Secretly Canadian
A calculated return to the comfortably numb shoegazing of the post-rock ’90s Against Love brings songmakers Jason McNeely and Dan Matz back to their emotional building blocks. Equally devoted to mid-fi acoustic and electric psych-pop Windsor for the Derby doles out its summer swelter in carefully measured increments paying equal deference to lap-steel reinforced instrumental tangents and synth-soaked sentimentality. Fifteen years into a musical collaboration built over vast distances these two singer-guitarists persevere in mapping out new inroads to communal creation from the amber-hued “Queen of the Sun” to the twang-panged “Dull Knives” to the autobiographical nudity of “Our Love’s a Calamity.” Flitting across the mind’s eye like the translucent “Moon Shadows” of memory Against Love makes child’s play of grown-up anguish.
