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[mud-on-the-turntable-blog]

Nana Grizol - Love It Love It (2008, Folk Punk / Indie Rock)

Hi! Nice to meet you! We are Max and Michayla, and this is the first post of our music review blog, Mud on the Turntable. The way our reviews work is one of us will recommend the other an album, and we both write some interesting things about the album separately. Read both of them, or just one of us if you like one of our particular writing styles, or neither if you don’t like either. Our first album is one Max suggested, Love It Love It by Nana Grizol. Enjoy!

Max + Michayla! xox

Michayla’s Review

Circles ‘Round the Moon

Feels like walking into your great-aunt’s yellow-walled kitchen at the break of day in the height of August. There is a hand-painted ceramic fruit bowl sitting on the counter full of oranges and grapefruit and limes. Your aunt is making pancakes and the scent of morning air, fresh cut grass, lavender, and clean sheets wafts in through the open windows while the warm morning sunlight pools onto the floors and cabinets and walls.

Colours: #f7f499/rgb(247, 244, 153), #ff693f/rgb(255, 105, 63), #68b233/rgb(104, 178, 51)

Tambourine - N - Thyme

Feels like floating suspended in deep aqua water, glittering fractals of light and swirls of infinitesimally small bubbles dancing around your body, framing you, frozen in a soft scream, watching the surface and the murk around you, but at peace with yourself, so beautifully suspended in fluid water. The smell of mossy dirt and powdered sugar on the tip of your tongue, neon lights shimmering in the distance, far, far away.

Colours: #0d7d99/rgb(13, 125, 153), #e20fbc/rgb(226, 15, 188), #c7f736/rgb(199, 247, 54)

Less Than the Air

Limoncello coloured with patches of red seeping through the page, like sun hitting your eyelashes while walking down an old dusty path, a long, hot sidewalk home, and walking through the front door of your house. Old maple floors lead into your living room, cream walls, pockmarked, covered in part by white linen curtains. You put on a record and dance barefoot in the living room. It feels like light, and the way it blurs your vision when it hits you like a camera lens. Tastes like fairy bread and rosemary.

Colours: #fff0a5/rgb(255, 240, 165), #d60000/rgb(214, 0, 0), #ad7c2d/rgb(173, 124, 45)

Motion in the Ocean

A soft blush pink set against ivory countertops. You find yourself getting ready for a party you never intended on going to, shell jewelry, drops of gold falling from your fingers like tears, the sky is darkening to indigo outside your window. Counting minutes on your fingers only to find you’ve run out far more times than it takes to eat the peaches your mother brought you late at night. Waking up tired and wishing for the sun, the taste of cold water and soft kisses, a memory of a dream.

Colours: #f2cbcb/rgb(242, 203, 203), #fcf6e3/rgb(252, 246, 227), #16074f/rgb(22, 7, 79)

Voices Echo Down Thee Halls

Stopping at a tiny diner along the highway, the vinyl seats are a pale minty-olive, you lean against the wall, faded highway signs and ancient greeting flash before your eyes, technicolour in the key of static radio waves, lying on the pavement, the sun beats down as you roll into the gravel, the dirt. Asphalt and car fumes, toasted tomato sandwiches and too much salt, wooden car panelling and the wrong colour of carpet.

Colours: #5faf56/rgb(95, 175, 86), #d1a877/rgb(209, 168, 119), #ef410b/rgb(239, 65, 11)

Stop and Smell Thee Roses

Like picking daisies in the overrun backyard of your childhood best friend’s house, dirty white picket fence set against mud and grass and a rain-heavy sky. Your laughter feels like home in her hands and you remember the sound of so many of you, running out the screen door, all strawberry-red-stained fingers and polaroid photos and charcoal smouldering in the fire pit, notes scribbled in pencil on loose-leaf paper, store-bought bread sticky on your teeth. The moment retakes you and you fall to your knees and smile and the first drops of rain hit your face.

Colours: #d8c302/rgb(216, 195, 2), #9598a0/rgb(149, 152, 160), #ffffff/rgb(255, 255, 255)

Tiny Rainbows

The rain clearing up and leaving sparkling puddles in the cracks in the pavement around your school, a warm september, you dive in and the droplets fall everywhere except your eyes, a rubber raincoat and not a single lie. Like falling down and finding yourself,a loving embrace after a cold winter day, fresh fruit on your lips, and the smell of coming home.

Colours: #05000f/rgb(5, 0, 15), #d3287b/rgb(211, 40, 123), #ff9011/rgb(255, 144, 17)

Everything You Ever Hoped or Worked For

Watching the sunset burn bright and melt down on another’s face, running away and finding joy in the places you’ve been. Crickets humming along to the beat of your footsteps and lulling you to sleep, to dream of stars and new beginnings at 2 in the afternoon. It tastes like bubblegum and sunshine, spilling down your chin from the back of your glass, bottle green, a telescope to where you’ll be, soon.

Colours: #65b277/rgb(101, 178, 119), #ff4e02/rgb(255, 78, 2), #abad53/rgb(171, 173, 83)

Broken Cityscapes

Washed out denim, sleeping with your jacket and shoes on, preaching holy words in the back alley to the birds, scattering seeds, soft and teardrop shaped, a touch of arange, rosy edges. Windchimes in the distance as they flock on the telephone wires and the words fade out, your hands dry and cracked but worth the smiles of the living, light seeping through the cracks in the clouds on a morning of second chances. The taste of cold tea chokes the back of your throat, garden carrots and lake water up your nose.

Colours: #9398c4/rgb(147, 152, 196), #e08247/rgb(224, 130, 71), #d9d4dbrgb(217, 212, 219)

The Idea That Everything Could Ever Possibly Be Said

Deep saturated garden greens not properly captured behind a grainy sepia photograph. Making notes on old graph paper, left on the desk in the unfinished attic, the trees tapping on the windows as the daylight pours into the room and into you, the exposed wooden beams house secrets and grocery lists, your mother told you to take out the trash, but that was five years ago today. You find comfort in eating cereal for lunch and all those things you would do as a child, now grown, now finding the light.

Colours: #543722/rgb(84, 55, 34), #0b5111/rgb(11, 81, 17), #e0e2b3/rgb(224, 226, 179)

Untitled Hidden Track

Screeching to a halt on a grid road just to see the stars, pen in spilled everywhere after your pen broke, you run and hide, the smell of acetone and burnt toast follows. It feels like shoving everything you wn off a desk and into your backpack and running, tears or blood or sweat running down your cheeks.

Colours: #0a0047/rgb(10, 0, 71), #f4fc58/rgb(244, 252, 88), #ff2b2b/rgb(255, 43, 43)

Overview

Overall, this album feels like falling into a pool of sunshine, and filling your lungs with it. Every song feels like another wave washing over you, the endings of each track hit like breaking the surface of the water for a gasp of air before going under again. If you needed a pick me up, try this one shot injection of good vibes, sunlight, and punchy musical citrus.

Anywho, congrats if you made it through that entire review! If you’re curious about how the songs translate into colours through my synesthesia, go on and copy/paste the colour codes into Google’s handy “colour picker” (just google it and then chuck the bits with a # into the top line of the colour picker) and it should work. I think. . .

Cheers!

Michayla Siwak

Max’s Review

Very rarely do I feel like I am the target audience of an album. However, whether this is actually true or not, Nana Grizol’s Love It Love It is certainly one that matches how I currently feel at this stage in my life.

All throughout this record, there is a sense of nostalgia and bittersweetness that I just couldn’t shake while listening to it. This emotional impact is noticeable from the very first song, “Circles ‘Round the Moon”. It represents a type of fantasy that I, and probably many other 18-year-old music fans who are scared of, yet excited about the intimidatingly massive world they’ve been thrust into, have quite often. Yes, the track tells a story of young relationships and figuring all those out, but it also describes leaving the big city for some place of solitude and simplicity in nature. It’s a beautiful thing really.

Musically, this feeling of homemade simplicity is reflected in every track. Far and away my favourite musical aspect of this album is the horns that will often come in and add to the pretty intense emotional impact this album has. The little imperfections and human-ness that is added by these wind arrangements serves as another tool to emphasize the feelings I’ve been writing about so far. Beautiful swells of trumpets cause your stomach to do little flips of excitement and emotion in songs like “The Idea That Everything Could Ever Possibly Be Said”. They add so much to the crescendos and dynamic changes throughout the album and are an indispensable part of the project as a whole. The songs all feel organic, like they’re being played by a group of friends in the background while you’re at some house party, stoned out of your mind and feeling insecure about the stupid shit you say in front of individuals of your preferred sex.

“Motion in the Ocean”, a huge highlight on the album for me both lyrically and musically, resonates with me more than almost anything else on this record. Lines like “It seems that we are clams inside our shells / Side by side on rocks we feel the tide as the sea contracts and swells” emphasize the feeling of powerlessness an 18-year-old Canadian who just failed his first year of university in a city of 2.463 million people (as of 2016) can feel sometimes. Yes, perhaps many of these lyrics are a tad on-the-nose and almost approaching cliché, but that adds to the beauty of it. Does this really make the messages and emotions conveyed by Love It Love It any less powerful or have any less meaning? These emotions and themes feel so genuine it’s hard to hate them, as much as the cold, cynical, pretentious arsehole in me wants to. What can I say? I can’t help but like and relate to this dumb little album. It’s great.

Yeah, sure. There’s lots of folky indie rock out there that will give you these kind of feels. I’m sure there are thousands of bands like this that try to do the same things. I can’t call this album revolutionary, or even especially fresh and different. No, the power in this album lies in its consistency and lovability. It fits very comfortably in a genre and mood that’s been done to death, but the playful, casual arrangements, lovably self-deprecating yet optimistic lyrics, and complete relatability to this young, confused college student make it pretty damn special in my books. Listen to it with some friends in the forest and let the stresses of post-adolescent mediocrity float away from you for a bit. At the very least, you’ll feel a helluva lot less alone after giving this a spin.

Perhaps this was a very fitting album for our first review in the gargantuan community of music reviewers. It’s pretty hard to recommend a better album for a couple of kids just starting their journey into a brand-new world who have no fucking clue what we’re doing. Anyway, I hope you enjoy our reviews.

Love,

Max Gilmour

Bandcamp