Remember The Humans

The horns on Not Around Anymore don't announce anything, they hover while the rest of the band assembles around them, and by the time Kevin Drew's voice arrives the song is already four things at once. First record in nine years, made partly at a studio they built in Warkworth, Ontario, with David Newfeld producing. Newfeld worked on You Forgot It in People and the 2005 self-titled, and his instinct has always been to treat the stereo field as spatial rather than ornamental: instruments hard-panned, sounds dropping in mid-phrase, the mix behaving less like a finished object than a room mid-conversation. Studio chatter stays in throughout, "Can I have a little more of that click?", left there deliberately. Not a subtle gesture, and it doesn't need to be. Hannah Georgas takes lead on Only the Good I Keep, her first as a principal voice on record, and holds her ground without leaning on the ensemble. Relief is Lisa Lobsinger and hits harder than anything else here, Justin Peroff's drums up in the mix, the structure stripped to a two-chord pulse she turns into something that accumulates. Feist appears on What Happens Now, a reshaped Hug of Thunder outtake, thin arrangement and muted drums, "I just died and I'm still in love with life" holding rather than collapsing. The quieter tracks are where the record is most itself, Parking Lot Dreams closing on acoustic guitar and a murmur, ending without resolving anything.