In that instant it started to pour...

Love is #2

Taken from Simon's Folly:





Even before he came out to sing, he came out on stage and looked at all of us. "Are you all alright?", we could see him mouthing. The roar told him yes.

And then they all came out. They threw red and white roses into the crowd.

It had been spitting rain for over an hour. We were all huddled towards the stage, wanting to see his antics, listen to her voice, watch their banter. The new romantic meeting the old guard, male and female, both transcendant. Together a synthesis of love, fantasy, lust, release and serenity

"The night starts here, forget your name, forget your fear".

There has always been this sound, or rather, a feeling to the sound of Stars. In my head, listening to them has always been like travelling, moving into somewhere. The melody laying a path onto a trip, somewhere. The pont st champlain, a bedroom, or in my case, listening to a love letter in my best friend's car while driving along the eastern shores, our hands outside the car, waving in time.

When they began to sing, "Your ex-lover is dead", the lyric, "In that instant it started to pour", it did. We looked up the the skies and watched the rain through the floodlights. We didn't care. It was, if anything, a kind of watershed emphasis to how their songs made us feel: letting go. The crowd sang along. We swayed and swooned with the melodica sounding its familiar tune. We imagined the scar on the porcelain skin.

We remembered why we love the Stars.

Love is: Jane Vain & the Dark Matter

First of all, I'd like to thank Simon for inviting me to contribute to this blog. It certainly has the potential to be pretty rad.

For my introduction post I'd like to highlight a band I came to know after a summer stint in Calgary, one of the few treasures found within the corporate conglomerate. Pop-noir quartet Jane Vain And The Dark Matter create masterfully moody melodies. Their recently released Love Is Where The Smoke Is, embodies the spooky seduction of Emily Haines solo endeavors, the mystique of Maria Taylor and features splashes of Coco Rosie's black humour throughout.

Chanteuse Jamie Fooks resembles a wiry, petite pixie with Coke bottle glasses. The captivating 24-year-old chanteuse is painstakingly honest, and her anxiety-ridden on-stage persona is merely amplified in person. Over a pot of tea in a pub, she spills over lost tales of adolescence, alcoholism and the struggle of self.

"I didn't even know how to play these songs when I recorded them. I just wanted to learn the process of everything. I played in bands prior to this, but they were mostly drunken punk rock bands. This just started as something I made in my bedroom, layering piano track over piano track."

As Fooks crafted the skeleton of the album in her basement apartment, she rang up old friend Dillon Whitfield of local act Racoon to add his instrumental expertise on guitar. The twosome are the spine of the band, as they've auditioned and lost three members over the course of the past few months. Currently, Britt Proulx is listed as the bassist and Jzero Schuurman sits in on drums.

"Basically, the band name stems from a darker period of my life," explains Fooks. "I don't really know how to say anything without being too blunt.

"I guess it mostly comes from a reckless adolescence, a time when everything was circulating around being vain and concerned with how everything appeared to everyone else."

"C'mon Baby Say Bang Bang," "Ships Bound To Sink" and "Last Chance For Romance" are tortured testimonies cloaked in endless existentialism and dense instrumentation.