but also soft enough to encourage dreamy staring out of windows.
“The Ghost” is, perhaps, the best of these tunes, an agglomeration of limpid, yearning guitars, wistful melody and a churning, propulsive bass. If Leibowich’s solo album filled out the contours of bedroom pop into something large and stirring, this work with the Infinites does a nice job of balancing wispy threads of vulnerability with the muscular energy of rock. Listen to how Leibowich’s near falsetto flutters fragilely, at the end of verses, while the band powers in behind him. Delicate beauty and resounding rock crescendo live in uneasy accord. The same thing happens in the following “My Best Friend,” where a plaintive “It’s time to fall again” drifts off into contemplation as the full weight of guitar sound pushes towards resolution.
Archetypes views romantic longing through a variety of lenses. Its characters have different jobs and circumstances but all wish, in their own ways, for love and connection. The music supports this narrative with luminous romantic pop made of glistening guitar tones and pulsing tendons of bass and drums. It’s an embodiment of a certain kind of indie guitar rock, an archetype if you will, and a good one.
Spice World — There’s No I In Spice World (Meritorio/Tenth Court)
There's No I In Spice World by Spice World
Spice World comes alive in starts and stops. “What a Pity What a Shame,” the first song on the band’s debut LP, crawls its way forward at a snoring tempo, dozing off to sleep and then snapping back awake like it’s lounging on the living room couch. And in fact it was written on one, late at night in the house that guitarists Jonny Burrows and Lyndon Blue share in Fremantle, Australia, where the album was also recorded. The song could be mistaken for just getting going, or finally petering out, at least a dozen times during its five-plus minutes: its intertwining acoustic guitars starting their short climb and then collapsing into final-sounding strums, the skeletal, ticking drums going momentarily still and then picking up again. “Oh what a pity, what a shame. You barely made it to the starting lane,” Burrows and Blue sing in sighing, off-kilter unison in the chorus, their way of acknowledging, perhaps, the song’s strong aversion to steady motion.
The band, which also consists of Julia Suddenly, Rhian Todhunter and Layla Martin, got off to a similarly fitful start. Originally forming as a quartet in early 2021 (with Martin joining more recently), Spice World played a single but well-received show in Perth before drummer Suddenly had to return to Melbourne, all the way on the other side of the continent. Band activities were mostly put on hold, as a result, until about a year later, when she returned over the Christmas holiday and they decided to document the band’s songs. And so, with limited time before Suddenly was due to leave again — and even less recording experience — Spice World took the live approach to recording their debut album, capturing 10 tracks in just five hours and bottling the ramshackle synergy that had made their first show so special.
The result of that recording session, There’s No I In Spice World, is the sound of dolewave colliding with the K Records spirit. There’s just something about the enthusiastically scrappy manner in which these songs are delivered, and the homespun warmth of the recording, that brings visions of Beat Happening — and the enduring DIY label’s early years, in general — to mind. The pleasingly clunky drumming, the unselfconsciously off-key vocals, the party-in-the-living-room vibe of the thing — it’s all very 1980s Olympia. But Spice World will no doubt remind you even more of the many disaffected jangle bands pouring out of Australia in the early 2010s, especially Lower Plenty and Bitch Prefect, with their offhanded musings on everyday mundanity and the ways one might escape it. Like on “Dying To Go,” when Burrows, in their endearingly nasal tone, ponders “spicing up” their life by faking their own death so they can leave the drudgery of the daily grind behind (the idea hits them while they're struggling to get moving with their day and jamming to some Spice Girls, hence the band name). “Where'd Jonny go, I haven’t seen them in a while?” they envision everyone wondering when they disappear, their bandmates’ voices all piling on top of one another to help pose the question. It’s the dolewave ethos of “less work and more play” taken to an absurdist extreme.
As shambly and whimsical as these songs are on the surface, they also hit with surprising poignancy at times. “Mountain Pony 20,” the album’s most downbeat offering as well as its best, epitomizes this. On first impression, the song’s wilting guitar work and simple, shaky beat lend it an underbaked aura. But give it a few replays, and some time to settle between your ears, and you’ll find that it packs the kind of gut punch you’d more expect from someone like Townes Van Zandt. Beginning with a lyric about getting high on the couch, “Mountain Pony 20” slowly reveals itself as a meditation on an incongruous relationship, where the couple in question can’t even agree on the color of the mold on a loaf of bread. In the chorus, Burrows’ narrator is confronted by their partner with the question of whether they believe in love. “Because I’m not wasting all my time with you if you don’t,” they warn him. Burrows’ answer, delivered atop the flagging thump of the bass drum as the song is winding down, doubles as a withering self-realization: “Don’t give (your love) to me cuz I’ll tear it down / If you give it to me, I’m going to tear it down,” they sing, and it feels like the ground being pulled out from underneath you.
Elsewhere, “Trouble” is as relatable a song as you’re likely to encounter about the modern malaise. It’s a midtempo jangler, like most of There’s No I In Spice World, but distinguishes itself with the addition of Blue’s violin playing, giving it some high-lonesome shading. Over its verses, “Trouble” unfurls its list of the many things that Burrows is having a hard time with these days ranging from the everyday (“staying away from the screen”), to the interpersonal (“trying to love you”), to the existential (“trying to see an end”). It might have been easier, and no less accurate, for them just to say everything, but that would be missing the point: shit’s hard right now, man, and we’re all feeling it. Metaphorically at least, Burrows seems to acknowledge this when they sing about walking by a friend’s house that’s “overgrown” and “falling down.” Spice World, on the other hand, seem to have found strength in the struggle on There’s No I In Spice World and it’s a beautiful thing. What’s harder to gauge, based on the band’s minimal web presence and general modus operandi, is whether this is the end or just the beginning?
