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Album Review
by SashaS
24-2-2004
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| The Stills, one of finer Canadian combos |
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The Stills: 'Logic Will Break Your Heart'
(679 Recordings/Warners)
The Stills crack the door of future perception
The music offensive 2004 is yet to launch in earnest - we hope, as every other year - but some have been combat training for a while. 2003 made disenchanted youth arm with a resolve that the superior Brit music was louder, harder, full of attitude and raw fun. The likes of Funeral For A Friend, The Cooper Temple Clause, InMe and Hell Is For Heroes spearheaded the faction proving that music had returned to the live arena and the buying public were eager to pay to see them. The chart battle is soon to follow - we hope, again.
Music has become an ornament, just a pendant to redress silence. It’s also become a fashion accessory… Where is the diss, where is the underground, what’s down? What‘s erect?? Everything seems to have been price-tagged, valued and discounted for quick sale. Pop music’s become like vacation ‘ghettos’, all those places Brits frequent during summertime to do all the vile things Brits do abroad in the name of hol’s fun…
But, there is light in the Mont Blanc tunnel… And, no it doesn’t come from Scotland, in the shape of Franz Ferdinand, and it is far from the media generating mass-inducing hypEnosis. This sonic vision comes from across the Atlantic, Canada to be geo-politically correct and its collective name is The Stills. The band’s debut album is ‘Logic Will Break Your Heart’ and it is one mighty piece of… polymer.
Combining the best bits of several songwriting generations, such as Television, Joy Division, Buzzcocks, Echo And The Bunnymen, a tad prog, a bit acoustic, sparse - and that’s just the opening ‘Lola Stars & Stripes’. Pensively mid-tempo’d ‘Gender Bombs’ follows and it is very interesting how it counterpoints drums beats with jangly guitars to lay foundation for a wistful vocal by Tim Fletcher.
‘Changes Are No Good’ starts to stretch the dictionary into the more epic landscape although the song’s duration of 3 minutes 39 seconds seems like it’s doing no justice to the tune’s possibility and onstage - it will morph into a killer. ‘Love And Death’ is set in the rockier vista, using more conventional idioms to get a listener’s body moving about, as well as does ‘Of Montreal’, ‘Allison Krausse’, ‘Still In Love Song’…
‘Ready For It’ takes its time (5:20) exploring the psychedelic imagery and gets there with a wide, huge-spliff-aftermath, smile! The lips pucker in ethereal exploration that is ‘Still In Love Song’… traversing the universe and ‘Yesterday Never Tomorrow’ ebbing away on a gorgeous guitar-wave…
The Stills hail from Montreal [as the aforementioned song title indicates] and the quartet is based around a childhood friendship of singer and bassist Oliver Crowe; the two have known each other since the age of 4, now being in their “early twenties“, is all their official biography informs us. [By the way, this band‘s got the shortest and most-to-the-point onsite biog, ever - tres qool!]
The Stills are mellower kinda rockers - but not soft - that bridges the division between harder rocking, psychedelia and singer-songwriter’s genre. They’ve taken on a lot and come up with the goodies… With catchy tunes leanings toward The Cure and Joy Division, it shouldn't take long to find plenty of fans.
8/10
SashaS
24-2-2004
The Stills’ album ‘Logic Will Break Your Heart’ is released 23 February 2003 by 679 Recordings/WB
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