Solange: A Beyonce you think you can feel

The most Solange moment of the whole night came when the cooly ebullient singer asked Dancing Phil to come up on the Danforth music hall’s stage. She didn’t address him by name, but when she dropped some props for his scramble-crosswalk-dance to Losing You, and the crowd started pointing at and pushing him towards her, she swept him up there with a beaming smile and basically made 2013 for a would-be viral video star.

It would be silly to suggest that Solange, especially the Solange of True, doesn’t stand on her own casually choreographed feet as a performer, but it would be even sillier to suggest that part of her charm doesn’t come from the shadows she peeks out from. The chatter in the spilling-over lobby as the show let out confirmed: she is the closest you can be to Beyonce while still being human, the everywoman who drifts through rarified air in an unpretentious bubble, and pops in our face when we get in close.

Read the full review here.

Into the void, with open arms

Frightened Rabbit
Pedestrian Verse
(Atlantic)

As Scott Hutchinson tells it at Clash Music, the phrase “pedestrian verse” was written on the front of the notebook that held the lyrics to his band’s latest album as a kind of totem to ward off the evil spirits of lazy songwriting. This is probably a case of neurotic vigilance: if you’ve already managed to transpose “bad lyrics” into “pedestrian verse,” it’s not likely you’re writing a lot of them, and Frightened Rabbit’s output up to this point bears that out. Yes, the band has been known to tread in a lot of familiarly sad waters — if Scotland isn’t currently surrounded by the Sea of Male Melancholy, it’s only for lack of cartographic imagination — but they’re at least doing it with the grace of synchronized swimmers.

Still, Hutchinson’s amulet has done its trick: Pedestrian Verse is far ahead of work that’s been fairly impressive even to now. Lyrically, it seems less an album than a Jonathan Franzen novel, where every narrative choice, every descriptive line, spirals up to cling to bigger and deeper things. We don’t have to look much beyond the song the album’s title appears in, State Hospital, a broken biography of a woman wheeling under forces well beyond her control: how about the description of her childhood, “Brought home to breathe smoke in arms of her mother with a blunt kitchen knife / Who just lays in a submissive position / beneath the national weight and the slow arc of a fist”? The entire mood of the song, and the whole panoramic scene of this girl’s life, is laid out in three lines.

Read the full article here.

I always feel like somebody’s watching me

Seen Reading
By Julie Wilson
Freehand Books

Here’s a good way to start feeling your skin: crack open Julie Wilson’s Seen Reading on the Toronto subway. If you can go more than five minutes without first scanning the car for voyeurs, and then spying on your neighbours’ choices — Game of Thrones, Game of Thrones, Hunger Games … oh, hey, Fifty Shades of Grey — your levels of meta-awareness might be too low to understand the better humour of this society.

Truthfully, though, feeling your skin, or at least your book cover, seems in large part to be the point of Wilson’s blog-cum-book, a collection of micro-fictions based on characters observed reading on Toronto transit. At times it seems less of a book of fiction than a sort of public art project, a voyeur’s fantasia that would work just as well — or, probably, in terms of wider comment, even better — arranged on a gallery wall or replacing a bus stop ad or even as a witty game among friends. (Seriously: Weaving together the book title with a telling detail or two is enough to fire up anyone’s Sherlockian powers of deduction.)

Read the full review here.

I’ll turn this car around

Almost There: The Family Vacation, Then and Now
By Curtis Gillespie

Our culture’s general consideration of the family vacation is pretty well captured in the unspoken question that Curtis Gillespie’s title seems to be answering. “Are we there yet?” whined out at a mosquito pitch, seems to distill the exasperation of herding a group of unruly children and surly teens and frazzled significant others into some experience that’s supposed to be … well, an experience, at least. It’s such a hideous frustration, it’s a wonder we don’t just spend our weeks off in darkened rooms with stiff spirits (and, I guess, ice cream for the kids).

Though of course we do set out, in absolute droves, by car, boat and plane, into the beyond, family in tow. Gillespie, one of the co-founders (with Lynn Coady) of the long-form journalism outlet Eighteen Bridges, is a smart enough writer to recognize that when the popular conception and the popularity of an act are this disconnected, we haven’t considered it closely enough. Taking inspiration from his own travels — from a six-week Mexican road trip in the quintessential ’70s transport, the station wagon, to a modern cruise — he comes up with the basic theory of the family vacation, a sort of tour guide of the mind of the parent packing a suitcase.

Read the full review here.

Although of course you end up talking about yourself

The Attack of the Killer Rhododendrons
By Glen Chilton

While I was reading The Attack of the Killer Rhodendrons by Glen Chilton, I spent a lot of my other free time planning and executing a move. That’s no particularly small feat when you’re too suspicious and cheap to hire movers to box up your possessions, but it taught me some valuable, folksy lessons that you’ll no doubt find amusing. Like, for instance, throwing a mattress over the railing of a second-storey landing while screaming, “Your voice is like eight starving badgers gnawing through my frontal lobe” is a bad way to motivate your girlfriend to help.

You find this digression fascinating, right? I mean, I know it has nothing to do with the topic at hand, but surely you’re not reading this because you’re interested in what I’m supposed to be talking about, right? I’m writing this, so you must be more interested in what I was doing. So interested that it certainly wouldn’t be enough to just let my subjective experience colour my observations on the subject at hand; no, my name is up there, right under the headline, so you want my personality to simply overwhelm any larger points I could be making here. Great. Now gather ’round and let me tell you about the time a bad joke in a book review led to a weekend of silent meals.

Read the full review here.