Living Hour: Someday Is Today

Winnipeg’s Living Hour shines on its third full-length release Someday Is Today. The gazey, dreampop excursion takes us into a fantastic interior world of emotional introspection. In eleven songs the band sketches a series of life studies that seek to capture the wonder, and sadness, and joy of having a heart that beats within your breast in the twenty-first century sanctuaries of the sentimental bourgeoisie. Killer lyrics too.

Who said every novelist writes the same book over and over again? It might be true with musicians too. Except bands have the advantage of multiple members, and different songwriters collaborate to produce, unsurprisingly, different types of songs. Living Hour has two main types of songs. Three, if you count the instrumental “Memory Express” as sui generis. That’s pretty good; that’s one or two types more than most bands have. And like a good curry recipe that can be prepared in a thousand different ways with a deep spice cabinet, the band brings out subtle accents with impressive musicianship.

The first type of song is the “slow build to climax.” Leadoff track “Hold Me In Your Mind” fits the description. A synth key motif floats through the entire song like a passing cloud. Breathy vocals keep a low-to-medium tempo, circumscribing your ear within the orbit of a dream. Shades of Beach House. Is the percussion live drums or drum machine? Living Hour plants its sonic flag in territory that tiptoes the line between physical and synthetic textures, melting the sounds into a hybrid fantasy. Jangly rainbows of electric guitar brighten up the composition as the song ushers a grand, multi-layered choral build to a climax at the finish.

“Lemon and Gin” also works its way to a concluding climax. Living Hour subs in a twangy guitar to lay down the foundational motif, instead of a synth. The song is dominated by the opening guitar hook, a languid picker. Observational lyrics ride atop the sound waves:

“A hundred watts in every bulb above my head //
“Dandruff on my shoulder again”

The protagonist paints a still life that’s banal to the point of delirium. Shades of Sartre’s Nausea. What happens when you stare at a door knob too long? (Try it and tell us what happens in the comments.) On “Feelings Meeting” (ft. Jay Som), Living Hour introduces a heavier rock-edge to the mix. Shades of Dinosaur Jr., with a sky-splitting guitar motif giving way to janglified, speak-singing verses. The song builds to crescendo twice, boosted by the distorted guitar riffs. Shades of Jesus & Mary Chain, with a high contrast between the high-proof chaos of the amps in back and the more sedate vocals up front.

The second type of song is the “even-keeled groover.” The chief goal of this type of song is to carve out a cool sonic niche for the listener’s ear to hangout in. You’ve heard of “hangout films” – there are “hangout songs” too. If there’s a climax or crescendo therein, it’s not meant to push you off your emotional spot, but rather intended to make you feel the vibe where you’re at all the more.

“Curve” follows this program. It offers a haunting vocal duet that introduces a male voice into the mix, laying the groundwork for more prominent male vocals later in the album. Drone accompaniment ramps up the mood like a shot of Thorazine to the arm. Is that a trombone? The brass bandit is used in long, sweeping, discordant arcs that shoot across the sky like lost meteorites. Is the play of consonance and dissonance in the dueling trombone lines a thematic echo of the interplay between the dueling vocals? Or is it just there because it sounds cool? We’ll take it either way.

Featured: Living Hour

Living Hour: Someday Is Today

Living Hour On Fire

Shout out to “Miss Miss Miss,” a breezy ode to the Palomino Club – presumably a former and/or current stomping ground for Living Hour. The lead vocals sing in dreamy repetition:

“I miss I miss I miss I miss I miss I miss //
“Palomino club.”

Note: that’s the “world famous” Palomino Club AKA “the best night dance club in Winnipeg.” The singer continues:

“Waiting in line, waiting in line, waiting in line for the bathroom //
“Waiting in line, waiting in line, waiting in line for the bathroom.”

Got to step up your restroom game, Palomino Club. Sounds like a nice hang though.

“Exploding Rain” sports a seriously catchy pop refrain. First we are welcomed into the song by gauzy vocal harmonies. The intensity picks up when the song hits the refrain, which plays out like a gaze-damaged, rock n roll mantra with definite sing-a-long prospects. More mellow shades of the speak-sing rants in Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire” or Michael Stipe’s verses from “It's The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)” – dialed down to acceptable adrenaline levels for the dreampop crowd.

The instrumental closer “Memory Express” is such a sweet jam that you wish Living Hour had included more of it. The song is its own animal on Someday Is Today, breaking out of the musical forms and shapes that define the more straightforward pop songwriting on the rest of the album. Or at the very least, imbuing those pop song structures with a nuance and depth that shines more brightly when the instruments are left to play by themselves in the front yard, without the vocals leading them along by the hand.

There’s a beautiful interplay between the melody on guitar and the soft synth interludes. A faint whistling feedback purr provides drone accompaniment. The percussion is unhurried, opportunistic, and devoted more to cinematic flourishes than the usual pop song propulsion. The song has a build, but avoids bombast. The climax is more hinted at than crested. “I could never get over this hump” rides again.

Living Hour wraps you in the warm blanket of your favorite dream, all the while hinting at the melancholy results of building castles on the sands of fantasy. But the band is not cruel; it doesn’t rip away the veil for cheap effect. If anything, on Someday Is Today Living Hour encourages a kind of meditative self-removal from the world that spies on it from 10,000 feet above.

Not so much to decipher the patterns of life as to linger in a mood of aesthetic contemplation of them, enthralled in the shape, color, form, and texture of their endless variations.

If the patterns aren’t brilliant enough, ascend another 10,000 feet, until the fields and pastures and highways elide into circles and squares and winding lines. And if that geometry isn’t brilliant enough, ascend another 10,000 feet – as much as needed – until the curvature of the earth seizes your soul and blows out your candle like a quick breath into a cupped hand. Sweet dreams.

Featured: Music