Slow Down Molasses

Slow Down Molasses craft a sound which seems to flood over you slowly, patiently breaking down your barriers.

Fusing shoegaze tapestries to a post-punk framework, the band's songwriting has an Anglophile streak - think New Order, Ride or Swervedriver - but there's also something deeply North American.

New album 'Burnt Black Cars' is out now, with Clash able to premiere the video for stunning highlight 'Home'.

It's a moment when the group's influences truly coalesce, with Slow Down Molasses impacting a real poetry on those gorgeous textures. - Clash Magazine

"Canada’s Slow Down Molases sound like they’ve been swapping notes with London krautrock-heads Toy or The Horrors, thanks to the drug-drenched psych-pop of Summer Sun, which burns through the stratosphere with star-spangled guitars and heat-shimmer organs." - Q Magazine

8"I remember them being much mellower," noted Exclaim! photographer (and this reviewer's wingman) Tiana Feng midway through the second song. Seriously, I thought. What a reinvention! Saskatoon-based Slow Down Molasses' 2011 record Walk Into The Sea was a mostly languid, atmospheric and decidedly dreamy affair; although a couple tracks pushed into some hard-rocking territory, both felt like asides from the main event. If this show was any indication, the material on their as-yet-incomplete new album is a whole 'nother thing, indeed. There was nothing mellow about last night's scorching 40-minute set.

Ready, it seems, to take their place alongside acts such as Metric, Stars and the Darcys, Slow Down Molasses wowed the crowded room with a huge stadium-ready sound, colourful presence and a genuine desire to explore the space created by their songs up there onstage. "It seems like we haven't been to Toronto in awhile," reflected frontman (and, full disclosure, occasional Exclaim! contributor) Chris Morin. Though I've seen them here before, truth is, this felt like the first time, all over again. They just feel like a whole new band. I like it. - Exclaim! Magazine

“Young Canadian band Slow Down, Molasses blow more than a few minds with a brief but often spectacular set in a small room at the Prince Albert pub. There’s a more than passing musical resemblance to the War on Drugs in what they play, which several times also makes you think this is the kind of sound Toy might be after, achieved with half the grooming and a lot less hair flicking” – ALLAN JONES, UNCUT - UNCUT Magazine

In 2007 I went down to Azimuth Theatre to see a band from Saskatoon called Slow Down Molasses. It was a Push Pins show and those never failed, so I knew to expect something either boundary pushing or extremely apt within a tried and true boundary. With a seven or eight (or nine?) person ensemble, they made a very large quiet sound, if you get my drift. They made folk that was slanted toward the beautiful, the enchanted, the ethereal. The record at first sounds thoroughly traditional, a straight shooter by people who know how to play their instruments and know how to play as a band. But with time these recording betray the creative accentuations Slow Down Molasses has filled everything out with. These granular flourishes are so subtly mixed that they blend in effortlessly with the more familiar firmaments of indie folk. Listening to the lead track on Walk Into The Sea, a jam called “Sometimes We All Fall Apart”, you hear how equally talented this band is at harnessing that musically erudite precision and signature ‘large quiet’ into a recording. They know how to let the guitars bay and squeel their dissonance without once taking away from the beauty of the composition. Most songs feature long instrumental movements and an almost choral layering of vocals. The lead singer, Tyson McShane, has a very cavernous tremor in his voice that seems to compliment the lyrical content precisely. And the beautiful ghostly female vocals behind the majority of McShane’s leads fills the band’s utterances with a haunting resonance—”Don’t fall too deep…I knew by the way the sun hit your eyes, You’d be mine…Don’t fall asleep.” It all fits very smugly over the orchestral vibration they manage to channel on most every song.
Look out for the lead track and for bangers like “Late Night Radio”. “Fade Out” and “As Meant To Be” are also some total gems.
Reflecting on the duality of Saskatoon and Regina, not unlike Edmonton and Calgary, it would not be unreasonable to call Saskatoon’s Slow Down Molasses the beautiful folk counterpart to Regina’s indie popping Library Voices. - Argue Job