The Burning Hell - "Sentimentalists".

I can't remember this ever happening to me before. A song that makes me remember something I have completely forgotten. Not a song that evokes a distant memory, that makes vivid something faded; a piece of music that brings back something that was lost. A mosquito in amber, resurrecting a brontosaurus.

The memory's nothing remarkable: a wooden paddle-wheel, in the restaurant of a department store. A paddle-wheel at The Paddle Wheel. With modesty and grace, the Burning Hell tell you everything you need to know. The wheel lives (lived?) on the top floor of the Hudson Bay Company, in Toronto. The wheel slowly turns. Guests can lean over the rail, throw a penny in, make a wish.

I lived in Toronto for almost a year, when I was five years old. My parents and grandparents brought me to The Paddle Wheel. I loved The Paddle Wheel. It was one of those sites we have, as children - imbued, potent, utterly distinct from everywhere else we know. A dark room, a slowly spinning relic; like in the cell under Stirling's Thistle Centre, the Bat Cave at the Royal Ontario Museum, visiting the paddle-wheel was like slipping through a wardrobe into somewhere Else. Just like the Burning Hell's Mathias Kom, I would sometimes take a penny and cast it out, over the railing, onto the heaving timber. If I was lucky it would land on one of the wheel's paddles and be lifted up, around, clicking down on the other side. This was magic. This was magic. Magic at a time when magic was fully real.

Yet I had forgotten it, forgotten it all. I don't think I've thought about The Paddle Wheel's paddle-wheel in more than 20 years. The first time I heard this song, as I listened, I thought, He's singing about the Hudson's Bay? A restaurant at the Hudson's Bay? Really? I had never heard of The Paddle Wheel. But then, like a shipwreck being sucked upward through the mud, like a great elm uprooted by a bulldozer: there it was, my memory. Faded and unsure. Eroded. Barely legible. I don't remember the entrance to The Paddle Wheel, I don't remember the food, I scarcely remember that it was a restaurant. I remember only the colours in the room, black and brown and silver; the enchantment; and me, full of longing, holding a coin.

"Sentimentalists" is a humble song. It is a slide-show, a vignette, the slightest recollection. It is burnished and handsome, in guitars and drums and clarinet and horn. It is two minutes and thirteen seconds and it is one of the greatest gifts I have received this year.

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