Alex MacNeil – Pasteis De Nata
You’ll only get to remember a handful of things. Unless you take a photo of every single event in your life, it can never be any other way. And the things that, years from now, you will be able to recall will blend the sublime with the ridiculous.
Take your travels, for example. After a while and enough distance covered, many of those trips will start blending together. Food and love affairs are two of the elements that will, without a doubt, stick in your mind. They did for Alex MacNeil.
But don’t think that this blend of memories cheapens the experience. MacNeil’s bread and butter is working with emotions and pouring a silver lining on every glimpse of the past. And to this, his tools are ones that the great pop songwriters of old knew how to use.
MacNeil’s greatest skills are the ability to write beautiful melodies and blend them with exquisite garage/power-pop arrangements. What else could this kind of warmth need besides a love affair? From Portugal with love…all the way to Yukon. Alex MacNeil’s vision of romance comes alive on “Pasteis de Nata.” And if this won’t make you play the song back, and check travel expenses for the Portuguese coast, you don’t have your priorities in check.
Canada Hill – Ringley Park Avenue
Bad guys don’t gallantly smile or twist their moustaches anymore. You don’t hear them sing love to the young girls before engaging in their anti-social behaviour. You don’t see people scratching their heads wondering if maybe, really, they’re not so bad after all.
Rock n’ roll had plenty of time for anti-heroes. Hell (which is where most of those characters ended up), the people who invented rock music were anti-heroes themselves. They were people as pleasant and daring as the musicians of Canada Hill.
But they were charming ruffians, robbers with a heart of gold, and troublemakers who’d phone their mothers on a Sunday. All of that’s gone now. It’s turned into bloody carnage. And one can’t have much sympathy for those types.
If you’d like to recall just how charming troublesome souls could be, take a listen to the garage-rock stomp of Canada Hill’s “Ringley Park Avenue.” Yes, this is a song about loneliness and broken hearts. But the way that this is played and delivered, you’d swear the person singing is consoling himself by emptying a rich man’s coffers in between crying sessions. Used to be that you could depend on these kinds of things.
