Sandro Perri - "Futureactive Kid (Part 1)". Sandro Perri is a leaning genius. He sways, tilts, slips. His Tiny Mirrors was one of the best Canadian albums of the past ten years. It was easy-listening and also free, starry folk-jazz unfixed from precedent, metronome, physics. Impossible Spaces is his new record, and now his music is touched by humidity, 80s soft rock, dying young-adulthood. It recalls Richard Youngs, Bread, Bon Iver, Fleetwood Mac's "Sara". Hear squelching bass, snare, flirting synths, bass clarinet and horn. There are songs about "openness and solitude", transformation, the hesitating Wolfman.

For much of "Futureactive Kid (Part 1)", the music is nebulous, even gaseous, seething under Perri's straight-ahead. He sings like a singer, unobscure. But then he steps aside, lets prowl the guitar, crunch, low woodwinds. The song's beauty is a kind of illusion; there are more shadows here than lights. Not dawn, not dusk, these are sounds for the mingling greys in the middle of the night.

[If it's not already clear, this is an album of an album. Don't just listen to one song. Buy it from Constellation.]

When Saints Go Machine - "Kelly". If every song sounded like this, if every song was this good, we would all age faster, and be happier, and scowl less at the radio in the coffee-shop. We would stroll with our lovers, blissful, dying twice as quick. I am not sure whether it's our hearts that would go, or whether it'd be something at the cellular level. (I am not a scientist.) Just that we wouldn't be able to keep it up. Too much, too soon. Before we knew it, we'd hit the fade-out. [buy / thanks steve]

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