Nennen - "Harbour"
On our way to Halifax, we stopped in Montreal because Doro had a show there. It was in this DIY space that I kept calling "new" until I realized my self-absorption - it's not actually at all, I just haven't lived in that city for a couple of years. Montreal has a strange way of shifting even as it stays fixed in place, strange hallucinatory nostalgia; this venue shared DNA with all the places I went a few years ago, to see bands - back alley, steep stairs, faint smell of garbage, beautiful young humans all glowing in their weird coats - but of course it's not the same at all. Time doesn't just stop for you.

I thought Nennen was going to be a whole band, but instead it was just one person - Amy Macdonald, voice, guitar, pedals. When I showed up she'd already started playing and the room was full of sound, a whole towering city. Songs that didn't yield to us, but pressed across and against themselves, overwhelmng. I closed my eyes and it sounded like watching a skyscraper build, change and crumble in time-lapse. Clouds pile- and unpiling.

Near the end of her set, she talked about the winter. It gets really fucking hard in this city, she said, in a voice that was quiet and sure at the same time. Bring each other soup. Do what you have to do. No one said anything, but everyone felt it. Go forth and let yourself be taken care of.

Majical Cloudz - "Downtown"
In Halifax, a friend told me to come meet him at the church where Majical Cloudz were playing. I'd seen them live before but it never quite clicked for me - something about their frenzied sincerity made me uneasy, like being cornered close by a wild-eyed stranger at a party who tells you he's on some drug you've never even heard of. When I showed up they'd already started playing. Onstage, Devon Welsh holds the mic like he's in Minor Threat, and Matthew Otto looks like someone's dubbed him into the present off a VHS tape of a '90s public access show. Welsh felt weird trying to do between-song banter in the church, he kept saying it, I feel censored by this space, gesturing helplessly around him at the organ pipes, the silent seated crowd.

But none of that mattered once he was singing. Their music's so simple - synth lines, single voice, lyrics that say what they mean - and I don't know if it was the night or my mood or the room or the band but something about the way it all slipped into sync caught against me and unraveled. The way Welsh's voice rose through and rang against the room, the sweep of it, the honesty.

I kept thinking about what it's like to be looked at by someone who's in love with you when you don't feel the same way, versus what it's like when you and that person love each other with the same kind of terrifying intensity. There's nothing as profoundly uncomfortable as being in the presence of someone else's naked sincerity, to watch them vibrating desperately on a frequency you're not tuned to at all. But if you're in the right place to hear it, if you're in the same place as them and ready, that kind of honesty can hit you at an angle nothing else ever does. Full-body sympathy. Every cell of you understanding.

[buy Alcrete/Nennen + Are You Alone?]