Sinai Vessel and Little Kid with Casiotone for the Painfully Alone

The heavens open up and God’s hairy forearm shoots forth from the clouds, slapping the word SONGWRITER across your body’s fragile avatar. And now the question: is it a calling or is it a curse? Will you drawthe sword from the lake, victorious and gleaming? Or will your skin crawl with boils, your crops alight in conflagration? Is the habit of songwriting something rewarding and nutritive, like gardening? Or is it more of a dirtytic, like bumming a cigarette every time you drink two beers? Is writing songs a job? A holy duty? Or is it just an occasionally rewarding hobby? And if I do heed my destiny, just how the fuck am I supposed to pay for healthcare?Such are the celestial backyard wrestling matches that make up Sinai Vessel’s fourth LP. I SING, what a phrase – chief songwriter Caleb Cordes wields a DIY lifer’s gallows humor as he tries to carve out a nichein stone with a grapefruit spoon, speaking truth to streaming royalties and trust fund powers. Crucially, though, Sinai Vessel never says “fuck you” to the listener – instead Cordes shakes his head, laughing, and saysinstead “fuck me.” How preposterous it is to be yoked to song, how silly to squeeze considered noise into plastic, how absolutely goofy is it that any of us listen, that any of us are moved. And in some unlikely screwball miracle, within the vanishing middle class vocation of singing for your supper, Sinai Vessel achieves the improbable: grace, resonance, a truly great collection of tunes.

Little Kid

A camera zooms in without crowding its subject. A song about someone else’s damage helps you understand your own, and puts you on to new mysteries. Stars look like grains of sand. On Little Kid’s new album and Orindal Records debutA Million Easy Payments, the urgency in Kenny Boothby’s voice matches the stakes of his lyrics, epic ballads and reveries that come at life from all angles and exposures, driving at and a little over the limits of self-reflection. The band’s lilting folk rock arrangements carry Boothby’s stories, occasionally lifting them skyward with flurries of cello samples, pedal steel, flute, and electric piano. It’s a record of depression and frustration that doesn’t stew in piety or aestheticize pain, that also explodes with life. Fragile and abundant. It’s a record with blood in its veins.Little Kid is a Toronto-based collaborative project that has existed in some form since 2009, and is currently comprised of Brodie Germain (drums, guitar), Paul Vroom (bass),Megan Lunn (vocals, banjo, keyboard), Liam Cole (drums, percussion), and Kenny Boothby (vocals, guitar, piano, keyboards).A Million Easy Payments, like the three LittleKid releases before it, was tracked, engineered, and mastered by Vroom. Vroom’s work renders a portrait of Little Kid’s twin musical strengths — as a live act, a straight-ahead folk rock outfit, and as a group of creative, independent producers who want to mess things up. To that end, the record features several guest instruments: Eliza Niemi’s cello, Anh Phung’s flute, Seth Engel’s percussion, Peter Gill’s pedal steel, and Aaron Powell’s voice. Every so often, the boundaries fray. Chaotic flute layers transport the outro to “Beside Myself.”