Please note that, for physical products such as CDs and vinyl, due to delays with Canada Post we cannot guarantee delivery/shipping dates or delays.Thank you for your patience and understanding.
Tall Tall Shadow, the third album by Toronto singer-songwriter Basia Bulat, is the bravest album she has made. Raw and spectral, heartbroken, yet jubilant, these ten songs tell the story of a very hard year in the artist’s life and all the love that helped her through it.
Whereas the singer’s past two LPs, including 2008’s Polaris-nominated Oh, My Darling, were made in Montreal’s all-analogue Hotel 2 Stango studio, Tall Tall Shadow is a more modern thing. This is a record with echo and reverb, electronic flutters and electric autoharp, voices that charge and incandesce around buzzing guitars, lonely piano and rattling percussion.
To get to this place, Bulat co-produced the album with, Tim Kingsbury and Mark Lawson. Kingsbury, a member of Arcade Fire, “can play anything and everything,” she says. Lawson, who has worked on records with Akron/Family and Colin Stetson, and who won a Grammy for his work on Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs, is a studio alchemist, someone who “hears things” hidden in songs, who is always keen to transform them.
They started recording in Toronto, at a reverberating 60-year-old dance hall. Once again, Bulat put together a band: her brother, the punk-inclined drummer Bobby Bulat; Holly Coish on keys and backing vocals; Kingsbury and Ben Whiteley on guitars and bass. One song features Whiteley’s father, the folk legend Ken Whiteley, on gospel organ. But Tall Tall Shadow isn’t acoustic folk music: like Beck’s Sea Change or Buckingham Nicks, chord and strum are a launch-pad for wilder sounds.
Bulat’s goal was to keep challenging herself. “Promise Not to Think About Love,” with shimmying bass and dancing handclaps, is the poppiest track she has ever released. “It Can’t Be You,” played on an Andean charango, is one of the simplest. “Never Let Me Go” is all crescendo, a woman in a storm, and the title track reaches soaring for the sky: has there ever been a better showcase for Bulat’s powerhouse voice? For her steam-train heart?
“Two months before I was due to begin recording, I suffered a deep loss,” Bulat says. “I kind of started over.” She started; and she didn’t stop.
by Sean Michaels
Warning
Pre-orders can only be purchased separately from other products. Your current cart will be emptied in order to complete the pre-order. Are you sure you want to continue ?
Warning
There is currently a pre-order in the cart awaiting completion. Since pre-orders can only be purchased separately from other products, you have to cancel the pre-order to add new products to the cart.
Warning
This product is out of stock. We are sorry for the inconvenience.
Manage Cookie Consent
To provide the best experiences, we use technologies like cookies to store and/or access device information. Consenting to these technologies will allow us to process data such as browsing behavior or unique IDs on this site. Not consenting or withdrawing consent, may adversely affect certain features and functions.
Functional
Always active
The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes.The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.
