Sinai Vessel w/ Little Kid, Margaux + Hut

7:00PM Doors // 8:00PM Show

21+

$15 adv // $17 doors

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 draw the 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 dirty tic, 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 SinaiVessel’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 niche in 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 says instead "fuck me.” How preposterous it is to be yoked to song, how silly to squeeze considered noise into plastic, how absolutely goofy is it thatany of us listen, that any of us are moved. And in some unlikely screwball miracle, within the vanishing middle class vocation of singingfor your supper, Sinai Vessel achieves the improbable: grace, resonance, a truly great collection of tunes.

A camera zooms in without crowding its subject. A song about someone else’s damagehelps you understand your own, and puts you on to new mysteries. Stars look likegrains of sand. On Little Kid’s new album and Orindal Records debut A 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 carryBoothby’s stories, occasionally lifting them skyward with flurries of cello samples, pedalsteel, flute, and electric piano. It’s a record of depression and frustration that doesn’tstew 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 KennyBoothby (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-aheadfolk 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’scello, Anh Phung’s flute, Seth Engel’s percussion, Peter Gill’s pedal steel, and AaronPowell’s voice. Every so often, the boundaries fray. Chaotic flute layers transport theoutro to “Beside Myself.” Banjo careens off the edge of “Something to Say.” The kickdrum in “Bad Energy” is more than a heartbeat.

Like a minimalist composition, an Emily Dickinson poem, a Frankenthaler painting, earlySufjan Stevens, or the songs of many of Little Kid’s new labelmates at Orindal, A MillionEasy Payments is brilliant insofar as it teems with texture and meaning under anoutward image of simplicity. A peacock in sheep’s clothing. Its lyrical and musical density never comes at the expense of clarity or striking melodies. Like your favorite movie or novel, you come back to A Million Easy Payments again and again for thepleasure of its beauty, but also because it reveals something new every time.

Host or Publisher The Broadway