Thus Owls & the Canadian postal service
Oddfinds #2
Note: It’s Record Store Day today, 20th April 2024. Some people really like it, and some people think it’s just a hype – an opportunity for labels to put out second rate rarities at big prices. That might be partially true, but it’s also a chance for us to support artists and visit our local record shops – talk to the passionate people who work in them, and perhaps buy a piece of music that is new to us… Just a thought. I’m going to be visiting our new-to-St Davids Dead Sea Records. It might just be the smallest record shop in the smallest city in the UK and Chris, who runs it, is an all round great guy with amazing taste!1
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Oddfinds #2
Oddfinds is an occasional series about the records, songs, or even shops, labels and other pieces of the musical ecology that are literally ‘odd finds’. Pieces of vinyl, CDs or online bits of music hanging around in digital corners. From my point of view, an oddfind is good - very good.
This post is a story of an oddfind: an album I thought I’d bought, then thought I’d lost, and which turned up eventually. I thought it was just going to be a story of a great album. It is, but there’s international connection, venture capitalism and the vagaries of the Canadian postal service in there too, so it turned out to be a bit more involved!
Who Would Hold You If The Sky Betrayed Us?
The album I found on Bandcamp (more on that below) is by a band called Thus Owls from Montreal, Quebec, entitled Who Would Hold You If The Sky Betrayed Us?
Great title! And I like it when everything comes together, because the cover is also beautiful, in gorgeous blocks and silhouettes of orange and black. It’s bold and dark with sci-fi overtones.2 Contemporary, but with the feel of an old fashioned political poster, perhaps for an idealistic movement trying to travel together towards a dark but hopeful future. On the front, people wait to enter a tunnel in the sky - or between the worlds – holding hands, doing whatever it is they are doing – together. Inside, there are floating mountains, warped planets and other strange things. There is something exploratory and (good) weird in all of this – and that’s before listening to the music!
Like a lot of great oddfinds music, I am finding, this turns out to be a COVID-era record. The lyrics are about questioning belonging, place and connection. Erica Angell, the band’s singer and lyricist, is Swedish and, during the pandemic, the disconnection she felt from her family and homeland was reflected in her songs. Listening, I also felt this ‘disconnect’ in the way the record emerged as a kind of ‘wild-in-places’ improvisation – almost desperate in places:
“The process was long and unconventional, rearranged by the pandemic. Cut off from her Swedish family, Erika had begun writing lyrics that reflected on that distance and its implications, the tension between who one is and how one is perceived. "Who am I?" she asks on "Lover Mother." "What do you see?" Moving to a new country, creating a home there—this is a matter of knitting connections, just as performing for a crowd is about drawing those lines. Could Thus Owls make a music that drew out that sense of active interconnection, the way we compose and recompose ourselves?”
Thus Owls on Bandcamp
The album also has the feel of a dance. Not so much a record to dance to, but one that emerges from a dance between different elements, people, instruments, questions and emotions. Erica Angell’s voice is assured, sometimes fragile and always beautiful, but has the depth and edginess to carry the dark noise of the uninhibited movements in and out of despair. It’s like a fire that threatens to get out of control. Irresistible, dangerous and hypnotic.
"Fragility is a good place to create from” - Erica Angell
The album is full of the unexpected. One minute a poem being solemnly recited; the next, the noise of frantic drums, driving guitar (by Erica’s partner, Simon Angell), and a full sax section in full sprint. At times, the album threatens to tip over into chaos, only to recover itself with a gorgeous melody or spoken voice line.
At first listen I was reminded of Bowie’s Blackstar album (and the band cites this as one of the influences). In places it also has a feel of Kate Bush or Bjork’s Fossora – with its sense of soaring ambition, wind instruments working deep in the bass realm and a sense of something unreachable. But really this is a totally unique piece of work. The melding of ‘spoke-sung’ poetry and vocals, jazz breakbeats and the deep interweaving voices of the guitars and saxophones make this an album that warrants listening and revisiting.
It’s a big album (66 minutes and 13 tracks), but tightly and carefully curated, and has all the experimentation, fusion and great songwriting that I love. The album starts strongly with Bleeding, beginning with a delicate guitar line and spoken vocal, building to a chaotic jazz crescendo, and then falling back down again. It’s followed by the slow, crystalline I Forgot What I Remembered – a beautiful song, with one of the strangest, fuzziest guitar lines I’ve heard, that keeps emerging to seriously mess with the more regular piano and voice vibe…
I suspect my favourite tracks on this album will change, but at the time of writing I’m loving I Miss Her Like My Country, a meandering, sax-led manifesto of a song; Who Would Hold You?, which jazz-flows around a spoken word and sax improv; and the final track, Bouncy Castle - a simply beautiful song that I will keep coming back to.
Throughout the album, Erika Angell’s voice is a standout. She can do poetry and gentle melodic beauty (as on the beginning of Above the Sun), and elsewhere soars and roars. I’ve got more to explore from this band, but I loved this vocal performance from Erika live from Stockholm in 2019:3
Postscript 1: The Canadian Postal Service saga
I bought the album on Bandcamp around the end of November last year. On the website was a warning that it could take a few weeks for the album to reach me in the UK. I guess that’s OK, I thought. From my own experience, I know that posting magazines, books and cards around the world can take a while. Maybe it’ll be there for Christmas, I thought. If I’m lucky. But I had reckoned without Canada Post (or, as I have come to think of it, The Canadian Postal Service, partly because this could actually be a pretty cool band name).
The record didn’t arrive. By mid-January, I thought that the Canada Post Christmas rush should be well over, and so contacted Simon Angell, the very friendly co-conspirator, multi-instrumentalist and administrator in Thus Owls.
He wrote: Whaddya say we give it another week and if nothing by, let's say Friday January 26th, we can fully refund you? Wish we could just send another record, but we've sold them all!! Crossing fingers it'll show up.
We gave it another week. No luck.
Simon, hopeful, on the 30th January: Hey Steve, any word on the record? Did it magically appear?
Me, crestfallen, on the 31st: No it didn't appear…It's such a shame, but it doesn't look as if it will turn up now.
Simon, again: Oh damn, so sorry about this. Talked to some other musician friends and there seems to be something fishy going on between Canada Post and Royal Mail :(
Something fishy… I decided to investigate…
There had been some bad weather in Canada that affected deliveries in mid-January, but the record would surely have cleared the borders by then? Fishy indeed. Nothing else seemed to explain the delay – except possibly a Royal Mail depot at this end. Some of these have been reputed to swallow parcels for weeks on end. Either way, I guess stuff gets lost in the post sometimes. Anyway, refunds and apologies were provided by the lovely Simon.
And then, one day, three months after the album had been posted:
Me, flabbergastered: The latest in the saga. Yesterday our postman arrived, knocked on the door and there was the record! it seems to have survived the journey. I've listened to sides one and two and they are perfect. It sounds amazing. The second record looks fine as well. A minor crease on the corner of the cover, but otherwise fine! I bet it’s got some stories to tell, it’s only taken three months to get here! So, I need to pay you back after you refunded me. What's the best way of doing that?
Simon, equally surprised: Oh wow! Crazy! I guess PayPal would be best? I'd say cause it took so long, don't worry about the shipping, it's on us. You can send 40$ to our PayPal account. Sound good? Thanks for the transparency!! And glad you got the record in the end!
It’s not a very exciting story, I guess, but I wanted to tell it because it shows that people who make and love music are most often generous souls who just want to connect, play and get their music out.
And I also sort of love that this piece of music took three whole months to get to me! It adds to the oddness of this particular oddfind. As I said - stories!
But what the blazes was going on with the Canadian Postal Service!!?
Postscript 2: The problem with Bandcamp
“It’s hard to overstate how genuinely beloved the music retailer Bandcamp was by music fans before this week.”
Tom Hawkin in the Guardian, October 27, 2023
Like a lot of people searching for new music, Bandcamp has been an invaluable online resource for me. A place where I can listen without shady algorithms pushing bland genre-based playlists. A place where I can buy music – digital or physical – and know that a good amount of the money goes straight to the artists. And on Bandcamp Fridays, they get even more of the profits of their creativity!
I found, and bought, this Thus Owls album on Bandcamp, and probably wouldn’t have discovered it anywhere else. And yet, like everything in this messed up capitalist world of start-ups, acquisitions and twisted priorities, Bandcamp has recently been embroiled in controversies involving takeovers, unionisations, lockouts and job losses.4
It’s a shame, though no-one should be surprised that a tech start-up was taken over! It’s what they are set up to do, after all. But Bandcamp did seem a little bit different – a little bit more ethical – and it certainly had enabled relationships and conversations to develop directly between artists and music lovers.
The platform is still going as I write, and everything seems to be in place, but something feels different. Is this just now a more navigable and user-friendly version of Spotify? I really hope not. I hope the artists will still have a place they can trust, where they know they’re getting a fair price for their labour, and where they can communicate directly with their listeners.
I might have more to say about this in time. I’d like to listen to what musicians think, and see how the platform evolves. Maybe it’ll be OK, but whatever happens, something has been lost in the mix…
Notes
You can find Dead Sea Records online as well as physically in St Davids, Pembrokeshire. Chris’s prices are good and there’s free delivery on orders of £60 (that’s only three LPs!) - https://www.deadsearecords.co.uk
The Cover Art is by Louis-Alexandre Beauregard. Graphic Design by Louis-Alexandre Beauregard and Antoine Corriveau. https://www.instagram.com/louisalexandrebeauregard/
The live track Devils in the Dark is from the 2018 Thus Owls album, The Mountain That We Live Upon. There’s also an amazing interactive live performance of Who Would Hold You If The Sky Betrayed Us? HERE on YouTube recorded at La Sala Rossa, Montreal, QC, June 4th 2022.
You can find out about what has been going on at Bandcamp online in Tom Hawkin’s Guardian article linked to above and in a number of other places, including: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/oct/17/bandcamp-lays-off-half-its-staff-after-buyout-by-songtradr & https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/is-bandcamp-as-we-know-it-over/
It’s a great album. Glad it finally found its way to you! And though it’s not the Canadian Postal Service, The Postal Service’s 2003 album Give Up is quite fantastic, particularly on vinyl. Highly recommend that one, too. :)