Category: Music

I Hold The Sound

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The first time I listened to the new Thermals album Now We Can See (pitchfork | metacritic) I didn’t think that much of it. But something told me I should listen again. So I did. And then I did again. And now I like it a lot.

Where their previous albums would contain one or two phenomenal songs like “Back To The Sea” or “How We Know”, the rest would lag badly. This album doesn’t have those highs, but neither does it have those lows. It’s more consistent, and it’s consistently good.

If you like fast, loose post-punk, check them out. An interesting side note is that their best songs, like “Here’s Your Future” or “Pillar Of Salt”, are tinged with religious stories. I don’t know the back story there, and I don’t think I wanna.

Go ahead, sample some of their music over at elbo.ws.

Wake Up And Go Beserk

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It’s been nearly seven years since I last saw Mogwai live. Their gig that night in 2002 was one of the most ferocious I’d ever seen, or have seen since. I’d been warned about the volume, but in tiny Lee’s Palace there was nowhere to hide, and my friend Mike and I bore the brunt. I loved it, though, and was excited to see them again night after missing them the last couple of times around. In fact, seeing them last fall was supposed to be a celebration of finishing the MBA, of returning to seeing the occasional gig. They just made me wait a little longer is all. Silly inconsiderate Martin had pacemaker problems so they had to postpone the tour. That’s so like him.

And so, on Monday, Joe and I staked out a spot near the front of the Phoenix’s balcony just minutes before opener the Twilight Sad began their set. A funny thing happened: I noticed this guy pulling on the door out to the little catwalk along the Phoenix’s upper wall, as if he planned to get out there to take in the show. Padlocked; foiled. The guy turns to walk away and as I see his face I realize…that’s Stuart Braithwaite. By the time I processed that he’d spun off to find another vantage point. Weird.

Anyway, the Twilight Sad was good. Solid. I shall sample more of their stuff, which I suppose is the point of the opening slot, so well done lads. I laughed to Joe that, after their set, I looked down to the main floor and saw a girl covering her ears and (presumably) complaining to her boyfriend that it was too loud. I felt bad for her. It certainly wasn’t to get any quieter from there on. Fifteen minutes later Mogwai emerged to drive her from the building, pleading for her life. Or so I imagined.

A few songs in it was clear that this would be a very different Mogwai than I’d seen before. Thankfully, of course; who wants to see the same show again? Their music has gained more depth and nuance, and I was happy to see that it translated well to the stage, perhaps was even augmented by it. The additional textures of Barry Burns’ keyboards and (highly effects-ridden) vocals gave the first half of the night a mellower feel than I think most people expected. Stuart even broke out the soft words of “Cody” to much applause. They were covering a lot of ground too; by the end of the night they’d have played songs from eight different albums, by my count. But in the final half of the show, they tightened it up and started throwing serious punches.

They hit us with “You Don’t Know Jesus” and “Auto Rock”, gave us a breather with “Thank You Space Expert” and launched the perfect segue: “Hunted By A Freak”. I’ve always found that song ominous — maybe it’s because I can’t understand the vocals, or because I’ve seen the highly disturbing video — but until tonight I don’t think I ever fully grasped what a brilliant, beautiful song that is. Really. Still, that feeling of impending danger that comes with it was accurate: they bled straight from that song into a version of “Mogwai Fear Satan” that had everyone gleefully reeling, and then laid the crunch of “Glasgow Mega-Snake” on us to close out the set.

I had a hunch about what the encore might be — I knew they’d played “Like Herod” and “Batcat” in Montreal the night before, and they’d tended to alternate — so I was more than happy when they began playing “My Father My King”. It’s one of my 50 favourite songs of all time, and it destroyed the last time I saw them. I settled in. I prepared. I tried to keep my hopes from getting too high, but needn’t have bothered. This was better than last time, better than I’ve heard it played live before. It declined, dissolved and, as the band left the stage, descended into punishing feedback, just to remind us that nuance and maturity or no, they were still the boss of us.

After so many years of loving their music I think it’s safe to say that they’re my favourite band, even if they do try to kill me through my ears. Actually, I exaggerate: even though my ears were ringing when I got home that night, when I woke up six hours later my hearing was fine. I guess the much larger space of the Phoenix spared me from 2002’s result, when it took more than two days for my hearing to return to normal. I was almost disappointed.

And thus, I was awakened from my long gig slumber. Have I mentioned that I prefer a loud alarm clock?

.:.

Setlist

  1. I’m Jim Morrison, I’m Dead
  2. Killing All The Flies
  3. Travel Is Dangerous
  4. Scotland’s Shame
  5. Small Children In The Background
  6. Cody
  7. You Don’t Know Jesus
  8. Auto Rock
  9. Thank You Space Expert
  10. Hunted By A Freak
  11. Mogwai Fear Satan
  12. Glasgow Megasnake
  13. My Father My King (encore)

Good timing, Black Angels

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Because I’ve had so little time to peruse new music (pro tip: say the phrase “peruse new music” out loud…it has a certain quality) my IN tray is filling up. Here’s what I should be getting to but amn’t:

  • asobi seksu . hush
  • bishop allen . grrr
  • black angels . passover
  • bob mould . life and times
  • elliot brood . ambassador
  • fanfarlo . fanfarlo
  • gaslight anthem . the ’59 sound
  • great lake swimmers . lost channels
  • mirah . (a)spera
  • thermals . now we can see
  • tindersticks . waiting for the moon
  • william elliott whitmore . animals in the dark

Anything there I should skip? Anything that should jump to the top of the list?

Garbage in, garbage ou…uh, actually, I guess in this case garbage stays.

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Not long ago, on the way home from work my Zen randomly played “Eat Junk Become Junk” by Six By Seven. While I listened I studied the subway ad in front of me. It was an ad for an MTV reality show. I couldn’t help but make the connection.

“Eat junk become junk” is just another way of saying “you are what you eat”, something we’ve all heard since we were kids. No one really doubts that the badness of what we eat affects our overall health. It’s not the sole determining factor, obviously, but it does matter. Doctors, medical studies, common sense…they all tell us so.

So why doesn’t the adage apply to music? Why not books? Why not movies or television? Aren’t the worst of these just empty calories, the Twinkies and triple-bacon cheeseburgers of culture? Aren’t people just jamming the same crap into a different orifice? I would think we would consider these toxic materials as harmful to the mind as we consider toxic food harmful to the body.

And yet, we hear people describe the benefit of vanilla TV (Two and a Half Men, anyone?) being that they don’t have to think, they can just have a laugh. They describe “beach books” the same way…something you just read but don’t have to think about. Worse yet, “reality tv” deliberately misleads viewers, making them think these shows are actually happening unscripted, trying to warp the viewer’s idea of reality rather than try to find entertaining reality to film. Music so banal and oversampled there’s no shred of musical innovation or feeling left at the heart of it. Movies slapped together to lampoon scene after 30-second scene of fleeting pop-cultural references funny mainly, and especially, to those whose news-gathering begins and ends with TMZ. At best these are vapid space-fillers; at worst, mind-numbing distortions. Alone they do not make you stupid. But they certainly lean that way.

Let me preempt the usual cry: that I’m arguing against fun. That’s a weak case, unless you would suggest “fun” can only equal “stupid”. Millions of things are fun, and funny without being weakly, patronizingly so.

Let’s maybe try showing this graphically. FlowingData recently posted a chart titled “Music that makes you dumb” courtesy of a CalTech grad student. It doesn’t show that listening to crap music makes you dumber. It just shows that people who listen to music like Lil’ Wayne, Carrie Underwood and Taking Back Sunday do worse on their SATs than those who listen to stuff like Radiohead, Bob Dylan and Beethoven.

Look, I’m not saying people should stop watching American Idol or listening to Nickelback any more than I’m saying they should avoid eating at Carl’s Jr. three times a day. I’m just saying that everyone knows they shouldn’t eat at Carl’s Jr. three times a day. For some reason they just haven’t figured out that it’s harmful to put other kinds of junk in their bodies too.

iWaffled

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I need a new MP3 player. Just a small one to hold my newest music; I find that my new music disappears into the depths of my player — which I usually have set to play all songs randomly — and I need a small one I can use for the ten most recent albums, plus a few hundred other songs.

Normally this would be an easy exercise. Ever since I bought my first MP3 player nine years ago, I’ve been a loyal Creative user. They’ve always been solid devices that never break, don’t force DRM or native file formats and are incredibly easy-to-use.

Lately, though, Creative just doesn’t seem to be keeping up. Their players have always been utilitarian (read: ugly), which was fine because (unlike most people) I don’t buy an MP3 player to be a fashion accessory. But their new players look almost comical, their features are falling behind and their models don’t seem to fit what I need.

Now, there’s an obvious, ubiquitous suggestion: the iPod. Problem is, I’ve never been an iPod fan…they’re expensive, I don’t like the wheely interface, they occasionally require ridiculous fixes like being dropped on the floor, iTunes sounds like a nightmare and, I’ll be honest, I’d hate feeling like a sheep every day when I passed fifteen grandmothers and tweens shaking their Shuffle on the subway.

But goddamit, their devices seemed like the only viable ones still out there. I started to wonder if anybody was even left in the game, or if all the other manufacturers had simply ceded their ground to Apple. I’m not getting a Zune, especially not after that whole ‘every 30GB device in the world blew up at the same time’ incident, and besides they look like they were produced in the Cold War era Soviet Bloc.

I had started to resign myself to the iDea of being an iPod oWner, but then I found anythingbutipod.com…and all was right with the world once more. The 8GB Samsung P3 looks pretty nice…maybe I’ll check one of those out.

Juno: daughter of Saturn, mother of Mars and goddess of horrible taste in music

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The Junos are set to air tonight. I could not care less about this fact — the Junos have long since proved irrelevant to anyone with even a passing appreciation for music as an art — except that the disgust felt by music writers at the nominees is, well…delicious.

From Ben Rayner at the Toronto Star:

It’s Juno Awards season again, and we all know what that means: Nitpicking, kvetching, bitching, bellyaching, bemoaning and generally venting our displeasure in the direction of whomever the Canadian recording industry has singled out for celebration this year.

Still, we watch, don’t we? And while we groan and shake our heads and grumble “What a farce! How meaningless!” whenever someone hands Nickelback or Michael Bublé – or Bryan Adams’s designated representative in Canada – another one of those little glass statues, we also secretly long for F—ed Up to take home that “alternative album of the year” award because … well … because that would be freakin’ awesome. Especially if Anne Murray has to present the trophy.

And, thus, we are complicit in the whole, hated awards-ceremony process.

Robert Everett-Green of the Globe and Mail was a little less reflective:

“Thinking about this year’s Junos makes my head hurt. They’ve already elevated Nickelback above all other Canadian musicians. The rock louts from Hanna, Alta., have five nominations, more than anyone else. My first response was to close my eyes to the horror. Go ahead, Juno, give the awards to Don Cherry, for all I care.

Juno’s idiotic nomination rules give an automatic berth in key categories to acts that sell the most records, and have put Nickelback in contention for album and group of the year. To suggest this band’s receipts prove it’s the best Canada has to offer is like saying nobody in this country makes better sandwiches than Subway. Bear in mind that Neil Young’s Chrome Dreams II got no nominations at all. Neither did excellent albums by Shad, k.d. lang, the Sadies, We Are Wolves and Cadence Weapon.”

Poor Nickelback has been taking a beating in recent weeks over what is seeming more and more like canonization from the Junos — not surprising, since it’s the favor of the Canadian recording industry’s favor that decides the evening’s winners. But even the Edmonton Sun slammed them today:

“‘You don’t have a clur (sic) about music. How can you say a washed-up old man like Bob Dylan is better than Nickelback?’

I got that e-mail nearly eight years ago, and I’ve had it taped up near my desk ever since. Mainly because it’s hilarious on multiple levels — clur? But along with that, it neatly encapsulates the essential difference between music critics and Nickelback fans.

Which is, in a nutshell: We think Nickelback sucks. And they think Nickelback rules. And neither one is going to change the other’s mind.”

It’s too bad that the Junos haven’t seized on all the international critical attention on the honest-to-goodness great music coming out of Canada in recent years, instead rewarding the likes of Nickelback and all facsimilies thereof and throwing in token nominations to the likes of Fucked Up or The Stills (nominated for best new group…puzzling, as they released their first album in 2003, I think). But it’s nothing new. The Junos have always sucked; that’s why god invented the Polaris Music Prize.

Oh, and a final thought from Mr. Rayner, one which lifted me from my chair and led me to applaud:

“Great Big Sea: I live with a Newfie. I know dozens of Newfies. I lived in Glovertown for six years when my family first moved to Canada. The broad consensus, from what I gather, is: embarrassing.”

Hear hear.

Evaluations

Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

The new Neko Case album is excellent. The new Alela Diane album is fantastic. The new Dan Auerbach album is pretty good, but the song “Heartbroken, In Disrepair” is kickass. Listen.

Watchmen (imdb | rotten tomatoes) was ok but not great. I didn’t read the comic so I can’t judge how well they translated the story, but I do know they forgot one cardinal rule: make it fit the medium. 2h43m was just too long…it’s hard to sustain interest and excitement over nearly three hours with a story that dense and jumpy.

Innis & Gunn oak-aged beer is very tasty indeed.

"This band's biggest problem is that they're not so much authentic as they're trying to indicate to you that they are authentic."

Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

This morning I finished reading Rock On: An Office Power Ballad (amazon) by Dan Kennedy. It’s Kennedy’s memoir of working in the music business, and the tragic hilarity (and crushing disillusionment) that followed. It’s a quick, entertaining read that will reinforce everything you probably already know about the “music” business, and corporate culture.

I’m recommending here that my brother Tim read it, because he will find it amusing, but also because Kennedy’s description of watching Iggy Pop live will probably resonate with someone who sees as many gigs as he does.

One final note: I’m very glad that in the book Kennedy makes fun of The Darkness. Atlantic was representing them at the time so there was much discussion over whether or not they were serious (they were) and how that could possibly be. As someone who hated that band just as much as I hated Nickelback or Creed, I enjoyed reading that chapter a great deal.

Next up: Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut.