Returning the Screw

My friend Dave over at Bumpershine sent out a request to a bunch of bloggers, musicians, industry types to send in their top picks from the Polaris long list. The Polaris Prize, for those who don’t know, is a juried competition that selects about 40 Canadian CDs that were released in the previous year. The winner gets $20,000. The main idea is to celebrate Canadian music regardless of genre, sales, etc. and just focus on the quality of the music.

Anyway, Dave invited me to participate and so you can find my picks here. Like I mentioned in my note along with the picks, many of the releases I chose skewed towards the Quebec side of things, most likely because I’ve been checking out a lot of stuff since I moved to Montreal a couple of months ago.

You can find the full post here, along with the picks of all the members of the “unofficial jury” and the tabulated shortlist. It will be interesting to see how it stacks up against the official list when it is announced on Monday.

Looky at what I found. Redd Kross playing “Jimmy’s Fantasy” at NXNE a few weeks ago. Much of their set is posted as well.

I was trying to figure out how to get around a bug in the WYSIWYG editor when I decided to upgrade Word Press. Unfortunately, I lost the theme I’ve been using the last couple of years so I had to change it. It’s still a work in progress so please no snarky e-mails.  I’ll finish the changes to the CSS files prolly sometime tomorrow night.

This year’s North by Northeast (NXNE) festival marked a bit of a change for me. To begin with, it was my first trip outside Montreal since I moved here last month. Second, I’ve needed some time off; the two weeks that elapsed since I left RNAO and joined the CEC weren’t exactly relaxing. So I was looking forward to returning to something familiar and check out some bands I really wanted to see and hopefully discover some new ones.

The people who program the festival always do a great job; there is always tons of great music to be heard and if you aren’t into what you’re hearing, a quick walk down the road to another club will probably take care of that.

Some highlights for me:

The Midway State - Reverb Thursday at 9 p.m. They reminded me of Coldplay with an early ’80s pop influence.

NQ Arbuckle - Dakota Thursday at midnight. NQ Arbuckle were by far my favourite local band when I lived in Toronto. Mix smokey bar room melancholy, some rollicking east coast folk with a dash of Springsteen thrown in and you have my lazy approximation of the band’s sound. They just released their third CD, X OK, on the always reliable Six Shooter records.

Maybe it’s just me, though, but the beer at the Dakota always does a number on me. I had a couple of pints of - heh - Labbatt 50 and I was done for the night.After their set, which was composed largely of material from their new album, I stood at the corner of Dundas and Ossington thinking “This sucks, how did I get so drunk. Now I have to go home.” So I didn’t get to go down to the Horseshoe to see White Cowbell Oklahoma like I had planned.

I made a note to myself to stay away from the Labatt 50 when at the Dakota. Some would say that staying away from Labatt 50 is a good rule in any event, but sometimes live music goes better with cheap beer.

The Priddle Concern - Reverb Friday at 9 p.m. This is the project of ex-Treble Charger guitarist and sometime Broken Social Scene collaborator Bill Priddle. I always liked Priddle’s contributions to Treble Charger records the most. His writing was more subtle and more melodic than his bandmates’ and was really the sound that made the band as good as they were.

Not to get too off-course here, but I remember having a conversation years ago with a label rep for BMG, which was their label at the time, who proudly informed that me the new Treble Charger record was “going to kick Blink 182 out of the water.” This was from an industry person I really respected and so was disappointed because I didn’t think that was going to be a case. Treble Charger was a pop band, not a pop-punk band and shoe horning them into a genre where they didn’t really belong may have been one of the reasons why they never caught on the way they should have. It was around this time Priddle left the band. I’m not saying there was a correlation or anything, but I’ve always wondered if the change in the band’s sound and image had something to do with it.

At any rate, he is still playing dreamy Beatles influenced pop with obscure lyrics and he still sounds like Al Stewart, the guy who sang “The Year of the Cat.”Oh, and you can stream his album in its entirely on his website.

Hugh Cornwell - Dakota Friday at 10 p.m. “Why don’t you people shut up? I mean, if you want to talk, why not go outside and have a fag?” This quote from a frustrated Hugh Cornwell pretty much sums up the shitty crowd he got for his set at the Dakota. It was terrible, even for the Dakota, where one chick once told me that she didn`t care about the music, she was told it was the place to be. Fine, but when you`re a musician and a legend like Hugh Cornwell is playing a small venue you shut up and listen, not brag loudly to your buddies about your `sick Pro Tools set-up“, which is what some shithead with an ironic mustache was going on about while one of the men who helped build the punk/new wave scene in the late `70s presented a clinic on great songwriting not more than 10 feet away.

At the beginning of his set Cornwell said he was going to touch on all the points of his career, with some early Stranglers numbers, which pleased a couple of guys in the front to no end, and I thought that was awesome - there should have been more fans like that to see his set. He also played some of his less familiar solo stuff as well as some material from his new album, called Hooverdam. BTW, his new is available as a free download. I’ve been listening to it at work and I really like it.

The Pack AD- Sneaky Dee’s Midnight Friday. Another shitty crowd who did not give a shit about the display in front of them. Maybe The Pack AD were too intimidating for the loser hipsters and frat boys who stumbled into Sneaky Dee’s on Friday night. Singer guitarist Becky Black channels Janis Joplin’s mournful, angry bluesy howl in a way that is absolutely chilling.

Vicious Guns - Bovine Sex Club Saturday 9 p.m. I was held up buying steak skewers at Taste of Little Italy so I was worried I would be late or miss their set, but they were starting fashionably late when got to the club. Their bio makes much of the fact that the two members are a couple and that they like to compete on stage, but I didn`t see that at all. What I saw was a couple of people having fun playing melodic challenging music with lots of sequencing and heavy beats.

Fred - Kathedral - Saturday 10 p.m. I was at the Katheral to see menwhopause, a band from New Delhi who is apparently huge in their native India, but what I got was a bunch of white guys (and girl) from Cork, Ireland with an extremely charismatic lead singer who led the sparse crowd through their set of fun pop that reminded me of the New Pornographers without the melancholy.

Redd Kross - Lee`s Palace - Saturday 1 a.m. Redd Kross had their work cut out for them. It didn`t help that on Saturday they were almost a half-hour late starting. “Fuck these rock star assholes”, I said to myself as I looked at the clock on my cell phone as the time approached 1:30.But they did not mail it in as I expected. They played full on for the entire hour they played; they went to the vaults and dusted off their early classic “Annette`s Got the Hits“ and also played their only single that could remotely be considered a hit (”Jimmy`s Fantasy”) with a new arrangement.

A cute moment occurred in the encore when singer Jeff MacDonald brought a camera out and asked for the crowd to pose for a picture because his teenaged daughter didn`t believe his band would draw anyone in Toronto. So we all stood and cheered with our hand in the air while he took the picture.After all, you gots ta help a brother out.

Update: This post was cleaned up for some light editing and formatting.

Update II: Boy do I ever hate the HTML editor in Wordpress. It insists on changing my code and the only way to get it to not do that is turn the visualization off completely, which means I have to hand code everything myself. Pain in the you-know-what.

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????????Update: WTF? There was a post here. I\ll have to look into this.

But yeah, I’m in Montreal now.

Better late than never: I had a hell of a good time at the Drive-By Trucker’s show at the Opera House last Wednesday. They played for 2 1/2 hours (!) and their set list was pretty varied. They didn’t play all the songs I wanted to hear, but with Jason Isbell no longer in the band, that’s too be expected I guess.

That aside, the only song with their current line-up that they didn’t play that I wanted to hear was “Carl Perkin’s Cadillac”, but seeing as they played “Where the Devil Don’t Stay”, “Sink Hole” and “Shut Up and Get Your Ass on the Plane” I guess I can forgive them that.

Not to harp too much on songs from The Dirty South, but a big highlight for me was “Putting People on the Moon”, which I think is one of Patterson Hood’s best songs.

And, of course, no DBT set is complete without Hood’s tale of ’70’s southern rock adventures in “Let There Be Rock”.

A DBT fansite posted the set list of last week’s show. I think it’s a bit jumbled but I could be wrong:

1. The Living Bubba
2. A Ghost To Most
3. Two Daughters and A Beautiful Wife
4. Daddy Needs A Drink
5. 3 Dimes Down
6. I’m Sorry Huston
7. Sink Hole
8. Uncle Frank
9. Puttin’ People On The Moon
10. Self Destructive Zones
11. The Company I Keep
12. Hell No, I Ain’t Happy
13. Checkout Time In Vegas
14. You and Your Crystal Meth
15. Goode’s Field Road
16. Women Without Whiskey
17. The Opening Act
18. Where The Devil Don’t Stay
19. Lookout Mountain
20. Zip City
21. 18 Wheels Of Love
22. Shut Up and Get On The Plane
23. Let There Be Rock
24. Buttholeville
25. State Trooper
26. Buttholeville (reprise)

Link

Gaunt had their moments back in the day. Part of the surprisingly rich Columbus, Ohio scene back in the early ’90s, along with the New Bomb Turks and Cheater Slicks, Gaunt made a couple of great records before making the disappointing Bricks and Blackouts, which showed the band with all their rough edges sanded down. Anyway, ever since I heard their single “Jim Motherfucker” from the 7″ of the same name, it’s been in my head on many occaisons. It just rocks. The record it’s on is pretty hard to find so I was pretty stoked to find it on a pretty kick-ass blog called Something I Learned Today. It looks like the  blog’s writer and I were into a lot of the same stuff back in the day and the site has been a gold mine of stuff I missed out on or just never got around to. It looks like the site may be losing steam, which is too bad.

Here is the page with “Jim Motherfucker” on it.  I don’t know if he’s cool with direct links to MP3 files so I am linking to the page it’s on instead. The version I’m writing about is on the 7″. There is another version on the Whitey The Man 10″, but I don’t think it’s nearly as good.

There have been a lot of tributes to singer-songwriter John Stewart on his passing a few weeks ago, but I think this performance of “Mother Country” from his signature release, 1969’s California Bloodlines, speaks for itself. This was recorded in April 2007.

Every year I do a list of favorite releases from the past year. It’s a hold over from my days as a fanzine editor, where I used to do a Top 10 list of favorite stuff that I came across between issues.

This year I decided to make a change. I decided to say just what I think and feel about a release and ignore the old professional music journalist in me that demanded at least a modicum of objectivity.

This list is in no particular order as each one is tops in its own way. Unlike in years past I could not name a “Record of the Year” I’m not too interested in making those kind of declarations anyway.

Ben Weasel and His Iron String Quartet – These Ones Are Bitter
It seems like every review I read about this release talked more about it being digital-only than about the actual, you know, music. And that’s odd because the idea of distributing music online is not exactly a new concept; it’s just one that’s gaining more traction from artists like Ben Weasel for the simple reason that it’s cheaper and more efficient. That’s a good thing because I was able to download it from Emusic as soon as it was available.

These Ones Are Bitter is, simply, a great fucking album. A big step up from 2002’s Fidatevi, which I thought had pretty sketchy production and not as good songs. One of the reasons I think this is a better record is that, by all accounts, he took a longer time making it, having recorded it with donated studio time, which allowed him to create more fully realized versions of songs.

Musically, it’s not too different from what you would expect from Ben Weasel: singalong Ramone’s style punk rock with Weasel’s trademark nasal honk. Much of this record can be compared in spirit to Screeching Weasel’s 1991 release My Brain Hurts with simple song structure and simple leads, which is perhaps best exemplified in “Let Freedom Ring” “Happy Saturday” and “Jeanette”. Weasel and back-up musicians that consisted of members of Akaline Trio and the All-American Rejects also explore a bit of more modern Social Distortion territory in tracks like “Got My Number” and “First Day of Spring”.

The Besnard Lakes – The Besnard Lakes are the Dark Horse
On a purely creative level, this is the best record I heard all year. While the band apparently resists being labeled “post rock”, the shoe fits and I will use it for convenience and clarity. The Besnard Lakes are best at creating mood and using all the tools at their disposal (multi-layered arrangements, sound samples, reverb) to evoke that mood. More, they effortlessly mix genres like ‘60s psychedelic, ‘80s new wave and industrial, creating a compelling sound that demands more than just passive listening.

Explosions in the Sky – All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone
One of these days I’m going to write something about post rock being the new prog rock. And I will not look very good in it because I do like a lot of the music flying under the post rock banner, either willingly or otherwise. This release by the Explosions in the Sky is a perfect example: One of the things this band is good at is creating imagery through sound. They are the reason the visualization feature in Windows Media Player was invented.

“The Birth and Death of the Day”, begins with a slow burn, climaxing with a screaming guitar that flies over top of the rest of the instrumentation like a fireball roaring through space.

The concluding track, “So Long, Lonesome”, is the opposite: It’s a quiet, gentle piece with a twinkling piano that evokes the image of a candle burning down to the bottom and flickering out.

Bishop Allen – The Broken String
I’ve been following Bishop Allen since I saw their set at NXNE a few years ago. The Broken String is their second full-length, which comes off their cute gimmick from 2006 where they released a CD EP each month for the entire year. I’m only familiar with a couple of songs from those releases as I only downloaded the freebies they posted to their website each month but I noticed couple tracks showed up on this full-length.

“The Monitor”, which kicks off the record, is from the June or July release, or neither, I’m not entirely sure and I’m too lazy to look it up right now. But regardless, it’s a fantastic song, with a haunting vocal line and arrangement, and somewhat obscure lyrics about the USS Monitor, the first ironclad warship commissioned by the United States Navy and which was used in a famous battle during the American Civil War and later lost at sea.

“Corazon”, another standout, and which was one of my favourite songs of 2006, shows up here with a slightly different arrangement than what appeared on the EP. It’s another slightly off-kilter song that appears to be about the singer’s piano. My only gripe is that the bass drives me nuts at times; it is a little too staccato, when the song really calls for a more fluid sound.

Bishop Allen mine similar territory as fellow New Yorkers Interpol and The National, but with less emphasis on the darker Joy Division-ish elements and more on the hooky pop.

Kat Goldman – Sing Your Song
Kat Goldman is described in her bio as “one of Canada’s best-kept secrets” and I’m wondering why that is. She is certainly one of the more talented singer-songwriters in Toronto today.

I came across her music completely by accident; I don’t know about you but sometimes when I’m on the Web listening to new music, I click link after link of artists’ sites or MySpace pages and somehow came across an MP3 of “Weight of the World”, which I became completely taken with. I did some reading and got a not-entirely-clear picture of her story. She was in a bad accident a few years ago where she almost died. If I read correctly, she was in a bakery when she got smoked by a car that crashed through the window and pinned her against the wall.

I don’t know how this experience informed the songs on this release, as there isn’t a track that overtly talks about it, but it’s hard to imagine that her perspective on life and her work hasn’t been affected. So in some respect this sophomore release is really a second debut. Or not. I’m just glad I stumbled across it.

Aside from “Weight of the World”, some standout tracks for me were “Baby You Gonna Fall In Love” with its warm ‘70s-style production and full-voiced piano accompaniment, “Driving All Night” and “Red Canoe”.

Jack DeJohnette – Peace Time
This release, for me, is not only one of my favorites from last year, it’s also one of the more perplexing. I am first to admit that I don’t understand it, but I do really like it. It consists of one 60-minute track that is like a meditation; it’s quiet, measured and filled with nuance.

Instrumentally, it’s just piano, flute and what sounds like a didgeridoo. I don’t know for sure as the personnel isn’t listed on emusic, where I downloaded it (that’s a flaw that I hope they correct in future iterations), or anywhere else for that matter. All I know is that I like listening to it and after it’s over I kinda wish it wasn’t.

Favorite Shows

I didn’t make it out for as many shows as I used to. Maybe I’m getting old. Having said that, not very many shows stuck out for me this year. Some standouts for me were a Dodge Fiasco show at the Dakota in early spring, the Subhumans (UK) at the Reverb, Tim Barry at Holy Joes, although it was the biggest sausage fest I’ve been to since I saw Art Bergmann at a club in Victoria many years ago; speaking of the Dakota, I saw NQ Arbuckle play a few very enjoyable sets there, in particular one where they played with Rich Hope and Carolyn Mark.
The show I had the most fun at was the UK Subs at the Kathedral. I even got to meet Charlie Harper after it was all over. I bought a T-shirt to mark the occaison, which I rarely do.

Song of the Year
“Is There a Ghost?” by Band of Horses. Man, what a moody, evocative song.

The “How to Save a Life” Award for Most Irritating Song of the Year
“The Sweet Escape” by Gwen Stefani. Of course, now that I’ve written that, I’ll hear it everywhere I go for the next week.

What’s Missing
Two bands I love, Bad Religion and the New Pornographers both put out new releases, which may have made this list if I had picked them up by now.

Update
How could I have forgotten to mention that I got to see The Tennessee Three? I even got to meet WS Holland, Johnny Cash’s drummer for many years, who played on both Live at San Quentin and Live at Folsom Prison, who played on the session for the Million Dollar Quartet back in 1956, which featured Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins and Elvis Presley. Shaking the hand of the man who lived through so many legendary moments was a truly memorable experience.

I’m continually impressed by people who have the time and motivation to create a daily blog. I had never thought that this would be a daily thing for me, but I’m surprised to find that I post here in spurts; a few posts a week here, a few there and then I neglect it for a while.

In all honesty, daily updates are, if I may be permitted to use an annoying phrase, so Web 1.0. I, like many of my friends, keep track of the blogs (and many sites) I read through an RSS feed. RSS feeds tend to frees content from its immediate temporal place. They make it so the old-school Web metrics of “eye-balls” and “time on site” are not really relevant any more. Back in the dot-com days it used to bug me that time-on-site was considered an important metric to measure site success. I figured that if a user was looking to buy something, the quicker you get them the item they were looking for and get them through the checkout, the more successful the site is. Being on a site like that for a long time, it seemed to me, was a sign that something was wrong, not something to be celebrated.

Having said that, I used to look forward to each day’s edition of Suck, which was more insightful and better-written than it had any right to be. And I have been reading Salon long enough to remember that they used to shut down the site in the late afternoon in order to upload the day’s new content.

One of the most pivotal moments of my career was sitting in a conference room in a barren post-dot-com office building in north Toronto watching a demo of a new generation content management system and thinking “where the hell have I been?” At the time I was managing a 1500 page Web site using Dreamweaver, Photoshop and Cute FTP. I felt like I was letting my organization down by not being aware of these tools and ever since then I’ve been out in front of most advances. Oh, my workplace now has a pretty kick-ass CMS.

Along the way, the way content has been delivered - hell, the way content is defined, has changed and how it is delivered and consumed has taken on many different forms. Before it was brochure-ware, which became articles, which became articles with calls to action to buy something. Now social processes are the big thing. It makes sense if you think about it. The Internet was originally a social instrument, a tool for collaboration. Think: e-mail, usenet. Then, with the Web came an individualization. Think: Personal home pages. The emphasis changed from the public to the personal, or, put another way, the “us” to the “I”. Now it’s changing back.

This is what I’m working on with my work these days. While social media is a pretty trendy term, and it seems like everyone involved in UX design has now adapted it as one of their interests, I have to wonder what took so long? And will it stay?