The Silt – Earlier Ways of Wandering

The Silt – Earlier Ways of Wandering
Rat-Drifting(Rat-Drifting 6)
Toronto’s Rat-Drifting label has a house sound something like “Tonight’s the Night” period Neil Young broadcast through a cheap megaphone or Brazilian MPB slowed down to 16 r.p.m. The label’s various acts are mostly permutations of a group of the city’s improvising community, including Eric Cheneaux, Martin Arnold, Ryan Driver, Marcus Quin and Doug Tielli, recording under a variety of names including the Draperies, the Reveries and The Silt, whose Red Whistle, a surprising, melancholy set of avant-ballads and folk rock is the label’s biggest hit so far. Although Toronto itself feels like an East Coast city, one can drive west for 24 hours and still be in Ontario, and the melancholy of those vast spaces informs many of the city’s acts, including current break out stars like Broken Social Scene. Earlier Ways to Wander, The Silt’s second effort, is more rocking than their first, but still has that aching sadness found on some of the labels other releases, including ex-Crash Vegas singer Michelle McAdorey’s beautiful Love Don’t Change, recorded last year with Chenaux. The Silt sounds hushed against that vastness, and unlikely, gorgeous pop songs like “Sloppy Ground” and “One Day Will come” loom out of the dark like a human settlement suddenly seen on the prairie at night.

originally published in Signal to Noise.