The Singles Jukebox

Look, we’re going to at least vaguely like everything this week, you know?

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Katherine St Asaph: I am floored that someone other than me — or a Canadian, I suppose — heard this; to my knowledge, I’m the only non-local reviewer to write up Femmes de Chez Nous. (Sorry, anyone who pegged me for this — great guess, though.) The title translates roughly to “our gals,” fitting for an album full of celebrations of women’s stories. There’s nothing especially noteworthy about the protagonist’s life: she gets liberated, becomes a stenographer, marries a clerk and loves a parade. But she gets a processional anyway, with pianos marching on, a rallying section of backing vocals and triumphant drums. This year, Slate had a few fascinating articles on old girls’ school report cards and small-town library records, insistent in their existence that “ordinary” people’s lives matter for being lives led by people. “Mlle. Steno,” though fictional(?), is the same, and to paraphrase a lyric by Fellows’ husband John K. Samson: you might roll your eyes at this, but I’m so glad that it exists.
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Anthony Easton: Cancon, in the pretending to be political but pleasant and low key–see the decorative work of Sherry Boyle, which people are convinced breaks gendered notions of violence; or the short stories of Alice Munro, which confuse minutiae with depth. Munro can write, though, and this just plods along. (I will now have to revoke my citizenship)
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Brad Shoup: For all the narrative Fellows supplies, the subject of “Mlle. Sténo” keeps bringing me back to k.d. lang’s sardonic “Miss Chatelaine” (“I can’t explain/Why I’ve become…”). I suppose the joke is that our typist got liberated only to become Princess of the Jubilee, but the tale is so sweetly presented, her “elevation” practically elicits cheers. As the song unwinds, Fellows leans heavier on the piano’s low-end, joined halfway through by a wonderfully forceful fuzz guitar/cello passage. The vocalists coronate our lady of the lilies with a Sufjanny “da da dum” passage, only to have the fallboard clap down on them: a rare sharp moment, and one that threatens to upend my reactions to that point.
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Iain Mew: The music and the wobble in her voice are telling me to feel something, but I’m not able to work my way into the story enough to get what, exactly (some of the enunciation isn’t helping). It leaves the song feeling very slight indeed.
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Jer Fairall: Christine Fellows used to write narratives that were always barely skirting the edges of tragedy, songs that were never as angry as they otherwise might have been because they were too busy sighing in resignation, music to escape the oppressive warmth and sunniness of the outdoors by sealing oneself in darkened, ornate rooms filled with old books and older instruments. At various points since February I’ve fluctuated over what it is that I love most about this track, whether it is the sheer radiant warmth of her voice and children’s-music-theater piano playing, the fuzzy Robert Sledge-like bass buzz that kicks in at the minute-and-a-half point, the added background details of the click and chime of the typewriter and the excited mutterings (en francais!) of the title character’s gossipy co-workers, or the unselfconsciousness that it takes any even moderately indie-minded artist in 2011 to name-drop Galaxy 500 and not mean the band. Right now, though, it is the disarming lack of malice at the heart of this pre-feminist character sketch, the celebration of accomplishments rendered tiny only by a half-century of post-history, but continuing to feel momentous in this small, wonderful three minutes of music that makes me ecstatic and grateful to be alive at a time when I’m present to hear it.
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Jonathan Bogart: Bouncy piano, string quartet too laid-back to be called chamber-pop — maybe basement-den pop? — at the service of a muted character study that slides too easily into the familiar embrace of a ba-ba-ba chorus. There’s nothing here that isn’t ordinary, except for the fuzzy sustained notes of the middle-eight, and even those suck the air out of the song for a bit.
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Zach Lyon: It’s not a stretch to think that she and her husband (one of my favorite lyricists these days) fell for each other based on a mutual affection for precise, detailed narratives about common people. In her case, random people, as this lacks the stress that Sampson puts on the narrative; different, but not worse. After a bunch of listens, I’m still not piecing her words together well, in part because the repetition ushers it into the background after a while. It also reminds me too much of Nedelle’s wonderful “Poor Little City Boy” and loses the comparison.
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