Living Hour, Westelaken, Burs

Living Hour is Sam Sarty, Gilad Carroll, Adam Soloway, and Brett Ticzon. Someday Is Today, the group’s third full-length effort, features contributions from three producers: Melina Duterte (Jay Som, Chastity Belt), Jonathan Schenke (Parquet Courts, Snail Mail), and Samur Khouja (Cate le Bon, Regina Spektor).

Someday Is Today is Living Hour at their most pensive and longing. It was recorded over seven straight days during the depths of a Manitoba winter, with the band cocooned in sounds as the temperature hit -30 outside. It's a grind, and it's incredibly challenging in a frustratingly beautiful kinda way, Sarty says of their local environment. It pushes you to keep going, to keep finding glimmers to move forward. A silver piece of wrapper sticking out a snowbank becomes your altar. The big grey sky gets me giddy.

Sam Sarty's lyrics; pulled from journals, iPhone notes, and napkin scribbles come suffused with reflections on disassociation, human interactions with technology, and a poignant contemplation of life in liminal spaces.

The band's sound grows to warm and earthy new perimeters on Someday Is Today with lush and generous instrumentation. The album thrives by keeping enough connection across its sonic and thematic palettes to feel like one cohesive world. The songs on Someday Is Today feel bound by something bigger than themselves; an energy that flourished in spite of it all, a human connection that grips just strongly enough even when pushed to its frayed, unreachable extremes.

with Westelaken, Burs