As you listen to the opener of this latest album from Tim Hort, a double no less, you get a glimpse of the complex sonic tides on which his songs flow. For every college rock groove found in “Death by Water,” there is an equal amount of Floydian drift, two worlds that rarely share common ground. Intriguing stuff indeed.
“Except for a Dead-On Girl” veers more into the alt-rock of a R.E.M at that late eighties point where they moved away from the quirky angles and into a smoother trajectory. And then songs like “Dissolve” blend liquid, digital beats with a gorgeous slice of emploring balladry. And the array of shifting sonic styles keeps coming, with the title track a beat-driven bombardment of dense, urgent rock.
Any artist might get to the end of that first disc and be happy that they had turned in a fantastic album. Hort decides that he is just going to turn around and do it all again. And why not? He has the songs and the ability to keep pleasantly confounding the listeners’ expectations.
“With The Rythmn of a Catfight” is not the raucous release of musical energy that the title might have suggested, but rather a shimmering pop-rock-roots piece that the likes of Tom Petty himself would have been proud to have had in his back pocket. “The Killer on the Kennedy” is big, bombastic, crunchy, and cool, a dense musical beast and relentless, at times nu-metal infused onslaught, and by contrast, “Spies in the House” is an acoustic roots piece, its simple lines soaked in rising organ swells and gorgeous backing harmonies, gentle piano, and melancholic sentiments.
In a world where music is released in a drip-feed fashion, the paint hardly dry on the artwork, I appreciate artists who appreciate the art of the album. No Dissociation is a sonic journey; its songs are arranged to evoke dynamic change and an ebb and flow of ideas, shaping and shifting, colliding and contrasting, and, when taken as a whole, complementing. Anyone who can do that across an entire album deserves our praise. The fact that Tim Hort does this over a double album means he should be lifted shoulder-high and paraded through the streets.
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