Blue Vinyl
There's a Julie Doiron song on Spotify with nearly 80m plays. 'August 10' is a lovely song, as Julie Doiron songs tend to be, but it's also a fairly innocous one, a little less realised and structured than others on Broken Girl, the album it's taken from, and many others across what is a generally pretty stellar catalogue. I guess it's current popularity is not esepcailly exceptional and nothing more than a symptom of the modern means of music consumption, representative of the generational reanimation that TikTok and Instagram virality allows for. It's also probably why now we're seeing the reissues of Broken Girl (first released under that name and not her own) and Loneliest in the Morning, her back-to-back opening outings that arrived in that unusual post-grunge hinterland where the defintion between the under- and the overground was getting a little murkier. Neither records are hi-fi affairs, defined by the kind of close-mic guitar and vulnerable vocal delivery that has now become the preserve of many a bedroom pop wannabe. The levels though are hardly comparable. The songwriting is rare in its consistency and Doiron's voice is the obvious starmaker, brilliant at communicating the dark night of the soul searching that seemed necessary after Cobain's death, just like Cat Power or Elliott Smith or Jason Molina, albeit more love tortured than chemically maladjusted. If 'August 10' gives a younger audience a way into these albums, then it's worth it. Further riches lie in plenty and Doiron remains as convincing as ever. It's the message not the medium.
FFO: Cat Power, Liquorice, Juliana Hatfield, Mary Lou Lord, Joanne Robertson
