As I’ve mentioned countless times on this site, I frequently receive emails from publicity firms, artists, labels and band managers from all over the world, and it turns this site’s mission of presenting and covering a variety of music from all over the world into a reality. 

I recently received an email from Mary Caroline, a singer/songwriter who spent time living in a trapper’s cabin on the shores of the Liard River in Canada’s remote Northwest Territories, about 600 kilometers from Yellowknife. In fact, while there she learned how to live the old trapper’s lifestyle which often included sustenance farming. And as she told me in that email, the material on her recently released EP Such A Liar and on her forthcoming debut full-length effort “attempts to capture the edginess and beauty of my northern life, forging my own … " 

In some way that statement reminded me of the work of the Inuit singer/songwriter Elisapie Isaac, as Isaac’s material evokes both the hard living and beauty of Great North. Interestingly, Mary Caroline’s EP’s first single "Such A Liar” possess an arrangement that’s elegantly simple – vocals, guitar, drums and perfectly placed strings, which evoke a hushed, haunting beauty.  But it also gives the song’s accusatory lyrics a sense of quiet acceptance, as though the song’s narrator was seeking a reason to move on from a failed relationship or was unconsciously seeking something to force her to act. And yet interestingly, underneath that is a sense of someone who’s learned to be fiercely independent. 

In any case, I thought it was a pretty song and the song’s video was shot in an abandoned farm in Walkerton, Ontario, not far from where she spent the summer recording material. And the video helps further evoke the song’s thoughtful, contemplative nature. 

The EP’s title track and first single “Such A Liar” has a hushed beauty and a rather elegant simplicity