20 November 2019

Ar ts & Culture 12

A release from a frustrating few years

Rich Aucoin talks his Death Tour, end of a musical chapter and starting over

KAELEN BELL, STAFF

Canadian indie-electronic musi-

cian Rich Aucoin is bringing his Death Tour to Winnipeg on Nov. 28, debuting the final instalment in his death album trilogy, Release. Though, the version of Release Aucoin will play is not what he had intended to show the world.

In early 2017 — after months of recording — his laptop was stolen, and with it the entirety of his thenforthcoming album.

“I thought I had it backed up,” Aucoin said.

“But I didn’t, and so then, I had to remake the record.”

Aucoin said he spent the next six months recreating what he could and making peace with what he couldn’t, whether it was an elusive keyboard figure or a particularly inspired bass rhythm.

“I had to let go of the idea of trying to remember,” he said.

“I would sit at the bass every day and try to let go but it just came back.”

After a half-year of recording and constructing his record all over again, Aucoin was finally done. However, Release wouldn’t see the light of day until May 2019.

With label woes delaying the process, Aucoin spent the two years following the re-recording biking across the U.S. and recording an entirely new, unrelated album.

“I’ve already written my next record, and recorded it, so I know where the next direction’s going,”

“It’s also kind of like an end and a new beginning”

— Rich Aucoin

he said.

Aucoin said he considers Release the closing of an artistic period — the end of an idea about life, death and existence that began with his 2011 debut We’re All Dying to Live

“In addition to [Release] being a record about how we live and how we prepare for death and how we mourn the death of loved ones, it’s also kind of like an end and a new beginning, starting in 2020,” he said.

Aucoin said he feels relief in finally playing these songs live and having them breathe out in the open, allowing him to move forward into a new chapter.

“It’s a nice moment to be touring [Release], kind of like hanging out with an older friend and then knowing that they’ve got to go off and do their own thing after this,” he said.

’Toban Turntable

Poesy — ‘Glass Box Confessional,’ 2.5/5

KAELEN BELL, STAFF

The album art for Poesy’s debut EP, Glass Box Confessional , immediately recalls the cover of Tori Amos’s Little Earthquakes — a young artist contained, trapped and on display.

But the music found within this brief EP has more in common with Amos’s infamous synth rock band Y Kant Tori Read than it does the incisive, searching art-pop that Amos would eventually become famous for.

Across four maximalist slices of ’80s indebted pop-rock, Sarah

Naturally, after such a long and convoluted gestation, Aucoin said Release has a distinctly different energy than his previous records, an energy that he’s enjoyed exploring on the Death Tour.

“Ephemeral was such a high energy record,” he said, “and the songs are all fast [beats], and that made the live show really high energy the whole time.”

Aucoin said he’s found it interesting to read the energy of the room when playing Release “and seeing it doesn’t always have to be high energy for the entire duration of the show.

“You can break it down and then build it back up.”

This newfound sense of energy will likely carry into Aucoin’s future endeavours.

He said he plans to release one record per year for the next five years, perhaps an antidote to the long journey that led to his latest.

For now, Aucoin is left to close this chapter of his musical life from the stage, bringing his death-conscious, human-made electro to the people, breaking it down and building it up — finally reaching release.

The Good Will Social Club will be hosting Aucoin’s Death Tour Nov. 28.

Botelho has charisma and an undeniably powerful voice often recalling Celine Dion

Botelho — who makes music under the name Poesy — toes the everdelicate line between homage and pastiche — and more often than not falls toward the latter.

Glass Box Confessional is a somewhat-dated sounding collection of songs, often leaning too heavily on detail-obliterating synth washes, blown-out guitar and pounding, motorik ’80s rhythms.

Chugging closer “Never Getting Rid of Me” is perhaps the most egregious, sounding like a copyright-free ’80s YouTube instrumental more than anything else.

Were it not for the top-40 enormity of the choruses and the compressed, mid-2000s-pop production, most of these songs wouldn’t sound out of place following Pat Benatar on throwback radio.

That’s not to say the EP is a disaster — there’s good to be found

here.

The songs are relatively catchy, and Botelho has charisma and an undeniably powerful voice, often recalling Celine Dion in how she seems to sing from the throat, curling her voice around words in a way that belies her age.

Opener “Body Language” is perhaps the strongest — and most modern-sounding — song of the bunch, with a throbbing, Robynindebted synth figure and her most enjoyably overblown chorus.

Botelho’s drawled phrasing during the verse plays excitingly against the relatively minimal pulse that she rides atop.

It is a genuinely promising taste of what she’s capable of conjuring.

It’s the failure to experiment with her influences across the remaining three tracks that ultimately does Poesy a disservice.

It seems Poesy — a contestant on Canadian star-making reality show The Launch — was in search of a discernable sound and brand, something that sets her apart from the generally depressive minimalism of current pop music.

Vaguely empowering, gothic ’80s pop-rock is a genre ripe for the picking, and if Botelho and her collaborators manage to take the assignment slightly less literally, there’s plenty of reason to be excited about Poesy’s future.

For now, however, there’s an undeniable sense of nostalgia gone wrong — a fundamental misunderstanding of why ’80s pop remains relevant today.

The best aspects of the decade’s sounds — the iciness, the spaciousness, the elasticity and willingness to experiment — are ignored in favour of its worst tendencies.

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