by JAY WATTS III

Victoria’s Paper Cranes were visitors to this city this past week, playing Fringe Pop and skulking around the town, looking for booze and cheap records. The svengali behind the chipper ’n’ healthy left-coast popsters, Greg, is a video-game wizard, involved in production with some company or another in Toronto, and also devotes a couple of hours a day, week, month, whenever, to keeping his readers abreast of musical fascinations old and new on his blog Are You Familiar (http://areyoufamiliar.blogspot.com). I know I’ve been flooding this column with a lot of that ghetto-tech hip hop cut-and-paste house nonsense as of late, so Greg’s varied tastes will provide a soothing balm to the ears of those who don’t like their syrup purple and their asses shaken. Greg’s got a knack for picking up on some of the more interesting er, wolves on the Canadian indie tundra, such as aforementioned Paper Cranes and the Diableros, and lovers of delay pedals and walls of fuzz will find his digging back into the shoegazing past a welcome treat.

The Are You Familiar-appropriate Book of Lists, a Vancouver quartet (featuring shutterbug and ex-Destroyer/Radio Berlin player Chris Frey), will be dropping a single on U.K.-based label 1965 Records next month, and though a previous EP did see some love from college radio, they unfortunately haven’t garnered much attention on this side of the Rocky Mountain divide, a situation that should be rectified when they visit here later this year. For your listening pleasure, point and click yourself to http://thebookoflists.net/music/index.html for three songs from last year’s Global Symphonic EP. Far more Glaswegian than Mancunian, the Postcard Records back catalogue is probably the easiest reference point for the group, though that does little justice to the expansive and thoughtful nature of their music.

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