The Automatik

Brobdingnagian/Outside Records, 2000

When I love an album, I want to rant endlessly how it’s the greatest album of all time, and in some cases, that’s exactly what transpires. Only later do I look back and cringe at how I’ve smothered it in hyperbole. Yet I’ve owned Down at the Khyber for a couple of years now and my appetite for it grows with every listen. Sometimes I don’t even want to play it because it’s so great. I’m afraid that on the next listen, it will be revealed to be a Kubla Khan-esque creation of my subconscious that I’ll never be able to enjoy again.

It’s the closest thing to a perfect album that you’re likely to find these days, and don’t misunderstand my use of the word. Individually, the songs are fantastic, so much so that deciding which one to put on mix CDs is a divine torture. As a whole, however, these songs transcend the minutes to become a true work of art.

The perfection is in the order of the songs, the way they ebb and flow, the way it all seems completely uncontrived. It’s in the extraordinary production values that allow you to hear the air in the studio being caressed by the reverberation of the guitar strings and the hum of the bass drum.

Sure, I could fling around gushing comparisons to Big Star and Led Zeppelin’s Physical Grafitti, but that’s not gonna tell the whole story. I’ll leave the storytelling to Joel Plaskett, whose lyrics are undeniably clever and unapologetically Canadian. You won’t hear many twenty-something Americans singing about their own geography with such flat-out reverence and they certainly won’t be condemning the Americanization of Canadian music in their songs with such delightful charm.

On top of all this wonderfulness, throughout every song, there’s Plaskett’s voice, which, try as I might, I still cannot describe adequately. It’s distinctive and it’s amazing, but it’s like nothing I’ve ever heard. It sounds like he’s got an itch he can’t quite scratch, like he’s desperately pining for something, but I’ll be damned if I know what it is. God, I hope he never finds it.