The Coast

• HorsePower
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Aug 1, 2009

Of Smoke And Curls, The Middles Of Nights

Words by Sean Moeller, Illustration by Johnnie Cluney, Sound engineering by Mike Gentry

The silent hours that linger on are a dirty currency in the land of The Coast, where there's too much of it, where everyone's wealthy and it's kind of awful. There's almost universal misery because of it all, all the bountiful wealth that everyone's swimming in. The silent hours and the coffee attacks both ride shotgun in the songs of this Toronto band of creamy melodies and the kinds of deliveries that almost remind one of those of John Rzenik in the best possible-Boy Named Goo-Dizzy Up The Girl way. These are often sad ballads written not necessarily about certain girls (though that's true too), but for certain girls as if there's any winning over or back that could be done with a few pretty verses of very plaintive wording and a hummable chorus. There's much of the same feeling that Rzenik sang about in the late 90s, for instance a line such as this one: "And I don't want the world to see me/Cause I don't think that they'd understand/When everything's made to be broken/I just want you to know who I am." It floats in the waters of The Coast, the sweet lull and the tempered power of its depths, as a good wind could kick up something that would knock you out. It mixes with the lonely ice cubes of a glass half-full and parties with all of the dying light to give us a finished sentiment, or a sentiment as it stands right now, as these songs are hopefully temporary fits of frustration soon to be given a heave-ho. They are meant to be banished, cleared away for the parting of the clouds and for better times. Lead singer Ben Spurr makes sure that his cloudiness and the holes in his pockets, the itch of his skin get the better of him or overwhelm us. He keeps his ways summery and light for the most part, paring off the negativity and giving us the beautiful down and out and commiserating facts of the matters. His ways are the same as the ways of a skyline cooking backwards into a night with the darkness scrunching down to the earth all of the grapefruit pinkish-orange of the afternoon until it looks like spilled hearts in the distance getting roasted by all of the love they've lost. It makes your eyes believe in all of it, as if that right there was an answer to some riddling note. Spurr sings on "All Farewells," "Any way you look at it, the end is unclear," and it's what haunts and encourages him on, it seems, this ambiguity that time holds. It's start and end are inconceivable and it's just got be taken as is, listened to and laid beside. Somewhere in doing all of that, it will reveal something and The Coast hangs on the hushing signals pounded out in smoke and curls.

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