Category:
Pop

Try if you like:
New Pornographers

Kathryn Calder is the other female voice filling out The New Pornographers and prior to that she spent a good chunk of her early career singing with the haunting band Immaculate Machine; but Kathryn Calder is more than the sum of the cool bands she’s played in. On her first solo album Calder recounts with deep honesty the two years she spent caring for her terminally ill mother. Do not be fooled by the melancholy of the subject matter, Calder herself acknowledges that Are You My Mother? is not a eulogy. It is instead a celebration of life and loving someone so much that their death can cause your heart to implode. It is an album full of joy, deep deep sadness and a little bit of cheeky humour. Listening to this album for the first time it may be easy to write Calder off as another sad Canadian indie rock girl with a piano but to dismiss her so completely would be a disservice to this stunningly beautiful record. 

While all ten songs on this album are striking, there are a couple of particular stand outs: ‘Slip Away’ is the perfect opener. It gives the listener a hint of what to expect from the entire album – whimsical instrumentation, innovative musical choices and lyrical honesty hinting at deep heartbreak, but not so specific that the audience cannot find their own narrative within each song. ‘Castor and Pollux’ is a gentle jangly pop song; ‘If You Only Knew’ harkens back to much of Calder’s musical breeding and firmly plants her in the zeitgeist of Canadian indie-pop; ‘All It Is’ is a stunning closer and the true rocker of the album. This album is for sunny late summer nights with friends, for epic solo dance parties that leave you sweating and crying alone in your living room with the turntable hissing, and for tired Sunday mornings when you finally tell that person beside you how much they mean to you. 

After listening to this album over and over again one begins to feel full of Calder’s spirit. One begins to understand the whimsy she employs to deal with the sort of pain present on the album. It isn’t to easy love and to lose love but while listening to Are You My Mother? it feels like there is hope in loss. “It’s only a matter of time,” coos Calder on ‘Down the River.’ “It’s only a matter of time / you think you’re falling behind / but it’s just a changing season / changing season…” And it is. This too shall pass and thankfully there is perfect music for the passage of grief.