{"id":12688,"date":"2024-05-14T12:30:11","date_gmt":"2024-05-14T17:30:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/?p=12688"},"modified":"2026-05-07T19:33:43","modified_gmt":"2026-05-08T00:33:43","slug":"album-review-vivat-virtute-hold-music-and-june-first","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/2024\/05\/14\/album-review-vivat-virtute-hold-music-and-june-first\/","title":{"rendered":"Album Review :: Vivat Virtute :: Hold Music and June First"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\""June<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

by maggie astrid clark<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Unless you\u2019re really dialed into the local music scene (although, given that you are currently reading Stylus Magazine<\/em>, this might be a fair assumption!), it would have been easy to miss a pair of records released last year by Vivat Virtute. You might not know the name, but you definitely know its members \u2013 Winnipeg indie rock mainstays Christine Fellows and J.S. Fellows. <\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

\u201cHang on,\u201d you might be inclined to interject, \u201cJ.S. Fellows? Who\u2019s that?\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ll give you a hint: the \u201cJ.S.\u201d stands for \u201cJohn Samson.\u201d The former Weakerthans singer has been conspicuously absent from the music industry for a few years now: their last solo album, Winter Wheat<\/em>, was released in 2016 and they resurfaced briefly with the 2020 singles \u201cMillennium for All\u201d and \u201cFantasy Baseball at the End of the World\u201d \u2013 the latter of which, I submit, should replace the dreadful, insipid \u201cO Canada\u201d as the song played at the start of every Goldeyes game. According to the author bio of his September 2023 article on prison abolition for Rupert\u2019s Land News<\/em>, he now teaches creative writing at the Stony Mountain Institution. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

John\u2019s apparent retreat from the music biz is hardly surprising. As Keegan Bradford wrote last year for Stereogum<\/em>, he \u201cfamously does not enjoy touring or press.\u201d Given my unfamiliarity with John-the-person, I can\u2019t state with any certainty what they do or don\u2019t \u201cenjoy,\u201d but I won\u2019t deny that this tracks with my impression of John-the-writer-and-performer. It would certainly explain why the Vivat Virtute records were released only on Bandcamp and received no publicity or press coverage \u2013 at least until I decided to scupper that by writing about them for this very magazine! <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hold Music<\/em> (released February 22, 2023) is a first in the discography of either Christine or John \u2013 an album consisting almost entirely of ambient instrumentals. The album is admirably varied in sound and scope. \u201cRockwood Pickleball League,\u201d for example, is a piece best described as \u201cK.K. Slider cowboy music,\u201d while piano-led compositions like \u201cDugout Phone\u201d and \u201cStony Mountain Unit 6\u201d evoke comparisons to \u00c9rik Satie or Ryuichi Sakamoto in their plaintive beauty. (Those were the first two pianists I could think of \u2013 how\u2019d I do?) Christine Fellows, ever the polymath, is no stranger to the art of the wordless tune: she included several on her studio albums Paper Anniversary<\/em> and Nevertheless<\/em>. Her performance at last year\u2019s Cluster Festival \u2013 her first since the beginning of the pandemic \u2013 was a highlight of my 2023 and was accompanied by a mesmerising collage of her stop-motion animations. You really had to be there and I\u2019m sorry if you weren\u2019t. Boasting aside, Christine\u2019s return to the genre is a treat for the ears. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The second record, June First<\/em> (released \u2013 well, I\u2019ll let you guess), is a three-song EP performed by John and engineered by Christine. The opener is \u201cRoyal Bank of Canada,\u201d a song that I cannot hear without freezing up and crying. Featuring a sparse guitar line and set to the tune of \u201cEventide\u201d (the usual accompaniment of the Christian hymn \u201cAbide with Me\u201d), it frames RBC\u2019s fossil fuel investments in apocalyptic terms. The Banking on Climate Chaos coalition has recognized RBC as \u201cthe worst financier of fossil fuels,\u201d with the bank having issued $41 billion in financing to resource extraction companies in 2022 alone. This reckless pursuit of profit has terrifying consequences for us all. The song reckons with a future in which the company\u2019s headquarters are \u201cemptied by the heat \/ Fear and starvation rising with the seas \/ Seeds of disaster sown by RBC.\u201d It is, of course, easy (and fun!) to blame bankers, but the more unsettling implication here is that, as residents of the imperial core, many of us benefit financially from wanton environmental destruction. After all, the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, a Crown corporation, owns over 2 million shares in RBC. The standard of living that many of us are accustomed to in Canada is paid for, in large part, by the proceeds from such investments. When John sings \u201cToo soon that final audit will begin \/ Each piece of pipeline multiplies thy sin,\u201d I interpret this as an appeal to every Canadian: this is our responsibility too. Our only hope is to divest from fossil fuels and pray that God forgives us for what we have done to each other and to this earth. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The subject of the next song, \u201cBudget Delegations,\u201d is familiar terrain for John and Christine, a companion piece of sorts to \u201cMillennium for All.\u201d In it, John condemns the priorities of Winnipeg\u2019s municipal government, lamenting that most of our city\u2019s budget is spent on \u201croads and police, and police and roads.\u201d As a result, we are left with \u201cno room for research, no food or drink, no thinking something new \/ No time for anyone trying to show us what love can do.\u201d At the time of writing, my thoughts turn to the December 31 shooting death of Afolabi Stephen Opaso, a 19-year-old Nigerian international student studying at the University of Manitoba, by Winnipeg police. (Of course, the phrase used above \u2013 \u201cshooting death\u201d \u2013 embodies what John identifies in the song as the \u201cpress-release framing\u201d preferred by our city\u2019s pigs and their stenographers at the local papers. Perhaps \u201cmurder\u201d would be more apt.) Fadi Ennab wrote that, according to Opaso\u2019s friends, \u201che struggled under the pressure of being far from home and with finding affordable housing, and was working two jobs.\u201d This brutal precarity is hardly a unique story among our country\u2019s international students and temporary foreign workers. Neither is the police violence deployed against the most marginalized people in our communities. The story is a tragic reminder of the human cost of our ruling class\u2019s crusade to defund life-sustaining social supports in favour of yet more policing and yet more money for the road construction lobby.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I wanted to dive into June First<\/em>\u2019s final track, \u201cAll My Ex-Boyfriends Are You\u201d \u2013 a piece that is simultaneously charming and upsetting, heartbreaking and funny \u2013 but I think the listener is best served to go in blind. Despite the heavy subject matter of the EP\u2019s songs, it is something of a relief, in our highly depoliticized climate, to know that the tradition of polemical folk ballads is alive and well. But I wish to close by returning to the final song of Hold Music<\/em>, and the only one to contain lyrics, \u201cDo Not Worry.\u201d (If you\u2019re wondering why I\u2019m telling the story out of order here, let me assure you that this is on purpose. I wanted this piece to have a more satisfying narrative arc.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Although the production is a touch too reedy for my taste, the song is a gorgeous meditation on the inevitability of death, the joys of life, and the persistence of the human spirit. I tried fashioning its central lyric (\u201cToday\u2019s trouble is enough for today\u201d) into a self-affirming mantra during a period of severe depression back in September. A few days later, I was referred to the Crisis Stabilization Unit in the vain hope that spending a few days in the loony bin would cure me of my persistent suicide ideation. (It did not.) The mantra didn\u2019t really work. But I\u2019m still here, so maybe, on some level, it did. I haven’t given into my despair just yet. The reason why can be found in another J.S. Fellows song I mentioned earlier, \u201cFantasy Baseball at the End of the World\u201d:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI\u2019m going outside \/ I\u2019m gonna help organize \/ Something better, something beautiful.\u201d I invite you all to do the same.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by maggie astrid clark Unless you\u2019re really dialed into the local music scene (although, given that you are currently reading Stylus Magazine, this might be a fair assumption!), it would have been easy to miss a pair of records released last year by Vivat Virtute. You might not know the name, but you definitely know […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":12689,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[1420,1638,1636,1639],"class_list":["post-12688","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews","tag-album-review","tag-hold-music","tag-june-first","tag-vivat-virtue"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12688","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12688"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12688\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12690,"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12688\/revisions\/12690"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12689"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12688"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12688"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12688"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}