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A voice sublime. Sarah Harmer is Canada’s greatest living and active singer-songwriter right up there with Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen in their prime. A philosophy graduate from Queen’s University, her music is cerebral, sultry and melancholy. She can play straightahead folk, she can rock out but shines most in her bluegrass-folk-rock persona. I’m A Mountain is one of the greatest albums to come out of Canada. This and her earlier All of Our Names evoke the natural beauty of the Kingston/Ontario where she lives:
Icy twinkling in the window, it's a sparkle on the snow
Hovering to see if I can see you come and go
I came down the dark road, arms under my coat
And my breath is nearly freezing my eyes closed.

The car that dropped me off, well did it turn around
And watch me walk the long way down
Past the glow of town like a setting sun
Horizon's alive with electric light and hum…

The wind from the river will swirl like a scream
And wrap itself around you
There may be a friend somewhere down the road
But from here you have to walk it out alone.


She deserves to be a global star but has never sought that sort of career path. Listen to her music with a great amp like the Crack and great cans like the T1s at your peril. It is druggingly delicious. When my youngest son recently started to crawl all day long through our house, Ozzy Ozbourne’s paean to Alistair Crowley came to mind. The church organ that opens this ridiculously juvenile, pea-brained gothic-metal pastiche—but otherwise irresistible song—digs down to the lowest octave. No headphone is going to follow the pipe organ down that low. So the question was: how far would it go?
At the crack of dawn
Deeper than I imagined. To me one of the marks of a great amp is that it can render terrible music… well, interesting. ‘Ah, didn’t realize that you really can hear Tony Iommi’s prosthetic fingertips as they create reverb.’ That sort of thing.


Some skits from Saturday Night Live from the late 1970s were so bad they were good. I think of Men Without Hats in the same light. These children of Canadian Content regs dictating that a certain ratio of all radio, TV and movies be ‘Canadian made’ hail from my ‘hood in Montreal. But that is where the similarities stop. What do the following lyrics say about our sad postmodern predicament?
Antarctica, Antarctica
Antarctica, Antarctica
Ice Age is here, right in your town
Antarctica, look what you've done.

And I, I feel like I've cheated your scheme
And I, I feel like you really know what I mean
Nightfall's heartbeat, the street's in a mess
On reflector, the beach is endless.


Perhaps there are times and places in which the concept of Thought Crime is legitimate. Can the Bottlehead render this insufferable crime against the ear tolerable? Yes, yes, it can. Ivan’s synthesizer is so… nuanced. Who knew? That this amp allowed me to endure this song through headphones is a testament to its alchemic abilities. Like the Candy Man, this amp can take a bad song and make it good. Time to crack open an old chestnut, Kind of Blue by Miles Davis. The most popular Jazz CD of all time is as good a reference as any. If you wish to rescue Paul Chambers’ subterranean bass lines from the condescension of posterity, you’ll need robust electronics. Surprisingly the Bottlehead is up to the task.  There is a point in the cut when Coltrane’s horn simply takes off and upon completion of his solo floats away, hiding its face in a field of stars. Having listened to that passage hundreds of times, I am confident that the Crack’s low noise floor allowed me to see further into the track than ever before.


To test for snap, crackle and pop, I spun an original pressing of Max Roach’s LP Drums Unlimited. This is a ‘Live or Memorex?’ recording, the type of music that can startle and make one question if one is listening to the real thing. As with the PRaT test, the Crack came up a bit short. I was a bit underwhelmed. But again, these are minor surface flaws. If you are willing to put in the elbow grease, I cannot imagine a better headphone amplifier for this price.
timsmith182 @ gmail.com
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