Soft Signal

I don’t know about you, but for me, it’s all too easy to consign the music coming out of Halifax to being not much more than quaint, Celtic-tinged folk tunes and whatever you want to define Joel Plaskett as. It’s not as if there isn’t some merit to these labels; both sounds are more than well serviced within the city, most of the time exceptionally well, but so much so that they occasionally eclipse those artists that dare to step outside the boundaries and toward something more adventurous.

Sitting somewhere just outside that shadow is Paper Beat Scissors, the evolved bedroom project of Tim Crabtree and a revolving door of guest musicians. Paper Beat Scissors is rooted in the same sounds as Crabtree’s Haligonian peers, but moves in more experimental shapes, punctuated by horns, strings and swirling electronic flourishes. Case in point: “Rest Your Bones,” which takes typically melancholic acoustic work and twists it into a delay-and-reverb soaked crescendo that catapults the track skyward, betraying the slight instrumentation it took to get there.

“Rest Your Bones” is pulled from an upcoming self-titled debut LP, featuring handiwork by Jeremy Gara (Arcade Fire), Pietro Amato (Bell Orchestre), and Sebastian Chow (Islands) among others, and promises to continue exploring these rocky new soundscapes. You can get in on the excursion come March 6, via Forward Music Group.

+MP3: Paper Beat Scissors – Rest Your Bones

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9 Feb 2012 at in New Music by Kevan 0 Comments »