Weeping Tile are what happens when the convenient wave of stylistically coincident popularity fails to arrive. Under These Rocks and Stones ended up on impulse-buy display-racks, while Weeping Tile's second album, Valentino, despite being released on Warner in Canada, has yet to appear in the US at all. I only discovered their first, 1995's Cold Snap, two years belatedly, but it ended up as the third slot in a rotation with Slingbacks' All Pop, No Star and fellow Canadians the Leslie Spit Treeo's Chocolate Chip Cookies, and held its own remarkably well, considering that those were my first and fourth favorite albums of last year. The genre these three bands belong to is harder to define, having not been illuminated by any particular commercial success. I keep thinking of it as country-rock, but none of the three bands have very much overt country flavor to them. What I believe I'm responding to is less a musical style than a personal, plain-spoken intimacy that I identify most strongly with a few bands like Lone Justice, American Music Club, Grant Lee Buffalo and Son Volt, who do have country leanings. Or perhaps this is what country turns into, after a few winters in a quiet, snow-locked, Canadian small town, its chaps and denim buried under thermal underwear and parkas, wolves traded for owls, the crackle of a fire moved off of the prairie inside thick cabin walls.
The thing that caught my attention about Cold Snap, originally, was a single line. The song it occurs in, "Westray", is about a coal-mining disaster and the cover-ups and denial that encircle it, and something about the tired, grim way the narrator sings the chorus, "You'll know in a little while / If this was meant to be", makes it sound, to me, like one of those messages the character who knows the hideous secret leaves behind in an envelope, or on an answering machine, "in case I don't return", when they go off to either bring the evildoers to justice or get their skull staved in. As I listened, striking peculiarities emerged from many of the other songs, as well. Songwriter Sarah Harmer has a folk-singer's ear for regional identity and rural detail; you will have a hard time finding another album that uses the words "arable" and "moil". Valentino grabs me the same way, with just one line at first. This time it's in "Chicken", a song about a village party that aspires to more glamour than it achieves, when Harmer, on the way to it, sings, matter-of-factly, "Checking your toes for leeches / Checking your hair for lice", revealing how much artifice there is to the glamour, but also how desperately the attendees need the illusion.
And it's later in the same song that I suddenly discover how Valentino fits into the gigantic jigsaw puzzle that all of art and film and literature and music sometimes (especially when a piece snaps into place like this) seems to me to constitute. "Playing under the tent at the point", goes part of the chorus, and it hits me that this album is the musical translation, for me, of the movie The Sweet Hereafter, which opens with Nicole's band rehearsing under a tent at exactly the sort of faded fairground where the party in the song would take place. It cannot be the film's actual soundtrack, the music that Nicole's band would have played, for precisely the same reason that All Pop, No Star could not be the music that Alyssa sings in Chasing Amy; these albums speak with the author's voice, and their lines would be as thuddingly inappropriate coming out of an individual character's mouth as it would if Meryl Streep sang Billy Bragg's "There Is Power in a Union" at the end of Silkwood, instead of "Amazing Grace", or Rene Zellweger launched into "So You Want to Be a Rock and Roll Star" on the roof of Empire Records. Nicole's songs come before the bus-wreck, before guilt and shock wear through her denial; the claustrophobia, ambiguity and directionless, paralyzing urgency that Weeping Tile capture become clear to her only afterwards. Even Cold Snap wouldn't have been quite right: the silence of the townspeople who know the truth in "Westray" is too simple, as if truth were a single thing you could hide; the point of The Sweet Hereafter (as best I can tell, but I only saw it once and haven't read Russell Banks' novel) is that in a town so small, truth is not an independent force, it's a product of the interconnections of the affected lives. Valentino seems more cognizant of the gracelessness of jumping to conclusions, and more willing to let its stories tell themselves. Nothing here comes as close, literally, to the plot of The Sweet Hereafter as "Westray", but these stories have their own ways of circling back to the same themes. "What's a few days of denial for me?", asks the narrator of "South of Me", as if after a few days she'll have forgotten that she doesn't really love the man. "We fought for an hour on the phone. / I wish I was there with you", starts "Through Yr Radio", and there's menace in her voice, as well as longing. "Judy G." turns on a plaintive "He mailed a postcard / Sent from the same city / To her only permanent place", like a Del Amitri lament that's found a way to unravel a little further still. "Take a picture on this miracle mile, / You could be anywhere in the country", goes the disgusted anti-road-anthem "I'm Late". "Our art titillates the scene, / But it's shy of what it's seeing", contends "I Repeat". "She watches the clock like a sickness", says "Can't Get Off". The darkest moment, lyrically, is the imbalanced-relationship evisceration "Tom's Shoe Repair", set in an apartment "where you live and I stay". The final song, "Goin' Out", extends only a small consolation, "There's a bed made upstairs if you get tired", but at least it's an honest, earnest offer.
But I would also have loved both Cold Snap and Valentino even if the lyrics had been gibberish. Harmer writes small, tight, timeless rock songs that lever up my spirit far more effectively than their mass would seem to permit. "South of Me"'s guitars buzz as choppily as Linoleum's, but the song breaks into a ringing refrain over spare, galloping drums. "Through Yr Radio"'s verses have some Throwing Muses-ish hesitation, but the choruses haul out power chords and tense harmony vocals. The surging "Unshaven" bristles with feedback and jagged lead hooks. "Judy G." is a mournful waltz, with the band's normally-subliminal country influences making a rare appearance in the form of some muted volume-pedal guitar. Drums rumble and pound stolidly through "2"". "I'm Late" is frisky and elastic, with a careening hook that reminds me oddly of Tribe. The guitar-and-voice intermission "Old Perfume" is a little like Stina Nordenstam singing Cole Porter. "I Repeat" modulates between Throwing Muses obliquity and a Sleater-Kinney-ish caterwaul. "Can't Get Off" is delirious and chiming, like Tommy Keene backed by Magnapop. "Every Good Story", conversely, is reedy and sedate, with a whirring Farfisa and a shuffling drum gait, like Lone Justice (or, for the more obscurely minded, Rubber Rodeo or Map of the World) in one of their quiet moods. "Chicken" crashes back into gear, Harmer and second guitarist Luther Wright slashing at each other across the stereo spectrum. "Tom's Shoe Repair" is as close to a Slingbacks song as you'll get without tracking down an import copy of their album (and, appropriately, swings into motion with the line "I was across the street in the record shop / When I heard I had to go", which I could imagine Shireen Liane writing). And "Goin' Out", the second acoustic waltz, makes a halting entrance, but eventually drifts into a pretty duet between Harmer and Wright, with a gentle flute fluttering around the voices like the air shimmering above their heads as their thoughts escape, despite their best attempts to keep them in.
