On a passing listen this album sounds like your typical banjo-laden folk-rock, but the path it treads is too shadowed and remote for that. The voice of central spectre Steve Shoe is old before its time — like Neil Young’s — and the production fittingly swathes it in near-psychedelic levels of fuzzy fog. I wish it were shorter — the world needed two parts of “Oshawa” about as much as it yearns for a duplicate of the town itself. Still, the laments are always unpredictable. When, say, the otherworldly synth line on “Saturday Night in the Summertime” appears, it’s disquieting and arresting, as if layers of moss had been scraped away to reveal something old and dead underneath.

Email us at: LETTERS@EYEWEEKLY.COM or send your questions to EYEWEEKLY.COM
625 Church St, 6th Floor, Toronto M4Y 2G1