#michael feuerstack

Feuerstack was one of two singer-songwriter-guitarists in Wooden Stars (along with Julien Beillard), a quirky, sometimes even mathy Montrealean indie pop band best known for its work with Julie Doiron. This solo record runs far more placidly, at least on the surface, than the Wooden Stars’ debut, The Very Same, though there are pockets of eccentricity even within these well-polished grooves.  You just have to look for them.

Indeed, Eternity Mongers’ best trick is lulling you into thinking you’re hearing garden variety indie pop, then pulling you up short. “You’re Mind’s Made Up,” an early single, proceeds with the easiest kind of flow, winding down warm currents of sax and massed vocals like an inner tube-ist on the first hot day. And yet, even here, amid the gentle contours of a song about spring coming and love ending, some existential posers rear their heads. “Am I getting through to you/If I pretend you’re someone else?” asks Feuerstack, and all of the sudden things don’t seem as clear and easy as before.

“Big Sails” likewise slouches deep in the pocket, its verse propped up by the bump of bass, the vibrato trill of organ but just barely; it seems always on the verge of drifting off into a nap. But listen to the way the guitar solo cuts right through it, or how the chorus opens up into an epic resolution. “I’ve got no particular place to go/Floating points in the distance glow/my passage is uneventful/I want to go where the big sails go,” and abruptly the song is no longer about staring off at the ocean, but instead about life and purpose and mortality.

The arrangements are integral to the way these songs pop, with Feuerstack himself singing, playing guitar and synths and occasionally weaving in some pedal steel. His core band—Michael Belyea on kit and other percussion, Kyle Cunjak playing bass and organ—grounds these melodies in an unhurried, unshowy well, while not one but two woodwind-ists blow in on saxophone, flute and clarinet.

Yet even so, the songs feel spare and unfettered, as on “Disenchanted” where the thump of drums, the nod of bass, the eerie flare of organ enhance, rather than dilute, an essential stillness. “You try to get a leg up, mind your inner child” sings Feuerstack, as a woman’s voice wafts up and around him. “You punch the clock and do your time/but the corridor goes on for miles.” It sounds exhausting, dispiriting, discouraging, but the song lifts up into transcendence and it’s hardly sad at all.