Here in the prairies, winter fades but is never gone. Snow clouds hang dark and low over these songs, plump and bruised. Even as the summer breaks hot and dry, Oliver Thiessen does not so much look away from the last winter as lament the coming of the next one. The discordant musings of “Winter Hymn” set the tone for a carefully layered record, the parts expertly planned and aligned. A dark reverberation seeps between the cracks in the song, an eerie floor for Thiessen’s voice to tread across. This is bedroom folk of the utmost quality, insinuating a loneliness compounded by the the isolation of the spacious Alberta snows.
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There’s something happening in Welland, Ontario, some fountain of youthful talent, diverse and realized. This is frustrated rock and roll, captured straight to tape in a farm close to Niagara Falls: the raw guitar roaring under barely pronounced vocals. There is a resigned anger here, expansive observations of a small town and its dead-end satisfactions. But there is also a vastness to the sound, an outward reaching mobility to the lyrics that suggest an effort to expand. There is a fine line to the lament of “Chariot Drivers.” A close knowledge of the back roads of your home is only a bad thing when they act as prison bars. The intimacy that traps you is the same thing that makes a place familiar, defines it as your home. This is a record that shakes with agitation and grit, walks the line between staying and leaving.

There is a quality to Joel McNichol’s hushed voice that draws you in, provides a measure of intimacy. The crackle of a fire would convince me that he recorded out of doors. I feel crowded around the flames, a final drink in my hand, listening.
A lovely track by Hazelton, sprung from that bustling fountain of youth — Momma Jack Recordings, steadily releasing a significant body of work right in my own backyard.
Until now, I’ve admired the work of Raven Shields from afar — she is a vocal force behind 