The Coast – Expatriate CD Review

The Coast
Expatriate
Aporia

We normally don’t run reviews of out of town bands, but this is an interesting and attractive CD, and it happens that they’ll be playing at the Picador September 21st. The Coast is 4 guys arrayed in the standard drums and wires rawk quartet. They’re Canadian, which is probably neither here or there musically, though anecdotally I’d say chances are they are more polite and better groomed than the average American band. And judging from this CD, they believe in classic pop song structure and major/minor pop harmony.

Stylistically they alternate between a shoe-gazey wall-of-sound with buried vocals style and a more earnest radio-friendly pop song. “No Secret Why” for example is really a country song, but the guitars are fuzzy and there’s no twanging accent. Ian Fosbery has a reedy tenor voice that seems to quaver with emotion, though after a couple of listens the lyric seems to leave little impression on me.

Lucky for us the lyrics aren’t the main thing here anyway. These are guys who are seriously in love with their guitars. They manage to decorate their songs with nearly every tasty guitar tone from the last 40 years in turn. What seems to turn them on — besides the generic impulse to Rock that even Canadians aren’t immune to — is to create three dimensional architectures of guitar sound within the pop form. Lyrical blandness aside, these guys are worth checking out.