Metaverse

At Burdock on Friday, 3 bands played around with internal rhymes, stretching and compressing melodies, and other tweaks to the basic pop structure. I thought that solo opener Julie Arsenault did the best job. Her rhymes were subtle and so were her lyrics. You're enjoying her melody and only a few seconds later do you realized she had just casually dropped a line full of pain and unresolved issues. Coszmos Quartette's songs were the most hippy-dippy "we're made of stardust" verses I've heard in awhile. I didn't mind their attempts to play around with melodic changes. But their lyrics alternated between simplistic rhyming and awkward words whose intonation didn't quite fit the meter.

When members of Montréal band Corinna Rose pulled out both a harp and an auto-harp, I wondered if we were going to hear some folkie/pop hybrid of Emilie & Ogden and Basia Bulat. And an audience request for an old song during the encore hinted that the older music of Rose did have those feelings. But the songs of her set, from her upcoming album, were mostly composed of disquieting and eerie layers. Rose's banjo picking translated to complex guitar arperggiation. She seemed to have reduced her lyrics to simple, unadorned phrases. These were only half as successful in holding my attention as her arrangements.