Goldfish - "Charm". In 1996, a band called Goldfish started recording an album. 21 years later, they finished it. Predictions of the Future is a time-capsule from a departed Montreal - tough, luscious, part-tarnished. Punk-rock from an era when punk was more glinting, when harshness and softness went together like scissors through silk. Like Lush or the Breeders, Goldfish were a four-piece. They were a band with two singer/guitarists, Carrie Haber and Vicky Klingenstierna. They tangled round the city; some nights it seemed like they owned the place. (They are probably the only act to have ever opened both for Natalie Merchant and for Fugazi.) Predictions was among the first material ever produced by my friend Howard Bilerman (who has since recorded classics like You Want It Darker, Funeral, Lhasa and 'Allelujah! Don't Bend Ascend). They laid it down at his parents' house. All this feels like folk-tale, fake history, but it's true. A band I'd never heard of that rocked and toiled, then went away. I moved to Montreal in 2000. By then Golfdish had disappeared. But the marvel of the thing is that they somehow clawed back. Two decades later, Haber decided that her band had unfinished business. "I realized that we're going to die," she told the Gazette's Jordan Zivitz. "I have a lot of unfinished projects, and this is not one I wanted hanging over me on my deathbed." This wasn't so easy: Predictions was recorded to tape; tapes don't last forever; but they retrieved 'em, baked 'em, set about completing that which wasn't quite completed. And now: here. "Charm" and all the rest of this artifact, like noticing a footprint in the sidewalk you've tramped over ten thousand times.

[buy Predictions of the Future from the Dears' label, Ting Dun]