Woolly Leaves

This nine-song, half-hour-long mini-album by the Guelph drums and guitar duo led by songwriter Whil Kidman (who played all the parts on this home-recorded effort) unsurprisingly belies its creator's good-natured, soft-spoken and understated demeanour, one that gradually charms the listener by being at once whimsically tentative and boldly self-assured. A trait Kidman shares in a way with such fellow underground Can-rock hushed strainers as Jimmy Guthrie and Rick White. In fact, while it may be tempting to reduce the Woolly Leaves' sound to a cross between the former's sprightly pop parables and the latter's more laconic riff-rock tendencies, moments such as the Polvoed-out slide breakdown punctuating "On and Off and Down the Way" or the stilted boogie rock of "Ayr" (whose refrain of "You can take me out of Ayr, but you can't take the Ayr out of me" seems to collapse in on itself by phrase's end) reveals a decidedly unflashy ability to play with structure that definitely puts Kidman's own stamp on things. A limited-edition run of hand-printed CD-Rs is out now, with a pressing on Die!Venom (already the home of bedroom pop partner-in-crime Heidi Hazelton) soon to follow in the coming months. Seek this out.