Sound Advice: Baby by The Burning Hell

Every Tuesday, Torontoist scours record store shelves in search of the city’s most notable new releases and brings you the best—or sometimes just the biggest—of what we’ve heard in Sound Advice.

Pop quiz! You have one word to describe The Burning Hell. Will you use: cute, hilarious, ridiculous, kitschy, or smart? Trick question. The answer: all of the above. In a lot of ways, Baby, out today on weewerk records, picks up where 2008's Happy Birthday left off: quirky folk-pop songs about birth ("Old World"), death ("When the World Ends"), and all the ridiculous absurdities that make up life in between ("Everybody Needs A Body [To Be Somebody]"). In other ways, it's an impressive expansion of musicianship, melodies, and one-liners.

Recorded mostly live-off-the-floor by big music brain Andy Magoffin, Baby's myriad instruments are matched only by band members (fourteen!). Ukulele, synth, glockenspiel, trumpet, and accordion are just some of the sounds that appear on the surprisingly spacious tracks, but no instrument can come close to the draw of singer/songwriter Mathias Kom's low, deceivingly serious voice; think John McCrea of Cake, or Matt Berninger of The National. While musically closest to at least parts of the former (mostly the parts without drum machines, or, the parts with animal stories), the almost maddeningly self-aware quips on the minutiae of everyday life sung so dryly, so tongue-in-cheek, recall the latter at his best.

If there is a downfall to all of this ha-ha musing, it could be that The Burning Hell's kitsch limits the scope of the otherwise pretty accessible Moldy Peaches-esque anti-folk they produce so well. Luckily, they're ultimately too dark and weird to be too cute, and the silliness is always just this side of smart(ass), which (thankfully) means the difference between biting observational humour, and jokes about Sting and Kurasawa. Stick around to the very end for the closing, unlisted track ("Mystery Song"); it's the proof that they're totally in on all of the jokes, and they want you to be, too.