Dan Darrah & The Rain

Dan Darrah is a twenty-something Toronto-based songwriter and guitar player whose compositions embed themselves in listeners’ memories via off-kilter Beatles-esque melodicism and impressionistic lyrics that come by their romanticism obliquely, ironically, almost aphoristically. Whereas Darrah has for years been recording songs off the cuff by himself in his bedroom, his new album, Rivers Bridges Trains, was recorded in a proper studio, over several months, with the help of players and singers he’s known and collaborated with since his adolescence on Greater Toronto’s eastern outskirts. The album, which collates and repurposes many of those old bedroom songs, is protean and rangy in the tradition of songcraft-oriented acts like Teenage Fanclub, Mojave 3, and Jets to Brazil. British Invasion harmony melds with country-rock languor as a somewhat bemused kitchen-sink realism emerges out of a swirl of half-recovered memories.