There’s a fantastic line in a recent post by Emma Healey on Said The Gramophone that perfectly summarizes the experience of hearing Winnipeg’s Notme for the first time: “I want to expand my vocabulary of sadness and love and lonely and longing, get my heart dimly lit up at the edges by some new old convergence of voice and metaphor, plain fact and tape hiss and past.”
Healey was referring to a classic soul track by The Young Disciples, a style at the opposite end of the musical spectrum from Notme’s “Moth”, a dreamy, reverb laced lament that’s happy sitting in its own special heartache. Just below its lullaby melody, “Moth” flutters with elliptical, discordant guitar lines. Like its namesake, “Moth” sails along on its own flightpath, darting and diving, expelling an inordinate amount of energy in an effort to sound effortless. What sounds delicate and fragile upon first listen reveals a determined inner strength and resiliency with each subsequent playback.
“The best quality a single song can have,” Healey writes, “…is the sense that it somehow contains every possible feeling in the world simultaneously”. On “Moth”, Notme capture every expression of sadness known to humanity and funnel them into every note of the song. All these emotional variations and nuances flitter and dance like specimens trapped in a glass mason jar before Notme unscrews the lid and lets them fly back to their natural environment.
