4 out of 5

Label: Jagjaguwar

Produced by: Minus Story

Sweet, sad and lush.

Minus Story fit well into the JagJaguar / Secretly Canadian stable of folk-tinged popsters; ye of funny haircuts and tight pants and string-laden proetic mini-epic.  Minus Story, in their short tenure, wisely kept this sound wrangled to just below a breaking point, songs deconstructing before they became too richly orchestrated, or hovering at a certain point just above a compelling median.  The Heaven and Hell EP is a good capsule of this, generally following a template of slow buildup to loud bridge / conclusion, but arranging the pieces differently (and interestingly) throughout.

The title track takes a sort of vague conceptual idea, presented in Andy Byers’ breaking falsetto, and winds around it as sparse instrumentation, supported by a strong beat, creates a quite beautiful and soft-hearted mood, tainted (in a good way) by a sprawling and wandering electric guitar which pairs well against the vocals and carries us through the end.

Time Wastes Itself and Suffer By Yourself follow, two short and somewhat less memorable tracks that trade melancholy in for momentum.  Wastes is the more generic of the two, solid, but not so different from any given Elephant 6 worshipper, but Suffer is pretty rich and definitely toe-tapping, just too short to wrap in Minis Story’s better magics.

Which is why it’s a plus that said tracks are set before some fantastic closers: Misery is a Ship firms up the structure / tone of the opener, building to something emotional and powerful over its six minutes, and then a surprisingly de-punked cover of the Misfits’ Hybrid Moments closes us out, which is woven 100% into a song it feels like Minis Story was birthed to provide, doing the quiet to loud buildup shtick again, and letting it crumble into some lovely disarray.

A seemingly throwaway narrative ends the EP, but listening to it more intently, I actually really like the way the story – tiptoeing back and forth between something celebratory and a ghost story – echoes the album’s themes.