Home Recordings (2014 – 2022) Volume 1 & 2 – fatalflaw (reviewed by Dave Franklin)

As the name suggests, this two-volume set of recordings is a collection of lo-fi, low-budget songs that owe their existence to one of two possible creation stories. Because not every creative urge needs to be put out there for public scrutiny the moment that the idea rises in the artist’s consciousness, something that has become the curse of the modern age, these tracks might be merely ideas recorded for personal enjoyment that have finally seen the light of day – which makes this something more akin to flipping through a painter’s sketchbook.

The other alternative possibility is a more subversive idea. Such songs are deliberatly minimalist and unpolished, ragged and raw-edged, making the point that it is the idea rather than the execution that is key. Just because you spend millions of dollars shining up a song for public consumption doesn’t necessarily make it any good (even if the record company PR machine spends even more millions getting the public to buy it). So, conversely, just because a song is put together cheaply and set loose with little fanfare doesn’t mean it isn’t a killer tune. I suspect Home Recordings has something of both attitudes running through its DNA.

fatalflaw is the nome de plume of Canadian music maker Will Maerz, and across these two albums, we see an exploratory mind at work, one that doesn’t pay any heed to the fickle sonic winds of fashion or fad, instead finding meaning where he chooses and using sounds and styles from across the musical lands scape to build his songs.

From one track to the next, we see him fitting the form of the function, that is, choosing a sonic style that best suits the song and the point it is trying to make or the mood it is looking to set. There are straightforward singer-songwriter songs, such as the first volume’s opener, Rashness, a style which he is happy to mutate on tracks like crywolf! where he runs from understated strummed ambience into sonorous sonic strikes – something that takes a stage further with puresuffering! and its transition from lilting, finger-picked balladry through grunge-infused troubadourism and finally into the realms of plugged-in, amped-up, off-the-charts, industrial mayhem.

The second volume has the same mission: not to play by the rules. So, for every song like Snob, which could easily find its way into alternative and underground charts, there are moments of total avant-gardening—the gothic gloom of Bleed, the acoustic garage rock renderings of Petroleum, the faux operatic of Approval, and the proto-punk drive of Burnt Bridges.

fatalflaw’s music is that of the liminal sonic spaces, music birthed in the gaps between genres and styles, between conventions and respectability, the dark underbelly of music where the cogs whirl and the machinery gnash, where the engineering of one sound or style grinds and grates against the energies and torque of another. That is where the sparks fly! It isn’t always pretty, but it is always important.Such experiments, such roads less travelled is how music, as a whole moves forward.