Alvvays' show at the Casbah on Oct. 5 was a flash in the pan. I stepped in from the cold five minutes before their set started and barely had time to break a sweat before lead singer Molly Rankin was announcing that they were about to play their last song of the night.

My experience wasn’t any different from the one I have when listening to the Toronto jangle-pop band’s infectious debut record — I didn’t want it to end and was left a bit put out when it did.

Like any show happening in the cozy venue just off Main Street, it was an intimate affair. Standing only a few feet from the eager crowd, Rankin thanked everyone for attending and asked if the sole three people who attended their last Hamilton show were in the audience. The blonde songstress was greeted with peals of laughter at such a suggestion but adamantly insisted that it had really happened. The rest of the band — Kerri MacLellan, Alec O’Hanley, Brian Murphy, and Phil MacIsaac — seemed equally happy to be past that “real dark shit” (in Rankin’s words) and in a phase of their career where they would draw a capacity crowd on a Sunday.

While their debut was dropped in the summer and shares certain elements with fellow female-led surf-rock outfit, Best Coast, Alvvays’ material is imbued with a much more emotional depth. The self-titled album’s strength lies in Rankin’s exquisite lyrics that marry well with the simple song structure created by the band and made rougher around the edges by producer Chad VaanGaalen.

The set was a tight one, running only ten songs and leaving everyone pining for more as the characters in Alvvays’ songs so often are. Rankin was comfortable on stage (which might have something to do with her lineage) and her radiant smile seemed to be meant for everyone. Much of the stage banter was left to her and she made sure to inquire if all the short people could see and implored everyone to help them out. Being 6’3 myself, I always feel a healthy amount of guilt for being #bornthisway, but I encountered no derision from the dwarves around me.

The odd time that guitarist Alec O’Hanley interjected with his own witticism, I get the feeling he wished he hadn’t. O’Hanley went to thank opening act Heat for “heating things up” but immediately regretted his pun and apologized for not being able to concoct something more elegant on the spot.

Not willing to leave one of their own out to dry, the rest of the band launched into album standout “Party Police”. I must confess that tears were shed on my part as Rankin’s angelic voice pierced through the air and stabbed repeatedly at my heart, which felt like it was under attack by a dull kitchen knife for the song’s entire four-minute duration. The band closed their all too brief show as I dried off my face with ‘”Archie, Marry Me”, another banger that had the audience packed around the stage both bobbing their heads and shouting out the lyrics. While Alvvays might not be back in Hamilton for a while, they’ll always be in our hearts.

When I arrived at Jackson Square for the Sunday afternoon screening of Richard Linklater's Boyhood, I noticed the average age of cinema-goers to be around 105. Jokes aside, the audience was full of mature people and for good reason; impatient adolescents wouldn’t have been able to sit through the almost three-hour film despite how much the film pulls from their own lives.

As a fan of Richard Linklater’s prior work with Ethan Hawke on the Before series and having read the glowing reviews for Boyhood, I knew to expect a compelling film but I was in no way prepared for the amount that it would resonate with me.

The film was shot over 12 years with the same actors resuming their roles for one intense week of filming each year. Ellar Coltrane takes up the titular role as Mason Evans Jr., with Linklater’s daughter, Lorelei, playing Mason's sister, Samantha. The pair is watched over by their mother, Olivia, played exquisitely by Patricia Arquette, and on occasion by their absentee father, Mason Sr., played by  Hawke.

Always an experimental director, Linklater has succeeded in crafting the magnum opus that he will be remembered for. While Dazed and Confused and School of Rock are masterpieces in their own right, Boyhood is Proustian in scope and subject matter with Linklater adopting a much more somber tone in looking at the tumultuous nature of growing up in a broken home.

Unlike any of the predominantly improvised Before movies starring Hawke and Julie Delpy, Boyhood is scripted but there is an air of spontaneity to the delivery of the snappy dialogue which alone makes one want to both laugh and cry in equal measure. Much of that could be due to the fact that Linklater pieced the script together as he went along and didn’t share it in its entirety with the cast, instead electing to only give them their respective lines.

The chemistry between the two children and with their mother is impressive form the start and only gets better with time.

While familial tension and growing up has always had a place in films, it isn't done right very often. On one end of the spectrum, it can be dealt with too lightly, like in Cheaper By The Dozen. On the other, it can be grimly presented in a heavy-handed way, like in Terrence Malick's very good but self-serious Tree of Life.

Boyhood succeeds in presenting both sides of the coin. The slew of drunken deadbeat guys the mother attracts while she works her way through a masters degree can weigh you down, especially if your experience has been similar. But Ethan Hawke always appears in time to relieve the tension and is a pretty constant figure in their lives. It can be tempting to see the fun that the children have with their father and put him on a pedestal, but Linklater does a good job of revealing the frustration that the two sometimes harbor for him.

Despite the added pressure that comes with single parenting, Olivia manages to be lighthearted in her own fashion. Unwary of befouling her children's minds, she is liberal in her use of obscenities. Mason Sr.’s banter with Olivia’s mother is another bit of comic relief that works really well without discounting their personal struggles.

It is impossible to dilute the emotional breadth of the film in a concise fashion because everyone will take away something different from it. In honing in on the largely banal life of an American boy, Linklater serves up something epic that will cater to everyone.

You’ll find a bit of yourself in every character, and be reminded to treat your own family better. And that’s all that matters.

As the tech industry becomes increasingly marred by planned obsolescence, it can be incredibly exhausting to keep up with all the new devices seemingly thrust into the world out of nowhere. But while many flocked to Apple’s site this month to take in the specs of the latest iPhone — and hear Jony Ive’s terrific pronunciation of “aluminum” — I found myself scorning the new device in order to mourn the death of an esteemed old one.

In an unforeseen move, Apple has ceased production of the iPod Classic. What was once its marquee music player has now been unceremoniously pulled from the Apple website without much fanfare.

There is almost no reason for anyone to care with many other options available, but I still felt personally aggrieved and fair bit sentimental upon hearing the news, considering I still use mine to this day.

Born and bred with a touch screen close at hand, today’s youth have no reason to be nostalgic for a time when navigating one’s music library meant using a cumbersome click-wheel.

Despite its sometimes-tedious interface, the Classic was a music nerd’s dream with its one hundred and sixty gigabytes of storage and its understatedly sleek design. In many ways, the Classic was the gateway to a life spent obsessing over music.

I still remember with a touch of pride the day my library expanded to the point where my paltry sixteen gigabyte Nano couldn’t contain it; I could finally justify the purchase of a Classic to my mom whose credit card I would borrow to make the purchase at the store, as my debit had a hundred dollar limit (before you mock me, this was in grade ten).

I rushed home to unbox my prize and cradled it with tenderness normally reserved for newborns. The black iPod had a certain heft to it that made it a pleasure to hold in the palm of my hand and I vowed to keep it in pristine form for as long as possible.

As with all machines, it had a number of eccentricities that made it all the more loveable, including the gentle whir of its inner mechanisms. Although I was careful with it through the years, my iPod now has a few knocks that could have been avoided — did I really have to stick it in my hoodie pocket only for it to fall out during my run? —but it is still steadily plugging along.

Over time, I’ve gradually filled its innards with more newly discovered music – and I only have twenty-five gigs left. It saddens me that the sixty-four gigabyte touch is the largest iPod people have to choose from now, but I realize that with the popularization of cloud-based streaming services like Spotify and the gradual cheapening of data plans, large storage capacity won’t be necessary in the future.

Although I’ll still stick with mine for the time being, it pains me to say farewell to a mammoth. Take care, iPod classic. Don’t forget to eject before disconnecting.

Welcome to ANDY's picks, a weekly must-hear playlist curated by our esteemed ANDY editors Tomi Milos and Michael Gallagher. This week's theme features artists who performed at the Supercrawl festival which took place this past weekend. You can listen below, or follow this link to playlist on Spotify.

 

Tomi Milos
Features Editor

St. Vincent
Artist: St. Vincent

St. Vincent’s eponymous record is both her most personal and her best yet. Abandoning a tendency for grandiose instrumentation that she may have picked up as a member of Sufjan Stevens’ orchestra-like backing band, Annie Clark strips away the dense arrangements that littered her first two albums in her fourth solo effort to date.

Notoriously protective of her privacy, Clark’s “Rattlesnake” seems a step in a more open direction for the 31-year-old musician. While the jittery synths might inspire nervous foot-tapping, the story that Clark proceeds to paint is more likely to induce laughter. The lyrics recount when Clark, ambling through the secluded landscape of a friend’s West Texas ranch on a beautiful day, shed her clothes in a bid to get closer to nature. Becoming aware of a sound she had taken for the wind, Clark turned and saw a rattlesnake. As she told The Guardian, “I took off running and when I got home had a shot of tequila.”

The frantic guitar solo captures the sheer terror of the episode and is a delightful hint at what comes next.

Morbidly titled “Birth In Reverse” was the first single to be released, and for good reason. After some more humouristic imagery — “Oh what an ordinary day/take out the garbage, masturbate” — Clark reminds listeners that she’s the queen of everything and is not meant to be fucked with. The ensuing scuzzy guitar wizardry is downright nasty and it’s great to see her following in the vein of her wild 2012 Record Store Day releases “Krokodil” and “Grot.”

“Prince Johnny” was the last track to be released prior to the album, and stands out as the most musically and thematically interesting of the trio. Less abrasive than its precursors, the regal track is one that brings listeners back to wasting summer days drifting in someone’s backyard pool. As it progresses through a dense maze of caustic bass and drum pads, Clark’s tender vocals woo the listener into a trance only to jerk them out of blissful reverie with a heavily distorted barrage of guitar.

The rest of the album doesn’t disappoint, with the same facemelting goodness found in tracks like “Regret” and “Every Tear Disappears.”

4.5/5

5.

Jai Paul (Unofficial)
Jai Paul

Who is Jai Paul? His website (www.jaipaul.co.uk) does not answer this question; it is a blank, white page. His Twitter feed is equally unhelpful. Jai has tweeted once, only to announce that that he does not endorse this release. All other information about the enigmatic UK artist must be gleaned from his collection of self-produced demos.

As early as “Track 2” it becomes clear that Jai Paul is an extreme musical force. The song is a triumph of sonic fusion: electronic hip-hop meets Bollywood on an MDMA-fuelled dance floor. Jai Paul’s sensual vocals are complemented by Vani Jairam’s singing on the sampled, “Bala main bairagan hoongi.”

Two of the collection’s sixteen songs have been officially released. Track nine, “Jasmine,” is a subdued, pulsating slow jam. In the final track, “BTSTU,” Jai Paul alternates between haunting falsetto verses and a banging hook driven by electrified synth riffs. The music world has taken notice. “BTSTU” has been sampled by Drake and Beyoncé, and Jai Paul was signed to the British independent label XL Recordings on the strength of these two songs alone.

It is hard to believe that the other fourteen tracks are demos, for they sound no less complex or complete. Songs bounce across genres and moods. The cowbell-accented future-funky “Track 5” is worlds away from the undulating tropical vibe on “Track 15.” The album’s disparate sounds are made cohesive by Jai Paul’s vocals, which are at once distant and foreign, yet deeply intimate.

Some might argue that this leak deserves no place on a top ten list. Doubters, I bid you, listen to Jai Paul. His are among the most innovative sounds of 2013. Once you have listened through, relish the idea of an official debut album. Let us hope to hear it soon.

- Josh Spring

4.

Trouble Will Find Me
The National

When life gets overwhelming, we reach for a security blanket. It may not be with the same consistency as Linus van Pelt, but sometimes the tumult of the everyday can prove to be too much (as wretch-inducingly Thought Catalog-ish as that sounds).

The National’s sixth album, Trouble Will Find Me, comes at the apex of their decorated career and provides the same wholesome comfort for the melancholy population as a tub of ice cream and shitty rom-coms do for spurned lovers. After suffering through relative obscurity and being pegged as sleepy miserabilist dad-rockers, all the acclaim the band has enjoyed in recent years could not be more deserved. In an industry saturated by one-hit wonders — Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, anyone? — it’s been refreshing to watch a band work their way up to widespread respectability.

I was surprised to face staunch opposition when I suggested this album for ANDY’s year-end list. Even though I’m a pacifist, I would have fought several bears or listened to Imagine Dragons to ensure its position. Though not as grandiose and immediately accessible as 2011’s stunning High Violet, TWFM is easily the most subtly brilliant record to come out last year.

It bears more of a sonic resemblance to 2003’s underappreciated Sad Songs For Dirty Lovers than its immediate predecessor. Although his young daughter Isla must be keeping it at its end, Berninger’s wit remains razor sharp. The baritone frontman will have you silently sobbing during the cathartic “I Should Live In Salt” (an ode to his younger brother) and laughing at the faux-morose lyrics on “Demons” (i.e. “When I walk into a room, I do not light it up”).

Jaded detractors have long labeled the National as overtly solemn, but they’re missing the obvious tongue-in-cheek nature of the music. Guitarist Aaron Dessner described the offerings on TWFM as “songs you could dance to—more fun, or at least The National’s version of fun.” After all, how could you insist that these guys take themselves seriously when the best song on their latest record is named after a nauseating cocktail, “Pink Rabbits,” and full of lyrics like, “I was a white girl in a crowd of white girls in the park”?

- Tomi Milos

3.

Woman
Rhye

Sometimes I repeatedly write the word “Rhye” in the margins of my notebooks. Mike Milosh and Robin Hannibal have refused to reveal the meaning or origins of their musical project’s name, and I am not even confident that I know how to pronounce it properly. But I just love how those four letters look together.

In this way, it’s the perfect name for a duo crafting soulful R&B music that, while perhaps not complex or profound, offers immense sensory pleasure. Horns, harps, and pianos are perfectly placed across Woman. Yet these flourishes always leave ample space for Milosh’s sublime vocals, which do not definitively register as either male or female.

His delicate, unplaceable voice enables Woman to deftly sidestep the hyper-masculinity and sexual aggression that frequently surfaces in male-fronted R&B. The cover art for R. Kelly’s recent record Black Panties, in which Kelly plays a naked woman like a cello, pretty much encapsulates this tendency. In contrast, when Milosh cries out “make love to me,” it’s a desperate plea, not an order. Of course, there is nothing wrong with sexual confidence, but Milosh’s style invests all the familiar pillow talk on Woman with a universal and somewhat subversive twist.

It’s true that a lot of other artists trade in similarly wounded, brooding R&B. In 2013, Autre Ne Veut, The Weeknd, and even Drake released albums in this vein. There is also some darkness on Woman. But perhaps better than any of their counterparts, Rhye balances such angst with the joy and jubilation of deep intimacy, even if there’s just “three days to feel each other.”

Woman opens with the couplet: “I’m a fool for that shake in your thighs/I’m a fool for that sound in your sighs.” It may not be subtle, but what else is there to say?

- Cooper Long

2.

Yeezus
Kanye West

To call Yeezus an album seems to do it a disservice – it is a scattershot of punk, a flurry of electric, and a hard-hitting pulse of hip-hop. It is a political statement, a diatribe on the overinflated monstrosity of celebrity status, and a lyrical tornado scathing a music industry that produces pop tunes that leave a listener feeling diabetic. Misogynistic slurs, challenges to racism, and helter-skelter screams pepper the measures. It is disorder. It is calm. It is everything and anything in between.
And that’s just the first song.

Kayne West’s Yeezus is an exhausting, powder keg of music, if it can even be called that. Unlike Kanye’s other six albums, the classic soul sounds are almost entirely absent. There isn’t the vintage word flexing or pencil pushing to produce smooth beats. Instead a progression of dissonance with shrieks and deep bass lines, chaotic melodies and emotional layers grate the ears for forty minutes.

Listening to it all in one go is a marathon. The tunes come in torrents, thud after thud after thud, and just when it feels like it’s too much, when you can’t take the discord, jerkiness, and sudden tiredness, the song ends and the next one ambles on with shrill screech.

This is not to say the album is bad. It isn’t. The greatness comes in exactly what makes it disconcerting: a reversal on the perceptions of regular musical composition, as well as the artist’s ironic assault on himself and everything that has made him.

That, or the album could just be the loud grumbles of a narcissist parading as complexity. Like the album’s title suggests, God only knows, and I’m sure even he has trouble listening to some of the fubar ricocheting throughout the songs.

- Kacper Niburski

1.

Modern Vampires of the City
Vampire Weekend

Whatever you call it, Vampire Weekend’s third record is one that defies both labels and my writing ability to express how fucking amazing it is. It is both the ambitious conclusion of a coming-of-age trilogy as well as an impressive sign of things to come.They were originally pegged as just another buzz-band when they arrived in a musical landscape replete with twee and lazily ironic acts. But Ezra Koenig, Rostam Batmanglij, Chris Baio, and Chris Tomson have proven their critics wrong at virtually every turning point in their careers. 2008’s self-titled debut was a buoyant amalgamation of classical influences Batmanglij picked up at Columbia University (no one ever said a V-Dubs song needed more harpsichord) and African-pop. 2011’s Contra built off the debut’s inventiveness while remaining accessible even when making references to typography (re: the oxford comma). As Pitchfork put it, the band was “in an enviable position: semi-popular and sincerely idiosyncratic.”

Perhaps that’s why the band’s utter domination of 2013 wasn’t surprising. Although Batmanglij was the sole producer of the first two albums, the band enlisted Ariel Rechtshaid to lend his deft touch and fresh ears to the proceedings. To call the resulting fruits of their labour “magical” wouldn’t be hyperbolic.

MVOTC is a barbaric yawp proclaiming the virtues of America and a brave confrontation of solemn issues like mortality and religion. “Step” functions in the same vein as Kanye West’s “Homecoming” as a clever love song about a city, with the metropolis in question being poignantly depicted in its accompanying video. The number of references to fire that pepper Koenig’s lyrics on tracks such as “Unbelievers” and “Don’t Lie” makes one wonder whether he was reading Dante’s Inferno in the booth. The songs are as grave in subject matter as the epic poem, but with the band’s trademark tongue-in-cheek still shines. “Ya Hey” is an ethereal conversation with a higher power, but that doesn’t make it any less fun to gyrate your hips to. Considering the sheer infectiousness of the remaining songs on the album, the sparse and intimate “Hannah Hunt” is certainly not the one you’d pick for radio play, but it’s easily their best yet. The sheer ecstasy it induces during its final minute is enough for anyone to produce a full-fledged Patronus.

No words of mine can really do this immensely important album justice, so I’ll just stop here and give you a chance to listen to it.