AEM027 PS I Love You

Before this decade, only Cana­dian artists who had explo­sive pop­u­lar appeal — like Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Ala­nis Moris­sette, Celine Dion and the rest — would make it in the States, their suc­cess hav­ing less to do with a home­grown Cana­dian music mar­ket and more to do with the open-armed Amer­i­can music industry’s will­ing­ness to swal­low any deli­cious pop morsel whole. Most other bands were left to wither in the lonely, obscure Cana­dian cold. And then Canada sur­prised every­one and pro­duced, in one decade, not one but two gen­uine, sprawl­ing home­grown scenes – based in Toronto and Mon­treal, really the only two cities in Canada any­way — that led to great art-tinged pop groups who also found immense pop­u­lar­ity across the bor­der. Led by the New Pornog­ra­phers and then Bro­ken Social Scene and Arcade Fire, these groups have per­haps defined the sound of Indie rock in the last decade more than any oth­ers, Amer­i­can or Cana­dian. The expla­na­tion for their pop­u­lar­ity has lit­tle to do with the Cana­dian scene itself: the bur­geon­ing inter­na­tional indie move­ment of the last decade has cre­ated a larger venue for more exper­i­men­tal artists, and the online democ­ra­ti­za­tion of music has made it eas­ier for new bands to catch a break regard­less of their location.

There is nev­er­the­less some­thing dis­tinc­tive about Cana­dian indie rock. While most Amer­i­can indie rock bands seem to revel in their go-it-alone atti­tude (only recently with projects like Dark Was the Night has any sem­blance of an Amer­i­can indie col­lec­tive began to emerge) Cana­dian musi­cians often act col­lec­tiv­ity. PS I Love You in some ways epit­o­mizes this and in oth­ers throws it by the way­side. They are part of an online com­mu­nity that quadru­ples as the place to find the goings-on-about-town in their home of Kingston, Ontario, a record label, music video club and zine. And their first pressed sin­gle, “Facelove”, came as the B-side on a (phys­i­cal) 7-inch with their friends Dia­mond Rings (though the first track got some Pitch­fork love, the B-side was largely overlooked).

But PS I Love You is just multi-instrumentalist Paul Saulnier and drum­mer Ben­jamin Nel­son – who lays down an excel­lent, fever­ish set through­out, espe­cially fea­tured on A-side “Facelove” – and is pri­mar­ily the life­long musi­cal jour­ney of Saulnier. And yet they might as well be an army. Where the Japan­droids, another recent break­out duo from Canada, describe them­selves as “a two piece try­ing to sound like a five piece band,” PS I Love You is a two-piece that actu­ally sounds like a five piece band, with Saulnier on gui­tar, vocals and (via his seem­ingly pos­sessed right foot) bass organ.  Not that that really mat­ters. I lis­tened to this song for weeks with­out know­ing that there were just two guys in the band. But it only adds to their mys­tique: when I offered them a gig (admit­tedly for basi­cally noth­ing) they responded that, as “poor Cana­di­ans,” they didn’t even have pass­ports (see their video too). For shame. These guys pack more than enough edge and just enough hook to fill whole hip­ster sta­di­ums – ones that don’t usu­ally serve as most-of-the-time ice rinks.

I’m seri­ous. Why? Turn on “Facelove” and keep read­ing. This sin­gle is pure propul­sion. There is no hook or verse, just con­tin­ual upward motion. Using the waver­ing, weighty bass organ as a jump­ing off point as it gains momen­tum, they briefly toy with a sur­re­al­is­tic love call (“your love is like a giant straw­berry (or) a deli­cious glass of wine (or) a naive dream of mine / thrown in my face.”) but then cas­cade into a gui­tar solo that would put Jimmy Page to shame. Yes, there is some­thing dis­tinctly heavy metal about this song: the beat may be post-punk but the gui­tar solo is more Black Sab­bath than Joy Divi­sion. The way he dou­bles the lines, his effort­less shred­ding – Saulnier clearly has some nos­tal­gia for times when gui­tarists proved them­selves by doing more than look­ing pissed off. And just when you might expect them to pull a 360, to return to Saulnier’s high-pitched hoarse cry, they just keep push­ing, turn­ing the bridge into a never-ending solo that makes you won­der if the gui­tar is going to fly right out of his hands. No need for another verse; that would bring these guys back to earth. They are in outer-fu*king space.

Where A-side “Facelove” sounds like bits grabbed from the last forty years of rock thrown into a smelter and served hot, B-side “Sub­tle and Majes­tic” firmly sit­u­ates PS I Love You in the Cana­dian indie rock scene. Recall­ing the more spa­cious sin­gles of Bro­ken Social Scene’s You For­got It In Peo­ple, the lightly picked gui­tars and del­i­cate chords com­ple­ment Saulnier’s off-pitched voice and ren­der it as some­thing that is both serene and grubby. He con­veys the mix of sin­cer­ity and self-deprecation that every musically-inclined dude has expe­ri­enced when mak­ing a mix­tape for a sig­nif­i­cant other (hope­ful or real): “I’m not try­ing to be roman­tic but I made you this mixtape/ It’s sub­tle and majes­tic and I know that you’ve prob­a­bly heard most of these songs before/ But this time they’re from me/So you can really hear what they actu­ally mean.” He gets at that per­haps ridicu­lous (or, in the opin­ion of this mix­tape obsessed writer, per­haps not) feel­ing that, by putting songs in their just-perfect order, you put your unique mark on them and make them real for your obvi­ously floored lis­tener. More, Saulnier’s strained but pow­er­ful call at the end of “Sub­tle and Majes­tic” (“Let’s quit smok­ing together/let’s start smok­ing together”) expresses the famil­iar long­ing to under­take shared projects with another, though which par­tic­u­lar project is basi­cally irrel­e­vant. What mat­ters is that last part: together.

I think we like bands best that take the famil­iar and put an unusual twist on it; that don’t so much re-invent a genre as per­fect it. With hard hit­ting beats, sweet gui­tar hooks, some seri­ously heavy bass organ and just a bit of self-conscious sen­si­tiv­ity, PS I Love You is able to be both a part and an exten­sion of their scene and sound. Now let’s get them some passports.

Nick Kelly

Side A — Facelove Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (ver­sion 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Down­load the lat­est ver­sion here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Side B — Sub­tle and Majestic Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (ver­sion 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Down­load the lat­est ver­sion here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

[[[Down­load the 7-inch]]]