THE HENRYS Joyous Porous (Trainrec) Rating: NNNN Rating: NNNN
When they’re on their game, the Henrys sound like no one else. After establishing and refining a sound over four albums, largely built around Don Rooke’s woozy slide guitar, the Toronto group are now happy to gurgle away in their own peculiar language. In its best moments, Joyous Porous’s mix of twanging steel, wheezing pump organs and Mary Margaret O’Hara’s elastic vocals is completely disorienting. A cover of Mingus’s Goodbye Pork Pie Hat only reveals itself a few minutes in as the riff peeks out from behind a haze of guitars, while more straightforward moments, like the O’Hara-driven Strangel, verge on pure pop. Utterly alien but oddly familiar at the same time.
