MountainTigerWolf

MountainTigerWolf is the sophomore album from songwriter/producer bradley. The follow up to 2007’s “pink pill program”, MountainTigerWolf finds the Vancouver artist building on the unique sounds found on his acclaimed debut. Created mostly with one analogue synth, a computer and manipulation, the result is a perfectly stretched musical canvass for bradley’s quirky and personal songs to settle on.

The tone is set early on as 'Monster' takes us on a schizophrenic trip through a failing obsession where electro beats climax to a cliffs edge, defining the electro/acoustic theme of the album in the process. While the beat heavy 3rd track 'Your Money' continues this sonic exploration 'Daylight's Finally Night ' and bradley’s version of the Great Aunt Ida song 'Little Voice' are highlighted by a soaring string orchestra provided by none other than Jesse Zubot. By the time the album closer Lullaby sways you with its hypnotic psychosis you realize that nothing is exactly as it seems in the land of bradley. In the land of MountainTigerWolf.

bradley's musical life as a songwriter and producer began when he converted his first computer into a studio. While the collaborative electro pop album with Coco Love Alcorn “Joystick” (2005) turned heads it was ‘pink pill program' that kept them turned. A dark, personal electro album reminiscent of The Flaming Lips, Beck and Gorillaz, bradley toured his debut throughout Canada in 2007 buoyed by a building buzz that saw him play a sold out hometown to cap it all off.

MountainTigerWolf Globe and Mail Pick of the Week

Robert Everett-Green, Globe and Mail
Mountain Tiger Wolf 3.5/4

This cracking good album from Vancouver’s Bradley Ferguson opens with a song that feels like alternating audio snapshots from two different phases of the same relationship. The first is blurred and kind of sweaty, crowded with dirty guitar and machine-gun beats and a guy’s obsession with the person he can’t stop thinking about. The second is brutally clear, just the lightest of strummed guitar chords and a few touches on xylophone to frame a man lying broken on the rocks of love and barely able to sing: “When she calls out my name, all she feels is shame.” Somehow, you get the feeling he thinks he deserves nothing better.

Asking whether you’re worthy, while suspecting you’re probably not, is one of disc’s dominant themes. Your Money is a pushy electro-rock number bristling with attitude, but it’s really about a guy trying to prove he’s kicking the unhealthy dependencies that have made others write him off. Padma breaks from its woolly rock verses into a waltzing chorus that gently insists: “You want to, but you know you can’t.” Daylight’s Finally Night gives an awestruck account of a woman who “says she sees all the good in me,” which in this context sounds frankly incredible.

All these doubts come out in songs that couldn’t be more freshly conceived or confidently brought off. Bradley’s musical outlook encompasses the craft-conscious ethos of an old-school songwriter, the playground mentality of someone who likes to mess with synthesizers, and the tear-it-up sensibility of an unreconstructed punk. You may have already heard some of his music on television shows such as The L Word.

Black Shirt must be the most radio-ready thing ever recorded by Drip Audio, a small Vancouver label that mostly specializes in albums of free-range improvisation. The heavy two-chord verses open into a striding loose-limbed chorus that seems guaranteed to get the club jumping.

The disc’s latter half spans the extremes of the dance number Hit the Floor, the most brittle electronic thing on the album, and the extended self-medicating Lullaby, an acoustic number that tinkles directly out of Hit the Floor. I’m not so keen on the chordal ballad Little Voice or the folkish Broken, both of which feel a bit dull and conventional. Bradley is at his best when he’s not tethered to any genre.