5 minute read
Arts & Culture
from 24 August 2022
The Secret Beach — a place, a band, a song, a vibe
New project from Micah Erenberg offers a fresh, loose take on folk and country
Alex Braun, staff
Matlock, Man.’s Micah Erenberg has been a fixture of the Manitoba indie, country and folk scenes for years, and has released a few excellent albums that have shown off his sharp song writing abilities, dry, witty delivery and keen ear for production.
Despite operating in genres dominated by singer-songwriters performing under their own names, Erenberg has always felt uncomfortable being the one name put to his music.
“I had put out this music before under my own name, and then I was playing with so many different people and was showing up with a band and then calling it my own music, which didn’t really make too much sense to me,” he said.
His studio, the Secret Beach, located on an actual secret beach, was the namesake he chose instead.
This new name allowed more credit to be shared with his collaborators, and made the title of the first Secret Beach album, Songs From The Secret Beach, work in a few ways. The songs were recorded by The Secret Beach at the secret beach and influenced by the secret beach as a place, as Erenberg remarked that the studio itself carries a special energy.
“With this album in particular, I made almost all of it in the same studio space that I’ve been working in since I was a teenager, since I was a kid really,” he said. “So, there’s definitely an ambience of the environment that sounds very similar to things I did when I was 14 or 15 years old.”
And even beyond those meaning-laden walls, Erenberg notes that the “Secret Beach vibe” carried over to the other locations of recording, following him around.
Erenberg said this loose association means things can be “more fluid, and more people can be involved,” adding that although this first album is comprised of his songs, he hopes to open things up to include songs from others that come through the studio or enter communion with the Secret Beach vibe.
The contributors list for Songs From The Secret Beach is quite star-studded, with appearances from Winnipeg’s Boy Golden, Kacy Lee Anderson of the wonderful Kacy & Clayton.
The album also boasts mixing credits from Rob Schnapf, a producer involved in numerous classics within the indiesphere including records by Beck and Elliott Smith, both of whom Erenberg cited as important touchstones for the project.
In his Instagram bio, Erenberg sums up the sound of The Secret Beach as “pop country but not what you’re thinking,” he clarified it’s not Florida Georgia Line pop country, but Gram Parsons, Beck pop country.
While he is unafraid to stretch past traditionalist production limits, Erenberg grounds his work in a “strong basis of the song, the lyrics [and] the story being the spine of the whole thing.”
“Maybe it’s pop-folk-country,” Erenberg said. “There’s a lot of guitars going on and a lot of G chords.”
But paired with this folk or country sound are plenty of synthesizers and swirling Mellotrons.
Though these genre and project boundaries might sound vague and confused, Songs From The Secret Beach is completely coherent thanks largely to Erenberg’s impeccable song
provided Killbeat / photo /
craft.
His plainly stated lyrics are refreshing, and though the wide-ranging genre touchpoints are evident the production never threatens to distract from the songs, only ever tastefully adding to the story.
Songs From The Secret Beach is streaming on major platforms Aug. 24 with a release show the same day at Blue Note Park.
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’Toban turntable
Kiwi Jr., ‘Chopper’
Alex Braun, staff
4.5/5 Stars
Toronto indie-rock group Kiwi Jr. is back once again with another batch of sticky, smartly constructed songs.
The band popped on the scene with 2019’s Football Money, drawing the attention of reviewers everywhere with its extremely rock-critic-friendly sound that combined the loose literary witticisms of Pavement, the exuberant jangle of C86 and the scrappy melodicism of ’80s Kiwi bands like The Clean and The Bats.
But on Chopper, Kiwi Jr. breaks free from its jangle-pop chains and swings for the fences.
Teaming up with Dan Boeckner of Wolf Parade and Arcade Fire fame on production, the band takes clear inspiration from the anthemic sounds of ’00s indie and power-pop — think The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, of Montreal or The New Pornographers.
Opener “Unspeakable Things” starts big and keeps getting bigger.
Singer Jeremy Gaudet, once a strict adherent to snotty talk-singing, now almost croons, adopting a faux British accent and channeling a new romantic melancholy overtop of soaring synth melodies.
This is not to say the band has become any less sharp and elliptical. Gaudet is still constantly dropping one-liners too dense with in-references to fully grasp, but too clever to not love. Like “flirting with the human scorpion jacket from Drive / he’s a haircut aiming a jar of gin” on “The Extra Sees the Film,” or “trapped in a downtown area storage facility overnight / Christ on the cross sees the sunrise for a second time” from “Downtown Area Blues.”
The difference on Chopper is that these too-cool nuggets of loose poetry are couched in massive hooks, delivered with a refreshingly sincere, vital energy and occasionally only part of a more traditionally structured lyric.
Take for example the Strokes-aping “Night Vision,” a driving, nocturnal beauty that follows an almost relatable narrative of relationship anxieties and slacker striving, or the swooning meditation on nostalgia via pop culture reference “The Sound of Music.”
Chopper is real indie-rock bliss, scratching every itch you want scratched in a record like this.
It’s anthemic but never overwrought, smirking and superior without being pretentious and obviously derivative but exciting and fresh.
/ provided Sub Pop graphic /
Kiwi Jr.’s Chopper is currently streaming on major platforms.
