The Adam Brown: What We'll Never Know
It’s hard to believe that if The Adam Brown hadn’t self-released his latest collection of power-pop anthems, this fantastic specimen of pop swagger would have ended up in the “What We'll Never Know” folder of the music business abyss. It’s even harder to believe that after swimming around the Montreal musical landscape for the last 16 years, he is still looking for a home In the form of a label. The Adam Brown’s music has always been a peculiarity within the Montreal scene, straddling the line or easily transferable between the underground punks and a more polished radio-ready sound.
What We’ll Never Know is The Adam Brown’s second full-length album or third, if you consider he repurposed 2015’s Sometimes I Try into Sometimes I Try: Time Battles (2018), fulfilling the original vision that In his view, wasn’t translated properly the first time. The results were an improvement on an already excellent batch of songs. It’s also an indication of the meticulousness in which Brown operates and regards his own creative output.
The Adam Brown writes hits. It’s the reason we asked him to write the GGRMS Theme Song. Sometimes I Try was full of them, but What We’ll Never Know manages to maintain the high sonic threshold while coalescing the songs into a more fluid album experience. It rocks, pops and pulls at the heart with teenage abandon but executed with laser-guided precision. A minefield of hooks awaits the listener through ten songs in twenty-six minutes. WWNK exhibits a nostalgic glow with the addition of synth pedals, pulling The Adam Brown somewhere between the gravitational pull of New Order and Ric Ocasek.
Lyrically the new material paints surreal vignettes from the center of Adam’s Id casting tales of banished Indie Rock has-beens to isolated islands, musical encounters of happenstance with cryptozoological wild men, coming up short in the soccer game of life, lost love, sacrifice and of course Spirit Tacos. Heart pumps and fist bumps permeate throughout the listening experience as you navigate between the power pop heartache of the first single Its Emotion!
The Caribbean island infused I will Let You Run is a summer playlist starter and exemplifies one of the different directions WWNK ventures sonically this time around.
Disco Mossman’s perpetual feeling of tumbling in on itself with cascading synths of scratchy guitars might just delay the rest of the album as you reach for the repeat button.
Humming Around dips into waters that Burger Records regularly drinks from, quenching your thirst for garage pop. Additional vocals by Monique Laflamme and bandmate Martha Rockhard adds sugar to the brim of the glass.
The shimmy inducing The Law Was The Love is Brown’s oldest song (written when he was a teenager) and delivers a Some Friendly era rave-up that the Charlatans UK would be proud of. The nocturnal cool of Firsty pulls the shades on a full moon, drops some impressive keys and alternates the pace between strut and swagger.
The Adam Brown with the support of his band, Martha Rockhard on bass and vocals and Steph Janukavicius on drums with additional vocals by Monique Laflamme and additional drumming by Carl Bedard and Colin Merriam), has tapped into something special on WWNK. What we do know with the release of this album is that summer has officially started, and hopefully with it, the sounds of The Adam Brown will permeate through car speakers, apartment windows and radio frequencies at full tilt. As for the existence of Tacos in the afterlife? That, We’ll never know…