Paper Beat Scissors - La Mitad (2021) Hi-Res

In September 2019, the Burnley, Lancashire-born but now Montréal-based musician, Tim Crabtree released the tender and beautifully orchestrated indie-folk album, Parallel Line under his Paper Beat Scissors moniker.

Paper Beat Scissors generates it’s own musical language, creating unusual contexts and developing new ways to explore the soundscape. Tim Crabtree challenges listeners to hear the music that exists within the notes, in the process re-examining who we are and what we think.

For an album that explored the fragility, complexity, and fundamental importance of human connection, the music felt deeply entwined in those emotions. This is highlighted even further on his new single “Formas” taken from a Spanish reworking of Shapes. Although I’m not fluent in Spanish, I’ve always found it a graceful and romantic language and here, Formas feels more powerful as I respond to just the sound of the music and vocals. Combined with the visionary eye of Montreal-based cinematographer and director Derek Branscombe the accompanying video enhances the depth of this engagement still further…the video is so well done, it’s as if the music has been intuitively composed around it.

“Formas”, is about “the knots we tie ourselves in, the messes we get ourselves in, but lay at another’s door, particularly in the realm of relationships” says Crabtree. Musically the song holds a hypnotic tension created through the ever-repeating electric guitar riff and Crabtree’s floating falsetto. Washes of pedal steel (Mike Feuerstack – Bell Orchestre) and French horn (Pietro Amato – Patrick Watson, Land of Talk) flit in and out before the steam builds through dislocating counter-rhythms on the piano and a crescendo of drums pushes the song to overflow. “Yo quiero todo, no quiero nada” (I want it all. I want none) comes the mantra. But when the cacophony subsides there’s no resolution, no catharsis, the character is stuck where he started. The single is paired with a visually stunning video centred around a concept worked up by director Derek Branscombe over many months. “I think Derek reflects the spirit of the song really wonderfully on the visual level – all this beauty and tension, all these situations on the verge of collapse, but when the dislocation comes it’s in unexpected ways”.