Thin Gaze

Thin Gaze is a vulture turned loft-party crooner. He’s got a voice that will haunt you like a hangover. His debut cassette is a collection of crooked lullabies for sleepless nights. Dark songs built on electronic soundbeds and unstable samples that move like smoke. While Gilles Vigneault’s country was winter, Thin Gaze’s domain is a back alley in the rain-slicked downtown east-side. It’s time to get acquainted with the first member of a whole new rat pack. - Weird Canada

The bench at the zoo. A shoeless, collapsing, sideways-lipped 20 something. She sat. She crumpled a blank white sheet of paper in her over-used coat pocket. The pigeon by my foot and the tiger caged nearly 20 feet away both spoke at the same time. Their interruptions of one another reminded me of how awkward it would be if I talked to her, sitting next to me, interrupting like strangers always do. She wasn’t distracted by it, or otherwise didn’t hear. Then a man, who was probably a grandfather, belittled in a dark jumpsuit scooped the innocuous wrapper crumpled by her stiletto. A jogger, in an outfit I would estimate to be as expensive as the shoeless bench-dwellers livelihood in whole, jogged by. But the trash man stepped to the side as she jogged by. Their feet, five feet from mine, 2 feet from hers, danced like awkward interrupting strangers. There was a faint but smothering smell of skunk, or marijuana, or cut grass. I decided it wasn’t cut grass because the zoo, the bench, the night was in a unfortunately beggarly neighborhood. I decided it wasn’t a skunk because the conclusion of a skunk would have been a boring conclusion. Therefore, it was the shoeless, collapsing, sideways-lipped woman, it must have been. I asked her if she had. She pulled a twisted envelope from her poorly packed coat pocket. She looked at my shoes. She must have decided I was well to do, because they were cleaner than hers, and because she then opened the envelope and revealed a slightly bent, slightly underwhelming, somewhat comforting, and especially skinny joint. I pulled a lighter from my pocket (which consisted of my wallet and my lighter). She grabbed it before I gave it. She inhaled and coughed before she inhaled. She kept coughing. I didn’t know if I was to tap her back like some child. Thankfully I didn’t have to. She passed me the joint as she continued coughing. I inhaled, and I really inhaled, and I didn’t cough, and I didn’t judge her for doing the same thing I was doing as I expected myself to. Neither of us were high. Or maybe she was, I couldn’t tell. But we sat on the bench for the rest of the night, no stumbling, interrupting, awkward stranger conversation. We didn’t speak. We listened to the animals talk. Or at least I did. And I wondered if she thought of me as a friend.
- verb/re/verb

Sept. 11, 2012 by Richard MacFarlane

Montreal-based (via Vancouver and Beijing) lounge-noir producer Thin Gaze played on our rooftop a month or so back, and while that was a pretty stressful affair (noise complaints, near falls, roof saggage etc.), his low-lit experimental pop definitely soothed the situation. Quietly deconstructing traditional Leonard Cohen-esque brooders with a penchant for the dark R&B vibes (and chopped/screwed signifiers) of Omarion, tracks like "Geisty" have a heavily filmic quality. All those manipulated vocals and looped guitars give a strange interplay and road weary haze throughout the tape. (via Rose Quartz)

Thin Gaze's 7-track cassette is out on Vancouver label Student Loan Records. Catch him at Pop Montreal in a couple weeks, too. - Ad Hoc