adamandtheamethysts.com kelprecords.com Adam & The Amethysts playing a cut off their new record "Flickering Flashlight" at the record release show in Ottawa. *** Sometimes the most startling new music is the stuff that sounds somehow familiar. With FLICKERING FLASHLIGHT, Montreal's ADAM & THE AMETHYSTS have lit up a box of homemade fireworks, firing psychedelic folk and pinwheeling pop, crowing for the love of all the old songs and all the young ones, too: the Beach Boys and Kurt Vile, Os Mutantes and Woods, George Harrison and Chad VanGaalen. ADAM & THE AMETHYSTS are a band of scrappy kids and Adam Waito, their leader, is possibly the scrappiest. Raised in Thunder Bay, Ontario, he moved from the small town to the big city in 2003. That's the migration that still haunts his songs, but other changes stir there too: growing up, crashing down, losing friends, finding love, forgetting. While indie-rock chases chillwave, Adam is making a sibling hypnogogic pop - the whirrs of old! VCRs, the gloss of old Polaroids, Sun Araw and Real Estate guesting on Paul McCartney's Ram. "The songs are little time-capsules, hazy photographs," Adam says. "I'm trying to preserve memories the way I want to remember them." But whereas Adam's debut, 2008's AMETHYST AMULET, was a portrait of his hometown, FLICKERING FLASHLIGHT is also about challenging nostalgia, calling it out. "A song with an acoustic guitar and lots of spring reverb evokes my childhood even though my childhood was devoid of
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