Thursday, May 15, 2008
May 08 live reviews
Saturday, May 3
Pas Chic Chic, Elfin Saddle @ Whippersnapper Gallery
An Albatross, Aa at Sneaky Dee’s
With even a small festival that’s as well curated as Eric Warner's Over the Top, some acts are bound to be lost in the shuffle.
Sadly, that was the case for Montreal’s Pas Chic Chic, who played to less than a dozen people in a spacious art gallery where the acoustics did the band no favours. Their 2008 album Au Contraire is a captivating mix of French pop and psychedelics, though how it would come off live was a mystery—especially considering that it’s a band fronted by Roger Tellier-Craig of Fly Pan Am, perhaps the most abrasive and alienating acts to emerge on Montreal’s Constellation Records. I do remember a DJ mix he did for Brave New Waves of French pop oddities, so I knew there was another side of him.
Live, Tellier-Craig turns out to be a completely engaging front man, dancing up a storm, singing directly to the audience and rarely stopping to approach his keyboard. The rest of the band are a visual treat as well, dressed exactly like you would expect for a Montreal rock band—if they were playing on a Radio-Canada after-school dance party TV show in 1972. The muddy acoustics dulled some of their impact, but the band themselves lost the plot during the one jamming interlude near the end of the set. But who can blame them? Try as they did to make the most out of this gig, they can be forgiven for not being inspired to higher flights of fancy. This band needs a bigger stage and a bigger sound; someone please bring them back to Toronto immediately—if they’ll come back.
Opening act Elfin Saddle reside in Montreal, but they very much look like they emerged from a cabin in the woods somewhere on their native Vancouver Island, dragging with them their instrumental detritus: accordions sawed in half, toy drum kits, ukuleles and saws. They sing in two styles: the cracked holler of a mountain man and that of a quirky Japanese girl, reaching improbable harmonies between those two poles. Their instrumental inventiveness drives the live show, especially the way they play off each other rhythmically on makeshift drum kits. They're already scheduled back in Toronto, as part of Pop Montreal's Pop Off show at NXNE: June 14 at the Silver Dollar with Slim Twig and Caroline Keating.
Over at Sneaky Dee’s, a capacity crowd was there to see a new incarnation of Toronto favourites The Creeping Nobodies, as well as the all-out assault of headliners An Albatross. I missed the Nobodies, but had to suffer through Aa (pronounced “big A little A”) who weren’t much more imaginative than their name. With three drummers and electronics, they promised a huge, punishing sound and delivered—but didn’t do anything with it, rhythmically or otherwise. If you’ve always wanted to hear Henry Rollins front a drum circle, this is your band.
An Albatross, on the other hand, deliver a manic rock’n’roll show to end all manic rock’n’roll shows. Like Fantomas sent back to the garage, their spastic speed metal contorts itself relentlessly but miraculously always ends up back on its feet—as does singer Ed Gieda, who looks like a Robert Crumb drawing of a young Steven Tyler. I seem to remember some more dynamics in their set when I last saw them in NYC about three years ago, but no one should ever go to An Albatross show expecting subtlety. Their debut album title said it all: Eat Lightning, Shit Thunder.
Just before they took the stage, a couple in their late 50s entered Sneaky Dee’s, meaning that I was instantly no longer the oldest person in the room. I assumed they were merely curious barhoppers, and so I expected them to leave once An Albatross began. Surprisingly, they didn’t. Even more surprisingly, they made their way to the front, where I recognized the lady as one of my favourite artists of all time: Mary Margaret O’Hara. Her date was snapping pics of the band through their whole set, including when Gieda climbed on top of the window ledge next to O’Hara, lay down and started grinding the bar shelf, much to her delight and amusement. O’Hara is an enigmatic figure in this town, but certainly not a recluse; nevertheless, this was the last gig where I’d expect to see her. A Mike Patton project, maybe, but perhaps the legend of An Albatross is spreading beyond the abrasive art-punk-prog scene.
Tuesday, May 13
Le Mystere de Voix Bulgares @ St. Andrew's Church
It was only two years ago that Eastern European music was the Unexpected International Influence surfacing in various incarnations: the "gypsy punk" of Gogol Bordello; the romantic brass of Beirut; Geoff Berner's exploration of the political and social roots of Roma and klezmer music; the dancefloor recontextualization of Shantel and the Electric Gypsyland compilations; the cultural mash-up of Balkan Beat Box; and on a smaller scale, greater awareness of groups like Kocani Orkestar and Taraf de Haidouks.
And yet for all the excitement of the new school, it's worth remembering one of the first sensations to emerge from behind the Iron Curtain back in the 80s: Le Mystere de Voix Bulgares, aka The Bulgarian State Female Radio and Television Choir (several of those adjectives were dropped gradually during the group's 50-year existence). Their haunting harmonics are a strange amalgam of Roma, Arabic, Turkish and Hebrew, and utterly alien to much of what we associate with choral music—most of which I would never consider going to see in performance, unless my own flesh and blood was involved (which, for the record, he is—my brother's ensemble backed up Kenny Rogers once, true story).
But Les Voix Bulgares are something else entirely, which is why they've survived the fickle flavour-of-the-month approach to trends in world music—this Toronto performance was near-capacity, filled with enthusiastic fans of all ages. And their sound is such a singular, unique and technically accomplished entity that they're unlikely to be assimilated into some basement indie rocker's exotic sonic daydreaming. Balkan Beat Box's track "Bulgarian Chicks" is the lone exception; but hearing two or three Bulgarian voices doesn't compare to the rich experience of hearing the full choir.
While witnessing the glory of their live sound, I remembered enough from my university theory courses to know that part of the choir's appeal lies in their use of harmonic seconds and ninths, but a bit of basic research told me that there are also a lot of parallel fourths and fifths—two things which are absolutely taboo in formal Western European theory. (They're also part of the reason I failed Tonal Harmony at a formative time when I was discovering Sonic Youth and Thelonious Monk, two artists who changed any notions of harmony—conscious or subconscious—that I may have had up to that point.) Being absorbed in the magical dissonance of the Voix Bulgares makes it downright shocking when at one point they constructed a traditional triad, Twist-and-Shout style, throwing everyone for a loop and reminding us what we think choral music should sound like—and how boring it is in comparison.
Even more fascinating is the rhythmic complexity. You can't splice this stuff easily into a remix, because there never appears to be a consistent meter no matter how many times you count to 5, 7, 11, or 13. That makes the role of classy conductor Dora Hristova even more impressive, when she's ensuring that five or six seemingly incongruous rhythmic patterns interlock and end up on the same page.
This is all egghead talk compared to the visceral pleasures of the Voix—not just the beautifully sonorous shapes of their harmonies, but the way they incorporate yelps, ticks and chatter into the pieces (which is not uncommon in much Eastern European vocal music, as Iva Bittova fans will tell you). And then there's their physical presence: the first set featured their traditional dress; the second more modern formal gowns. Each set also featured a variety of featured soloists, duos, quartets and sextets—including the surprise appearance of two token dudes—giving the set more range than initially expected.
Still mysterious after all these years, the Voix Bulgares are still a unique and powerful live experience. Their current North American tour dates can be found here, including two dates in Vancouver and one each in Edmonton and Nanaimo.
The presenters of the event, Small World Music, always have a variety of worth events going on in Toronto. Their next event is Japan's Yoshida Brothers on May 25; the Costa Rican/Iranian guitar duo Strunz and Farah are on June 1; both events are at Harbourfront's Enwave Theatre. Small World also has two high-profile Iranian acts coming up: singer Shajarian and the Ava Ensemble at Roy Thomson Hall on June 6, and Zarbang, a Persian Qawwali percussion ensemble, at the Ontario Science Centre on June 1.
And on the Eastern European tip, David Buchbinder presents his Odessa/Havana project at the Lula Lounge on June 11.
Pas Chic Chic, Elfin Saddle @ Whippersnapper Gallery
An Albatross, Aa at Sneaky Dee’s
With even a small festival that’s as well curated as Eric Warner's Over the Top, some acts are bound to be lost in the shuffle.
Sadly, that was the case for Montreal’s Pas Chic Chic, who played to less than a dozen people in a spacious art gallery where the acoustics did the band no favours. Their 2008 album Au Contraire is a captivating mix of French pop and psychedelics, though how it would come off live was a mystery—especially considering that it’s a band fronted by Roger Tellier-Craig of Fly Pan Am, perhaps the most abrasive and alienating acts to emerge on Montreal’s Constellation Records. I do remember a DJ mix he did for Brave New Waves of French pop oddities, so I knew there was another side of him.
Live, Tellier-Craig turns out to be a completely engaging front man, dancing up a storm, singing directly to the audience and rarely stopping to approach his keyboard. The rest of the band are a visual treat as well, dressed exactly like you would expect for a Montreal rock band—if they were playing on a Radio-Canada after-school dance party TV show in 1972. The muddy acoustics dulled some of their impact, but the band themselves lost the plot during the one jamming interlude near the end of the set. But who can blame them? Try as they did to make the most out of this gig, they can be forgiven for not being inspired to higher flights of fancy. This band needs a bigger stage and a bigger sound; someone please bring them back to Toronto immediately—if they’ll come back.
Opening act Elfin Saddle reside in Montreal, but they very much look like they emerged from a cabin in the woods somewhere on their native Vancouver Island, dragging with them their instrumental detritus: accordions sawed in half, toy drum kits, ukuleles and saws. They sing in two styles: the cracked holler of a mountain man and that of a quirky Japanese girl, reaching improbable harmonies between those two poles. Their instrumental inventiveness drives the live show, especially the way they play off each other rhythmically on makeshift drum kits. They're already scheduled back in Toronto, as part of Pop Montreal's Pop Off show at NXNE: June 14 at the Silver Dollar with Slim Twig and Caroline Keating.
Over at Sneaky Dee’s, a capacity crowd was there to see a new incarnation of Toronto favourites The Creeping Nobodies, as well as the all-out assault of headliners An Albatross. I missed the Nobodies, but had to suffer through Aa (pronounced “big A little A”) who weren’t much more imaginative than their name. With three drummers and electronics, they promised a huge, punishing sound and delivered—but didn’t do anything with it, rhythmically or otherwise. If you’ve always wanted to hear Henry Rollins front a drum circle, this is your band.
An Albatross, on the other hand, deliver a manic rock’n’roll show to end all manic rock’n’roll shows. Like Fantomas sent back to the garage, their spastic speed metal contorts itself relentlessly but miraculously always ends up back on its feet—as does singer Ed Gieda, who looks like a Robert Crumb drawing of a young Steven Tyler. I seem to remember some more dynamics in their set when I last saw them in NYC about three years ago, but no one should ever go to An Albatross show expecting subtlety. Their debut album title said it all: Eat Lightning, Shit Thunder.
Just before they took the stage, a couple in their late 50s entered Sneaky Dee’s, meaning that I was instantly no longer the oldest person in the room. I assumed they were merely curious barhoppers, and so I expected them to leave once An Albatross began. Surprisingly, they didn’t. Even more surprisingly, they made their way to the front, where I recognized the lady as one of my favourite artists of all time: Mary Margaret O’Hara. Her date was snapping pics of the band through their whole set, including when Gieda climbed on top of the window ledge next to O’Hara, lay down and started grinding the bar shelf, much to her delight and amusement. O’Hara is an enigmatic figure in this town, but certainly not a recluse; nevertheless, this was the last gig where I’d expect to see her. A Mike Patton project, maybe, but perhaps the legend of An Albatross is spreading beyond the abrasive art-punk-prog scene.
Tuesday, May 13
Le Mystere de Voix Bulgares @ St. Andrew's Church
It was only two years ago that Eastern European music was the Unexpected International Influence surfacing in various incarnations: the "gypsy punk" of Gogol Bordello; the romantic brass of Beirut; Geoff Berner's exploration of the political and social roots of Roma and klezmer music; the dancefloor recontextualization of Shantel and the Electric Gypsyland compilations; the cultural mash-up of Balkan Beat Box; and on a smaller scale, greater awareness of groups like Kocani Orkestar and Taraf de Haidouks.
And yet for all the excitement of the new school, it's worth remembering one of the first sensations to emerge from behind the Iron Curtain back in the 80s: Le Mystere de Voix Bulgares, aka The Bulgarian State Female Radio and Television Choir (several of those adjectives were dropped gradually during the group's 50-year existence). Their haunting harmonics are a strange amalgam of Roma, Arabic, Turkish and Hebrew, and utterly alien to much of what we associate with choral music—most of which I would never consider going to see in performance, unless my own flesh and blood was involved (which, for the record, he is—my brother's ensemble backed up Kenny Rogers once, true story).
But Les Voix Bulgares are something else entirely, which is why they've survived the fickle flavour-of-the-month approach to trends in world music—this Toronto performance was near-capacity, filled with enthusiastic fans of all ages. And their sound is such a singular, unique and technically accomplished entity that they're unlikely to be assimilated into some basement indie rocker's exotic sonic daydreaming. Balkan Beat Box's track "Bulgarian Chicks" is the lone exception; but hearing two or three Bulgarian voices doesn't compare to the rich experience of hearing the full choir.
While witnessing the glory of their live sound, I remembered enough from my university theory courses to know that part of the choir's appeal lies in their use of harmonic seconds and ninths, but a bit of basic research told me that there are also a lot of parallel fourths and fifths—two things which are absolutely taboo in formal Western European theory. (They're also part of the reason I failed Tonal Harmony at a formative time when I was discovering Sonic Youth and Thelonious Monk, two artists who changed any notions of harmony—conscious or subconscious—that I may have had up to that point.) Being absorbed in the magical dissonance of the Voix Bulgares makes it downright shocking when at one point they constructed a traditional triad, Twist-and-Shout style, throwing everyone for a loop and reminding us what we think choral music should sound like—and how boring it is in comparison.
Even more fascinating is the rhythmic complexity. You can't splice this stuff easily into a remix, because there never appears to be a consistent meter no matter how many times you count to 5, 7, 11, or 13. That makes the role of classy conductor Dora Hristova even more impressive, when she's ensuring that five or six seemingly incongruous rhythmic patterns interlock and end up on the same page.
This is all egghead talk compared to the visceral pleasures of the Voix—not just the beautifully sonorous shapes of their harmonies, but the way they incorporate yelps, ticks and chatter into the pieces (which is not uncommon in much Eastern European vocal music, as Iva Bittova fans will tell you). And then there's their physical presence: the first set featured their traditional dress; the second more modern formal gowns. Each set also featured a variety of featured soloists, duos, quartets and sextets—including the surprise appearance of two token dudes—giving the set more range than initially expected.
Still mysterious after all these years, the Voix Bulgares are still a unique and powerful live experience. Their current North American tour dates can be found here, including two dates in Vancouver and one each in Edmonton and Nanaimo.
The presenters of the event, Small World Music, always have a variety of worth events going on in Toronto. Their next event is Japan's Yoshida Brothers on May 25; the Costa Rican/Iranian guitar duo Strunz and Farah are on June 1; both events are at Harbourfront's Enwave Theatre. Small World also has two high-profile Iranian acts coming up: singer Shajarian and the Ava Ensemble at Roy Thomson Hall on June 6, and Zarbang, a Persian Qawwali percussion ensemble, at the Ontario Science Centre on June 1.
And on the Eastern European tip, David Buchbinder presents his Odessa/Havana project at the Lula Lounge on June 11.
Labels: Aa, An Albatross, Elfin Saddle, Le Mystere de Voix Bulgares, Pas Chic Chic
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Springtime 08: New Life, Live Shows
This blog may have been inactive over the last month, but there's been plenty of live action in Toronto that I've had the pleasure to be privy to. As noted here and here and finally here (with my retort in the comments), Destroyer was not one of them. Here's a brief recap.
March 27
Burnt Sugar at Lula Lounge.
This is an arkestra conducted by guitarist and cultural theorist Greg Tate, featuring fine funk and jazz players, yet it never really coalesced in the unexpected ways I expected—if that makes any sense. I was hoping for more sense of rhythmic and harmonic freedom, but instead the band seemed content to ride rather simple grooves that one sympathetic colleague uncharitably described as "jam band territory." The much-ballyhooed "conduction" employed by Tate and his band members didn't seem any different than what every jazz band on the planet does: communicate through eye and hand gestures on stage, with or without a baton in your hand.
There were definitely inspired moments, mostly courtesy of the alien-like MIDI saxophonist and the punchy baritone player. But overall, I much prefer the wilder and more inclusive antics of Toronto's own Dave Clark and the Woodchoppers Association, who have been conducting improv sessions for the better part of ten years now. Anyone who's witnessed the Woodchoppers at the Tranzac, at the old Ted's Wrecking Yard, or Clark's annual Hillside Festival workshops knows exactly what I'm talking about. Clark pushes his players—and often the audience—in every possible direction and isn't afraid to rip everything apart before pulling it back together, making Burnt Sugar seem downright safe in comparison.
March 28
Kalimba Summit: Kahil El'Zabar, Njacko Backo, Laura Barrett, Nifty at Tranzac.
As one can tell from hyper-self-conscious articles like this one, Toronto's indie rock community suffers from a load of white guilt when it comes to building bridges to the rich world music community here. But thanks to the valiant efforts of people like David Dacks of The Abstract Index and, more specifically, Jonny Dovercourt of The Music Gallery and Wavelength, events like this are starting to become more commonplace. And hopefully they become less stilted than much of this evening ended up being.
Nifty is Matt Smith, who formed Les Mouches with Final Fantasy's Owen Pallett back in the early days of Torontopia. His debut album, A Sparrow! A Sparrow!, was one of the most pleasant surprises of 2007, involving sound collage, metallic percussion pieces, aquatic techno and avant-garde folk songs. In many ways, Nifty is everything I always hope Sandro Perri's various projects (Polmo Polpo, Glissandro 70, his self-titled folk material) will be but rarely are to these ears.
Live, however, Smith is stuck behind his sampler, loop pedals and mixing board, with nothing much to focus the eyes on other than his highly questionable 80s fashion choices. And while the reverb-drenched recording rarely gets stuck in a swamp, the live set does exactly that all too often. As for his use of kalimba, it was obviously inspired in part by Congotronics, but he didn't take it far enough in that direction to hold the interest of the audience faction who came to hear the headliners.
Laura Barrett has single-handedly brought the kalimba to the attention of Toronto's indie community, and it's safe to say that she was the impetus for this evening's programming. Her two EPs to date don't do proper justice to what she does and where she's going: her crazy busy kalimba playing is the perfect complement to her abstract sense of melodics that recalls late-period Joni Mitchell—in a good way—and the new material, due out this fall, showed her continuing to grow away from her cutesy beginnings.
Barrett claims to have felt a bit out of place on a bill with Njacko Backo, an African-Canadian from Cameroon who fronts a band called Kalimba Kalimba—obviously not a newcomer to the instrument. Backo also spends part of his time performing and teaching for school children, a trait that came across all too well at this performance. His lyrics were simplistic and sadly often cloying. He appeared to be having some rhythmic difficulty perhaps due to a bad monitor mix, and the way he joked about bullying the audience into crowd participation had the counterintuitive effect of feeling uncomfortable.
The evening took a total shift when Kahil El'Zabar took the stage. A tall, cool and commanding figure, he took a markedly different approach than everyone on stage before him. El'Zabar plays the blues, sparse and full of soul, and without the busy rhythms that mark most kalimba playing. He has the demeanour of a seasoned jazz dude, the kind who can casually remind you that he's played with everyone from Paul Simon to Nina Simone to Pharoah Sanders without seeming like a total jackass. He works himself into a trance, to the point where he's humming gutturally and practically twisting his head around Stevie-style, lost in the moment and pulling us in with him. It had been a long night at that point, but there wasn't any question of anyone bailing early once El'Zabar cast his spell.
He made a great speech (among many) that gave Laura Barrett some props and then invited everyone on stage for a final jam. The collaboration was less remarkable than we'd hoped, and perhaps a visibly unimpressed Njacko Backo did the right thing by curtailing it early on. But it was worth trying—as was this bill, which if nothing else introduced Barrett and El'Zabar to new audiences and each other. More culture clash, please.
March 31
Sunset Rubdown at Lee's Palace.
I've seen Sunset Rubdown plenty of times, including very early band incarnations at tiny gigs in Montreal. I've even seen them plenty of times at Lee's Palace; this would be my third time. And because I somehow postponed spending any serious time with the latest album—Random Spirit Lover, which came out last fall—this gig wasn't on my radar at all. Until, that is, my old friend Mark "The Nooch" Nichol wrote and asked if I was coming; he's the latest addition to his Mile End Sunday soccer mates in Sunset Rubdown, playing kalimba, bass, and percussion, and I had yet to see him in the band.
The Nooch did not disappoint, and neither did the rest of his new crew. They're packing more muscle now that there's a bass being traded about on stage. Camille Wynn-Ingr still sounds magical harmonizing with Spencer Krug, who remains one of the more endearingly awkward men currently fronting a powerhouse band. And the two dudes trading guitar and drum duties take an inventive approach to both instruments that elevates the arrangements far above the realm of rote rock bands.
The new material is better than I remembered the album sounding, especially the song that Helen Spitzer always thinks sounds like Big Country. And I'm still baffled at the sight of people holding hands, singing and swooning to "Us Ones In Between," though it's a lovely sight.
April 8
Jens Lekman, Final Fantasy at Great Hall
Hearing brand new Final Fantasy material was reason enough to go to this show. Seeing Jens Lekman live for the first time was another. And I'd be lying if I said that the fact that I live about a 30-second walk away from the beautiful, hallowed venue wasn't yet another still.
Despite its beauty, the Great Hall has some serious acoustic problems, which plagued much of the Final Fantasy set. It put off Owen Pallett somewhat and didn't help his nerves about debuting new material that he didn't consider finished works. Not that it mattered: the new songs sound great, punctuated with lots of staccato rhythms he creates by bouncing his bow on the strings, sounding not unlike Japanese kotos. The new album will be called Homeland, due out in the fall, and Pallett described it as being set in a "fictional world where I am the supreme deity." Um, isn't that the case with all narrative fiction, in song lyrics or otherwise?
Jens Lekman had a lot of love from the crowd for his Swedish Jonathan Richman schtick, which would fall flat on its face were he not such a charmer. He's as deadpan as the Flight of the Conchords, and yet because of his ESL lyrics it's not always clear when he's conning you and when he actually thinks he's nicked an awesome rhyme. Either way, his charisma outweighs the cheese, and his way with classic melodies supercedes any other shortcomings. Plus, for this performance he was joined by Final Fantasy's projectionist Steph Comilang, which added visual splendour to the stripped-down set, which otherwise featured only a percussionist and the occasional backing tape.
Lekman wrapped up the evening by performing in the park beside the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (I was in bed by that point); something he'd obviously planned from the beginning of the set, and seemed itchy to ditch the formality of the stage show to get to it.
April 10
Hilotrons, Andy Swan at Horseshoe
Ottawa's Kelp Records crew rolled into Toronto with a couple of well-kept secrets, a niche that Kelp seems to have nailed down. It's a specialty that no label aspires to, and while Kelp may be a sensation in their hometown—witness their ability to throw massive weekend-long parties at the city's major venues every April to celebrate their anniversary—they're far under the radar in Toronto.
That's true even of their only Toronto act, singer/songwriter Andy Swan. Changing the name of his long-running band Detective Kalita to The Michael Parks doesn't help, nor does the fact that he just released a solo album under his own name (Andy Swan's Ottawa).
He's got some critics in his corner, he has the undying loyalty of his Kelp peers who talk him up every chance they get, and he has Polmo Polpo's Sandro Perri playing slide guitar for him occasionally. He also has an arsenal of great songs, but not the kind that make an immediate impression or that his modest stage persona is about to give you a major sales job on. Swan is so subtle that it's taken me years to cotton on to what a talent he is; every time I've seen him I fall further under his spell, and this performance sealed the deal. Without a major hustle behind him, Swan can only hope for a Ron Sexsmith-esque career revival a few more albums down the road.
The Hilotrons are major stars in Ottawa, yet rarely play outside the city limits. That should change with the release of Happymatic, a fine pop album that makes you instantly forget about all those other herky-jerky Devo-tees who are giving art-damaged early 80s pop music a bad name.
The Hilotrons boast a bouncy rhythm section capable of twisting beats upside down and around, while vocalist Mike Dubue unleashes synth squiggles in between a pitch perfect vocal performance. We expect so little from male singers in rock band these days, leaving the operatic performances to melodramatic drama queens in moody art rock bands or sensitive folkie acts. Dubue is having none of that. He's a belter who doesn't need multiple takes to get it right; he nails it every time, as does every instrumentalist standing behind him on stage.
I'd heard earlier recordings by this band and found them mildly interesting at best; Happymatic was a pleasant surprise. But nothing prepared me for how jaw-droppingly awesome the Hilotrons' live show is—miss them at your peril. They certainly don't deserve to be relegated to "well-kept secret" status.
April 14: Man Man, Yeasayer at Lee's Palace
Man Man has always sounded insane. Lead singer Honus Honus howls to a point well beyond hoarse while attacking his keyboard; drummer Pow Pow looks like he'd be sequestered in a straitjacket had he chosen any profession other than percussion; the rest of the band look like a ragtag crew of salty sailors with a questionable grip on sanity. And yet the music has always worked: their strange mash-up of klezmer, cabaret, barrelhouse piano, kitchen sink percussion and raunchy blues managed to never get completely unhinged. Until now.
Maybe they've been playing these songs too long on the road and are bored by now, but there was a perverse desire to play everything twice as fast. The manic marimba player looked like he was ready to lose some limbs. As if to compensate, cracks started to show in their collective stamina by set's end, allowing them to play the until-now rare live treat "Van Helsing's Boombox," a track that's as tender as Man Man ever gets.
Not that anyone in the crowd seemed to mind. Word of mouth has built up over the past three years, thanks in part to the fact they now share a label with Tom Waits and Nick Cave, and there were no doubt many newbies who came out to witness the spectacle. The band seemed all to eager to please, pushing everything over the top and barely able to stay in one spot for more than two bars. Honus Honus in particular had trouble focusing on his piano, because he had a perverse desire to smash yet another piece of percussive metal every two bars or so, while the other Men Men pushed their already-ridiculous falsettos well beyond the breaking point.
Man Man on a bad day are still infinitely more entertaining than most of what builds a buzz on the blogosphere these days—which brings us to opening act Yeasayer. This Brooklyn band might be one of the hippest things among those born after 1980, but anyone a bit older than that be forced to recall Oingo Boingo for the first time in over 20 years. Individually they're amazing players, but that doesn't for a second excuse the monotonous mess they get into. As soon as they took the stage, I realized that I had actually seen them before once, in NYC, and had made a point of forgetting about them. Visually, they're a motley crew, with a preppy vocalist that looks like a young John Linnell from They Might Be Giants, bookended by a Latvian mafia bassist gyrating his hips and a noodly guitarist focusing on his effects. One song with a First Nations vocal feel managed to cut the mustard, but the rest of the set felt downright punishing.
So did Man Man, I'm sure, for some people. Even this day-one fan found them a bit much on this outing, like they were trying to hard to impress the larger audience that had suddenly shown up to see them. Just be yourselves, Men.
March 27
Burnt Sugar at Lula Lounge.
This is an arkestra conducted by guitarist and cultural theorist Greg Tate, featuring fine funk and jazz players, yet it never really coalesced in the unexpected ways I expected—if that makes any sense. I was hoping for more sense of rhythmic and harmonic freedom, but instead the band seemed content to ride rather simple grooves that one sympathetic colleague uncharitably described as "jam band territory." The much-ballyhooed "conduction" employed by Tate and his band members didn't seem any different than what every jazz band on the planet does: communicate through eye and hand gestures on stage, with or without a baton in your hand.
There were definitely inspired moments, mostly courtesy of the alien-like MIDI saxophonist and the punchy baritone player. But overall, I much prefer the wilder and more inclusive antics of Toronto's own Dave Clark and the Woodchoppers Association, who have been conducting improv sessions for the better part of ten years now. Anyone who's witnessed the Woodchoppers at the Tranzac, at the old Ted's Wrecking Yard, or Clark's annual Hillside Festival workshops knows exactly what I'm talking about. Clark pushes his players—and often the audience—in every possible direction and isn't afraid to rip everything apart before pulling it back together, making Burnt Sugar seem downright safe in comparison.
March 28
Kalimba Summit: Kahil El'Zabar, Njacko Backo, Laura Barrett, Nifty at Tranzac.
As one can tell from hyper-self-conscious articles like this one, Toronto's indie rock community suffers from a load of white guilt when it comes to building bridges to the rich world music community here. But thanks to the valiant efforts of people like David Dacks of The Abstract Index and, more specifically, Jonny Dovercourt of The Music Gallery and Wavelength, events like this are starting to become more commonplace. And hopefully they become less stilted than much of this evening ended up being.
Nifty is Matt Smith, who formed Les Mouches with Final Fantasy's Owen Pallett back in the early days of Torontopia. His debut album, A Sparrow! A Sparrow!, was one of the most pleasant surprises of 2007, involving sound collage, metallic percussion pieces, aquatic techno and avant-garde folk songs. In many ways, Nifty is everything I always hope Sandro Perri's various projects (Polmo Polpo, Glissandro 70, his self-titled folk material) will be but rarely are to these ears.
Live, however, Smith is stuck behind his sampler, loop pedals and mixing board, with nothing much to focus the eyes on other than his highly questionable 80s fashion choices. And while the reverb-drenched recording rarely gets stuck in a swamp, the live set does exactly that all too often. As for his use of kalimba, it was obviously inspired in part by Congotronics, but he didn't take it far enough in that direction to hold the interest of the audience faction who came to hear the headliners.
Laura Barrett has single-handedly brought the kalimba to the attention of Toronto's indie community, and it's safe to say that she was the impetus for this evening's programming. Her two EPs to date don't do proper justice to what she does and where she's going: her crazy busy kalimba playing is the perfect complement to her abstract sense of melodics that recalls late-period Joni Mitchell—in a good way—and the new material, due out this fall, showed her continuing to grow away from her cutesy beginnings.
Barrett claims to have felt a bit out of place on a bill with Njacko Backo, an African-Canadian from Cameroon who fronts a band called Kalimba Kalimba—obviously not a newcomer to the instrument. Backo also spends part of his time performing and teaching for school children, a trait that came across all too well at this performance. His lyrics were simplistic and sadly often cloying. He appeared to be having some rhythmic difficulty perhaps due to a bad monitor mix, and the way he joked about bullying the audience into crowd participation had the counterintuitive effect of feeling uncomfortable.
The evening took a total shift when Kahil El'Zabar took the stage. A tall, cool and commanding figure, he took a markedly different approach than everyone on stage before him. El'Zabar plays the blues, sparse and full of soul, and without the busy rhythms that mark most kalimba playing. He has the demeanour of a seasoned jazz dude, the kind who can casually remind you that he's played with everyone from Paul Simon to Nina Simone to Pharoah Sanders without seeming like a total jackass. He works himself into a trance, to the point where he's humming gutturally and practically twisting his head around Stevie-style, lost in the moment and pulling us in with him. It had been a long night at that point, but there wasn't any question of anyone bailing early once El'Zabar cast his spell.
He made a great speech (among many) that gave Laura Barrett some props and then invited everyone on stage for a final jam. The collaboration was less remarkable than we'd hoped, and perhaps a visibly unimpressed Njacko Backo did the right thing by curtailing it early on. But it was worth trying—as was this bill, which if nothing else introduced Barrett and El'Zabar to new audiences and each other. More culture clash, please.
March 31
Sunset Rubdown at Lee's Palace.
I've seen Sunset Rubdown plenty of times, including very early band incarnations at tiny gigs in Montreal. I've even seen them plenty of times at Lee's Palace; this would be my third time. And because I somehow postponed spending any serious time with the latest album—Random Spirit Lover, which came out last fall—this gig wasn't on my radar at all. Until, that is, my old friend Mark "The Nooch" Nichol wrote and asked if I was coming; he's the latest addition to his Mile End Sunday soccer mates in Sunset Rubdown, playing kalimba, bass, and percussion, and I had yet to see him in the band.
The Nooch did not disappoint, and neither did the rest of his new crew. They're packing more muscle now that there's a bass being traded about on stage. Camille Wynn-Ingr still sounds magical harmonizing with Spencer Krug, who remains one of the more endearingly awkward men currently fronting a powerhouse band. And the two dudes trading guitar and drum duties take an inventive approach to both instruments that elevates the arrangements far above the realm of rote rock bands.
The new material is better than I remembered the album sounding, especially the song that Helen Spitzer always thinks sounds like Big Country. And I'm still baffled at the sight of people holding hands, singing and swooning to "Us Ones In Between," though it's a lovely sight.
April 8
Jens Lekman, Final Fantasy at Great Hall
Hearing brand new Final Fantasy material was reason enough to go to this show. Seeing Jens Lekman live for the first time was another. And I'd be lying if I said that the fact that I live about a 30-second walk away from the beautiful, hallowed venue wasn't yet another still.
Despite its beauty, the Great Hall has some serious acoustic problems, which plagued much of the Final Fantasy set. It put off Owen Pallett somewhat and didn't help his nerves about debuting new material that he didn't consider finished works. Not that it mattered: the new songs sound great, punctuated with lots of staccato rhythms he creates by bouncing his bow on the strings, sounding not unlike Japanese kotos. The new album will be called Homeland, due out in the fall, and Pallett described it as being set in a "fictional world where I am the supreme deity." Um, isn't that the case with all narrative fiction, in song lyrics or otherwise?
Jens Lekman had a lot of love from the crowd for his Swedish Jonathan Richman schtick, which would fall flat on its face were he not such a charmer. He's as deadpan as the Flight of the Conchords, and yet because of his ESL lyrics it's not always clear when he's conning you and when he actually thinks he's nicked an awesome rhyme. Either way, his charisma outweighs the cheese, and his way with classic melodies supercedes any other shortcomings. Plus, for this performance he was joined by Final Fantasy's projectionist Steph Comilang, which added visual splendour to the stripped-down set, which otherwise featured only a percussionist and the occasional backing tape.
Lekman wrapped up the evening by performing in the park beside the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (I was in bed by that point); something he'd obviously planned from the beginning of the set, and seemed itchy to ditch the formality of the stage show to get to it.
April 10
Hilotrons, Andy Swan at Horseshoe
Ottawa's Kelp Records crew rolled into Toronto with a couple of well-kept secrets, a niche that Kelp seems to have nailed down. It's a specialty that no label aspires to, and while Kelp may be a sensation in their hometown—witness their ability to throw massive weekend-long parties at the city's major venues every April to celebrate their anniversary—they're far under the radar in Toronto.
That's true even of their only Toronto act, singer/songwriter Andy Swan. Changing the name of his long-running band Detective Kalita to The Michael Parks doesn't help, nor does the fact that he just released a solo album under his own name (Andy Swan's Ottawa).
He's got some critics in his corner, he has the undying loyalty of his Kelp peers who talk him up every chance they get, and he has Polmo Polpo's Sandro Perri playing slide guitar for him occasionally. He also has an arsenal of great songs, but not the kind that make an immediate impression or that his modest stage persona is about to give you a major sales job on. Swan is so subtle that it's taken me years to cotton on to what a talent he is; every time I've seen him I fall further under his spell, and this performance sealed the deal. Without a major hustle behind him, Swan can only hope for a Ron Sexsmith-esque career revival a few more albums down the road.
The Hilotrons are major stars in Ottawa, yet rarely play outside the city limits. That should change with the release of Happymatic, a fine pop album that makes you instantly forget about all those other herky-jerky Devo-tees who are giving art-damaged early 80s pop music a bad name.
The Hilotrons boast a bouncy rhythm section capable of twisting beats upside down and around, while vocalist Mike Dubue unleashes synth squiggles in between a pitch perfect vocal performance. We expect so little from male singers in rock band these days, leaving the operatic performances to melodramatic drama queens in moody art rock bands or sensitive folkie acts. Dubue is having none of that. He's a belter who doesn't need multiple takes to get it right; he nails it every time, as does every instrumentalist standing behind him on stage.
I'd heard earlier recordings by this band and found them mildly interesting at best; Happymatic was a pleasant surprise. But nothing prepared me for how jaw-droppingly awesome the Hilotrons' live show is—miss them at your peril. They certainly don't deserve to be relegated to "well-kept secret" status.
April 14: Man Man, Yeasayer at Lee's Palace
Man Man has always sounded insane. Lead singer Honus Honus howls to a point well beyond hoarse while attacking his keyboard; drummer Pow Pow looks like he'd be sequestered in a straitjacket had he chosen any profession other than percussion; the rest of the band look like a ragtag crew of salty sailors with a questionable grip on sanity. And yet the music has always worked: their strange mash-up of klezmer, cabaret, barrelhouse piano, kitchen sink percussion and raunchy blues managed to never get completely unhinged. Until now.
Maybe they've been playing these songs too long on the road and are bored by now, but there was a perverse desire to play everything twice as fast. The manic marimba player looked like he was ready to lose some limbs. As if to compensate, cracks started to show in their collective stamina by set's end, allowing them to play the until-now rare live treat "Van Helsing's Boombox," a track that's as tender as Man Man ever gets.
Not that anyone in the crowd seemed to mind. Word of mouth has built up over the past three years, thanks in part to the fact they now share a label with Tom Waits and Nick Cave, and there were no doubt many newbies who came out to witness the spectacle. The band seemed all to eager to please, pushing everything over the top and barely able to stay in one spot for more than two bars. Honus Honus in particular had trouble focusing on his piano, because he had a perverse desire to smash yet another piece of percussive metal every two bars or so, while the other Men Men pushed their already-ridiculous falsettos well beyond the breaking point.
Man Man on a bad day are still infinitely more entertaining than most of what builds a buzz on the blogosphere these days—which brings us to opening act Yeasayer. This Brooklyn band might be one of the hippest things among those born after 1980, but anyone a bit older than that be forced to recall Oingo Boingo for the first time in over 20 years. Individually they're amazing players, but that doesn't for a second excuse the monotonous mess they get into. As soon as they took the stage, I realized that I had actually seen them before once, in NYC, and had made a point of forgetting about them. Visually, they're a motley crew, with a preppy vocalist that looks like a young John Linnell from They Might Be Giants, bookended by a Latvian mafia bassist gyrating his hips and a noodly guitarist focusing on his effects. One song with a First Nations vocal feel managed to cut the mustard, but the rest of the set felt downright punishing.
So did Man Man, I'm sure, for some people. Even this day-one fan found them a bit much on this outing, like they were trying to hard to impress the larger audience that had suddenly shown up to see them. Just be yourselves, Men.
Saturday, April 26, 2008
Dan Bejar's Mass Destruction
Because an entirely off-the-record comment I made to Carl Wilson last Friday has surfaced on his blog, I feel a need to elaborate. Not that I feel like Samantha Power exactly, but some further context is required.
Carl asked me if I was going to see Destroyer last week at Lee’s Palace, knowing that I was almost as big a fan as he is. I gave Carl a short, flippant answer. This is the long, verbose one.
Writing about Lou Reed, Lester Bangs once said that heroes exist only to disappoint you. Throughout Destroyer’s career, singer/songwriter Dan Bejar seems to have been on a mission to convince me that the rock’n’roll game is little more than a ruse, a farce, something to held in contempt. That he does this while making brilliant rock records is all the more confounding. Yet the deeper into his discography that we get, the less I find reasons to care. His mission, it seems, has been accomplished.
My favourite live memory of Destroyer comes from a set in Montreal on the Your Blues tour. During the song “Don’t Become the Thing You Hated,” Bejar’s vocal delivery drew out the first two words of the title in such a way that one woman beside me turned to her friend: ‘What did he say? Don’t be a cunt?’
For a man with a knack for dazzling wordplay, Bejar claims that his lyrics have no deeper meaning or connectivity. The guy who writes songs for one of the more over-the-top pop arrangers working today—Carl Newman’s New Pornographers—shows up at that band’s shows practically sneering at the audience and seemingly oblivious to the towering symphonies being created behind him. As for his own Destroyer shows, here’s a review I wrote for Eye Weekly about the 2006 Rubies tour (it has since been lost in that publication’s website redesign):
I’m not suggesting that Bejar has any kind of weird obligation to be as excited about performing music as his fans are to see him do it. I’ve been enthralled by plenty of artists for whom performance is low on their priority list. But the older I get, the less tolerance I have for live shows that seem like a tease or a con or an exercise in patience. At worst, it’s arrogance: ‘Oh, you really love my music? Let’s see if you’ll put up with me acting like none of this matters. And by the way, you’re an idiot for showing up.’
Despite the fact that he’s made a living off it for years now, I’m sure Bejar would argue that none of it does matter. When 2000's Thief and 2001's Streethawk were making critical waves, Bejar rarely played a town he wasn’t living in at the time (Vancouver, New York, Montreal). Toronto, of all places, could certainly wait. The first time I saw him play, I had to go to CMJ in New York City to see him at a Merge showcase. “The listeners of the world are on your side!” I heckled, quoting one of his lyrics. I really have no idea why I did that now.
Since then I’ve seen various Destroyer bands of varying qualities. The best one was perhaps the one that Merge assembled for him at the label’s 15th anniversary in Chapel Hill in the summer of 2004, consisting primarily of Merge office staff—including label had Mac McCaughan (Superchunk, Portastatic) on giddy guitar, who appeared to be living out a rock and roll fantasy on stage that a bored Bejar didn’t want any part of. No matter—the set was majestic. As, for that matter, was the time he played most of Streethawk in its entirety opening for the New Pornographers’ Twin Cinema tour on its Montreal stop.
I fell in love with Destroyer's music around the time of the 2000 album Thief. I say "around the time of" because it took me a while to warm up to Bejar's winsome whine and way with words, both lyrically and vocally. Once I did, however, I was entranced by his tentative embrace of rock and folk clichés wrapped around lyrics that cast dispersions on the entire premise of the music industry itself. Bejar possessed the kind of distanced vitriol that one would expect from a more abrasive music maker, not one so obviously well steeped in the elements that make a great rock record.
As I (and others) wrote at the time, Bejar managed to combine the wordplay of 60s Dylan, the folkie/glam affectations of early 70s Bowie, the wit of 80s Morrissey and the obscurantism of 90s Malkmus. What's not for a record collector to love, other than to get gleefully lost in the meta-ness of it all?
2001's Streethawk: A Seduction sealed the deal: a perfect album that I still return to regularly, where the rock moves were ratcheted up and the tender moments rang true despite the distance one could still sense from Bejar's aloof delivery.
Since then, Bejar's bounced around a lot in my consciousness: the lazy This Night introduced him to a bigger audience after he signed to Merge. Your Blues polarized his fan base further, but I was one of the few at the time who loved it (I still do). The Frog Eyes version of Your Blues (heard on the Notorious Lightning EP) pummeled any beauty out of the originals. Destroyer's Rubies was alternately beautiful and meandering but ultimately a step backwards to This Night. His collaborative work in the band Swan Lake embraced the weirdness again, for the better (again, I was in the clear minority on that one).
Those are all musical impressions. Lyrically, Rubies was the first time I believe he started sinking into complete self-parody, and it started to effect the way I viewed the back catalogue as well. The more I immerse myself in the ongoing Destroyer discography, the more I think he’s just making fun of me and every other pretentious asshole who wants their music to “mean” something. At this point it’s almost as if he’s daring us to parse any kind of meaning at all from his lyrical barrage.
Bejar is not the only one, of course. Someone must still be buying Stephen Malkmus records.
Critics love writers who weave verbosity into pop songs, because they’re convinced it actually means something—even if it clearly doesn’t. Beck, Wu-Tang Clan, The Fiery Furnaces’ Matthew Friedberger—just because you give off the illusion of a self-contained absurdist world with self-referential signifiers doesn’t mean that there’s actually anything going on.
But in the case of each of those three artists, at least the act of going along for the ride can be fun—much more fun than the way someone like Elvis Costello or Bob Dylan makes it almost medicinal, daring you to write your grad thesis on it.
Bejar used to be fun, and occasionally still can be. But why would you ever bother being that verbose if you actually don’t have anything to say? What kind of a poet, other than a self-declared con artist, would claim that his choice of words is entirely arbitrary and devoid of intent?
I approached the new album, Trouble in Dreams, with trepidation. My recent reaction to Destroyer hasn’t been helped by the fact that the album closes with a chorus that says, “You’ve been wandering around/ you’ve been fucking around.”
These Trouble times contain some fine moments, but it mostly sounds like spinning wheels. This is no fault of his band, who also played on the two most laissez-faire Destroyer albums (This Night, Rubies). Likely informed by some serious time on the road, they’ve found their groove, with arrangements sounding less like they were conjured up in a single afternoon. Quite the contrary: they’re elaborate, often quite gorgeous, and in many cases the arrangements are better than the songs themselves. To the band’s credit, I’d much rather hear some of this material with Bejar out of the mix entirely: “Shooting Rockets,” “Plaza Trinidad,” “Foam Hands” and especially Ted Bois’s keyboard flourishes on “Leopard of Honor.”
Bejar himself comes through on “Introducing Angels,” “My Favourite Year” and “Libby’s First Sunrise,” all of which are all quite lovely. So there’s my typically Libran assessment: despite my profound disappointment with it, seven of the 11 songs on Trouble in Dreams are interesting enough for me not to give up on Destroyer entirely.
But you’d have to pay me to go see it live.
Carl asked me if I was going to see Destroyer last week at Lee’s Palace, knowing that I was almost as big a fan as he is. I gave Carl a short, flippant answer. This is the long, verbose one.
Writing about Lou Reed, Lester Bangs once said that heroes exist only to disappoint you. Throughout Destroyer’s career, singer/songwriter Dan Bejar seems to have been on a mission to convince me that the rock’n’roll game is little more than a ruse, a farce, something to held in contempt. That he does this while making brilliant rock records is all the more confounding. Yet the deeper into his discography that we get, the less I find reasons to care. His mission, it seems, has been accomplished.
My favourite live memory of Destroyer comes from a set in Montreal on the Your Blues tour. During the song “Don’t Become the Thing You Hated,” Bejar’s vocal delivery drew out the first two words of the title in such a way that one woman beside me turned to her friend: ‘What did he say? Don’t be a cunt?’
For a man with a knack for dazzling wordplay, Bejar claims that his lyrics have no deeper meaning or connectivity. The guy who writes songs for one of the more over-the-top pop arrangers working today—Carl Newman’s New Pornographers—shows up at that band’s shows practically sneering at the audience and seemingly oblivious to the towering symphonies being created behind him. As for his own Destroyer shows, here’s a review I wrote for Eye Weekly about the 2006 Rubies tour (it has since been lost in that publication’s website redesign):
Destroyer’s Dan Bejar has spent his career projecting a carefree, some would argue ironic distance from rock grandeur—right down to the band name itself. It’s little wonder that the stenciled lettering on the bass cabinet proudly proclaimed, “College rock still sucks.”
Not that “college rock” doesn’t deserve it, as this textbook evening proved on many counts, like the earnest solo folkie opening act who should stick with open stage nights (Nedelle); leaving the campus radio hit (“Painter in Your Pocket”) off the set list; a limp, impress-me crowd debating the merits of Pitchfork at the bar.
Finally, we have the misunderstood melodicist being praised for his most “accessible” album yet, mostly by latecomers waiting to anoint something more conventional from a career contrarian. The lit crit vultures circle, trying to parse meaning from fleeting poetic fragments, while their confused dates wonder what the fuss is about.
This was Destroyer’s first Toronto show since Bejar decided to start playing the rock’n’roll game—little things like consistent touring, appearing on magazine covers, and performing with his aesthetically estranged cohorts in the New Pornographers. Yet no matter how lovely the new Destroyer’s Rubies is, like much of Bejar’s best work, it’s a slow burner. And outside of the warm and sympathetic production by longtime Vancouver midwives JC/DC, many of Destroyer’s strengths get dwarfed in a live situation—starting with the martyrdom of Ted Bois’s keyboard flourishes, and ending with Bejar’s own clipped caterwauling that only manages to mask the lyrics that everyone showed up to hear in the first place.
What’s ultimately frustrating, of course, is that Bejar can pull it together when he wants to, like his ahhh-mazing falsetto on “Rubies,” or the moody blues reinvention of “It’s Gonna Take an Airplane.” Yet as he’s openly admitted to anyone who asks, he hates rock clubs and doesn’t want to be there. You can’t accuse the man of dishonesty, but you’re better off in your bedroom with a set of headphones. That’s probably where Bejar wants you anyway, in “the elegance of an empty room.”
I’m not suggesting that Bejar has any kind of weird obligation to be as excited about performing music as his fans are to see him do it. I’ve been enthralled by plenty of artists for whom performance is low on their priority list. But the older I get, the less tolerance I have for live shows that seem like a tease or a con or an exercise in patience. At worst, it’s arrogance: ‘Oh, you really love my music? Let’s see if you’ll put up with me acting like none of this matters. And by the way, you’re an idiot for showing up.’
Despite the fact that he’s made a living off it for years now, I’m sure Bejar would argue that none of it does matter. When 2000's Thief and 2001's Streethawk were making critical waves, Bejar rarely played a town he wasn’t living in at the time (Vancouver, New York, Montreal). Toronto, of all places, could certainly wait. The first time I saw him play, I had to go to CMJ in New York City to see him at a Merge showcase. “The listeners of the world are on your side!” I heckled, quoting one of his lyrics. I really have no idea why I did that now.
Since then I’ve seen various Destroyer bands of varying qualities. The best one was perhaps the one that Merge assembled for him at the label’s 15th anniversary in Chapel Hill in the summer of 2004, consisting primarily of Merge office staff—including label had Mac McCaughan (Superchunk, Portastatic) on giddy guitar, who appeared to be living out a rock and roll fantasy on stage that a bored Bejar didn’t want any part of. No matter—the set was majestic. As, for that matter, was the time he played most of Streethawk in its entirety opening for the New Pornographers’ Twin Cinema tour on its Montreal stop.
I fell in love with Destroyer's music around the time of the 2000 album Thief. I say "around the time of" because it took me a while to warm up to Bejar's winsome whine and way with words, both lyrically and vocally. Once I did, however, I was entranced by his tentative embrace of rock and folk clichés wrapped around lyrics that cast dispersions on the entire premise of the music industry itself. Bejar possessed the kind of distanced vitriol that one would expect from a more abrasive music maker, not one so obviously well steeped in the elements that make a great rock record.
As I (and others) wrote at the time, Bejar managed to combine the wordplay of 60s Dylan, the folkie/glam affectations of early 70s Bowie, the wit of 80s Morrissey and the obscurantism of 90s Malkmus. What's not for a record collector to love, other than to get gleefully lost in the meta-ness of it all?
2001's Streethawk: A Seduction sealed the deal: a perfect album that I still return to regularly, where the rock moves were ratcheted up and the tender moments rang true despite the distance one could still sense from Bejar's aloof delivery.
Since then, Bejar's bounced around a lot in my consciousness: the lazy This Night introduced him to a bigger audience after he signed to Merge. Your Blues polarized his fan base further, but I was one of the few at the time who loved it (I still do). The Frog Eyes version of Your Blues (heard on the Notorious Lightning EP) pummeled any beauty out of the originals. Destroyer's Rubies was alternately beautiful and meandering but ultimately a step backwards to This Night. His collaborative work in the band Swan Lake embraced the weirdness again, for the better (again, I was in the clear minority on that one).
Those are all musical impressions. Lyrically, Rubies was the first time I believe he started sinking into complete self-parody, and it started to effect the way I viewed the back catalogue as well. The more I immerse myself in the ongoing Destroyer discography, the more I think he’s just making fun of me and every other pretentious asshole who wants their music to “mean” something. At this point it’s almost as if he’s daring us to parse any kind of meaning at all from his lyrical barrage.
Bejar is not the only one, of course. Someone must still be buying Stephen Malkmus records.
Critics love writers who weave verbosity into pop songs, because they’re convinced it actually means something—even if it clearly doesn’t. Beck, Wu-Tang Clan, The Fiery Furnaces’ Matthew Friedberger—just because you give off the illusion of a self-contained absurdist world with self-referential signifiers doesn’t mean that there’s actually anything going on.
But in the case of each of those three artists, at least the act of going along for the ride can be fun—much more fun than the way someone like Elvis Costello or Bob Dylan makes it almost medicinal, daring you to write your grad thesis on it.
Bejar used to be fun, and occasionally still can be. But why would you ever bother being that verbose if you actually don’t have anything to say? What kind of a poet, other than a self-declared con artist, would claim that his choice of words is entirely arbitrary and devoid of intent?
I approached the new album, Trouble in Dreams, with trepidation. My recent reaction to Destroyer hasn’t been helped by the fact that the album closes with a chorus that says, “You’ve been wandering around/ you’ve been fucking around.”
These Trouble times contain some fine moments, but it mostly sounds like spinning wheels. This is no fault of his band, who also played on the two most laissez-faire Destroyer albums (This Night, Rubies). Likely informed by some serious time on the road, they’ve found their groove, with arrangements sounding less like they were conjured up in a single afternoon. Quite the contrary: they’re elaborate, often quite gorgeous, and in many cases the arrangements are better than the songs themselves. To the band’s credit, I’d much rather hear some of this material with Bejar out of the mix entirely: “Shooting Rockets,” “Plaza Trinidad,” “Foam Hands” and especially Ted Bois’s keyboard flourishes on “Leopard of Honor.”
Bejar himself comes through on “Introducing Angels,” “My Favourite Year” and “Libby’s First Sunrise,” all of which are all quite lovely. So there’s my typically Libran assessment: despite my profound disappointment with it, seven of the 11 songs on Trouble in Dreams are interesting enough for me not to give up on Destroyer entirely.
But you’d have to pay me to go see it live.
Labels: Carl Wilson, dan bejar, destroyer
Wednesday, April 02, 2008
Spring Cleaning 08 pt 2
More spring cleaning from the vaults of the last three months.
The Heavy – Great Vengeance and Furious Fire (Ninja Tune/Outside)
For all their obsessions with American soul and rock music, the British rarely do either right these days. Here, however, is The Heavy—a band from a tiny town outside of Bath who make dirty, raw garage rock and R&B that sounds like Curtis Mayfield fronting the Stooges. Lead singer Swaby bounces between swaggering bravado and a tender falsetto—he sounds like he’s well steeped in the Temptations’ psychedelic period. While none of this would work without his cocky charisma, it’s the devilishly distorted fat bottom grooves that drive this record, even when the tempo slows down to a torchy crawl. None of this is particularly original—especially the one track that lifts directly from the Spencer Davis Group—sitting somewhere between the retro revival of Sharon Jones and the futurist soul of Gnarls Barkley. Yet The Heavy are cheeky enough to pull it off, to get you reaching for the volume knob, and they give us one more reason to forget about Lenny Kravitz entirely—as if we needed one. (K-W Record, March 20)
Magnetic Fields - Distortion (Nonesuch)
A man can only wield a ukulele so long before he runs back to the electric guitar. Anyone who thought Stephin Merritt was lost to NPR and Chinese operettas after signing to Nonesuch will delight in the sound of the literally titled Distortion, which sounds like Merritt got caught up in the excitement of the recent Jesus and Mary Chain reunion. On the surface, the sonic atmosphere is the only thematic thread here—unusual for the mind of Merritt, who never sets pen to paper without a concept in mind. Most of the songs are about loathing—of both the self (“Too Drunk to Dream”) and others (the anti-OC anthem “California Girls”). It’s the running order that reveals a loose narrative. Merritt spends most of the first two thirds of Distortion repelling all those around him (“Mr. Mistletoe,” “Please Stop Dancing” before a wave of regret hits (“I’ll Dream Alone”) and he spends the final three songs equally fascinated and frustrated with the emotional detachment of others. Naturally, he uses the most extreme examples possible: a nun fantasizing of being a sex worker, a zombie’s lover, and a musing on the carefree life of a courtesan. Longtime fans will welcome back the vocal presence of singer Shirley Simms, a star of 69 Love Songs who was shut out of 2004’s i. Whether Merritt’s return to lo-fi will fly at the Lincoln Center remains to be seen, but his melodic mastery is never in question. (Magnet, Winter 2008)
Steve Reid Ensemble - Daxaar (Domino)
Steve Reid is an elder statesman among drummers. Just look at his resumé: Miles Davis, James Brown, Fela Kuti, Sun Ra, Marvin Gaye, and recent collaborations with electronic composer and producer Four Tet, a.k.a. Kieran Hebden.
Riding a wave of renewed interest thanks to the Hebden projects and some reissues of his free jazz material, Reid recorded this album as an ensemble leader with local musicians in Dakar, Senegal. Sadly, the African influence is largely transparent. Real sparks are few and far between, and it's more than a bit disappointing that the laid-back locals never really rise to Reid's rhythms.
Neither, for that matter, does Hebden. Other than ably serving as the session producer, Hebden adds very little to the music when he gets his hands in there. The electronic sounds on the terribly titled "Jiggy Jiggy," in particular, sound like the band is being attacked by seagulls; elsewhere, he's more subtle but equally ineffective.
As a musician, perhaps Reid is more effective at taking orders than giving them; he deserves greater challenges than this. (K-W Record, February 7)
The Ruby Suns – Sea Lion (Sub Pop/Outside)
Singer/songwriter Ryan McPhun has lived by the ocean all his life: first in California, now in New Zealand. It certainly sounds like he’s spent a lot of time meditating in front of vast expanses of water; not only do many of his songs evoke a lush, warm and tropical ambiance, but you can actually hear the ocean in the background of several tracks here, with either actual birdsongs or instruments that are reverb-ed beyond recognition until they sound like aquatic fauna.
At one point McPhun does meditate on the "Morning Sun," and there are certainly moments where it sounds like Sigur Ros staging an operetta in a grotto where the piano is slipping into the sea. But this isn’t one of those soothing “sounds of nature” albums for your massage therapist.
The beauty of Sea Lion is its ability to create an entirely logical, self-contained environment where Phil Spector produces New Order on a remote African island. And despite the beautifully arranged vocals that owe more than a few obvious debts to Brian Wilson, the Ruby Suns are one of those rare bands that have learned from the more outré elements of the Beach Boys’ catalogue rather than aspiring to make a slavish imitation of the clichés that mark that group’s most popular songs.
The Western pop is only one element at work here. An acoustic Brazilian rhythm might be interrupted by an interlude of ukuleles and coconuts, which is then swept away by a loping brass section and Hawaiian guitar before giving way to African guitar lines and a choir singing in Maori. Sure, sometimes it sounds like a lo-fi Fruitopia commercial. More often than not, however, the adventures of McPhun and the Suns add up to a wildly rewarding ride that’s a wonderful left-field surprise. (K-W Record, March 27)
Vampire Weekend – s/t (XL)
Here's a band that is often judged by their pedigree rather than their actual music, so let's get that out of the way first. Vampire Weekend are a band composed of New York City university students with song titles like "Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa" and "Oxford Comma." Surely, goes the common critical argument, they must be smarty-pants upper crust cultural tourists who include ironic winks at African music in their heavily layered Big Apple bouillabaisse. “Feels so unnatural,” they sing, “Peter Gabriel too.” Whatever that means.
Yet Vampire Weekend’s debut is refreshing for its simplicity, for the way it feels entirely natural and joyous. It taps into the giddy, propulsive amateurism that has fuelled so much great pop music from the 50s to the great new wave songwriters of the 70s (David Byrne, Joe Jackson) to Toronto’s Hidden Cameras, not to mention the Third World mirror mutations of Western pop music that Vampire Weekend also borrow from, creating an odd cultural feedback loop that provides critics with endless cocktail conversation.
Because of their New York home and African interests, Vampire Weekend have been saddled with endless comparisons to Paul Simon’s Graceland, which is ridiculous for several reasons, starting with the fact that this is much more fun on a Saturday night. Furthermore, Simon hired the best of the best South African session players for that album, and a key part of Vampire Weekend’s unique charm is their ability to draw from that music without attempting to emulate it outright. This isn’t an album for ethnomusicology students, but if you’re trapped next to one at a party where this is playing, I’m sure they’d have some interesting theories.
None of this chatter matters during the course of these 11 songs, especially when arpeggiating cellos dance around the beat breakdown in Walcott, or the joyously strained group backing vocals affect a collective falsetto on Blake’s Got a New Face, or when secret weapon songwriter/producer/keyboardist Rostam Batmanglij pulls out his harpsichords and mellotrons. Drummer Christopher Tomson sounds like he’s fresh out of high school concert band and discovering skinny-tie new wave and calypso at the same time. There’s a martial stiffness to his playing, and yet his timing never falters and the grooves never get too slippery.
The stripped down arrangements are key here; the recording sounds raw and live and doesn’t rely on dense layers—a rarity from bands of any level or genre these days. As a band, Vampire Weekend do all their work in the rehearsal hall, not the studio. This is a band that thinks horizontally, not vertically: sparse, clean guitar leads are unsullied by any accompanying arsenal of rhythm guitars, and every song’s dynamics are driven by simple stops and shifts in the arrangements.
Explaining this music doesn’t make it sound any better than it already does, for Vampire Weekend succeeds primarily with uncomplicated songs and melodies that would work almost as well if Jonathan Richman played them on acoustic guitar. And their timing couldn’t be better: this is ideal musical escapism for the dreariest days of February, though you’re likely to be listening this consistently for the next 12 months and beyond. (K-W Record, January 31)
Woodhands – Heart Attack
(Paper Bag/Universal)
It’s been years now since the rock kids discovered how much fun it is to make live electronic dance music, and the benefits of that are now in full bloom. Witness the career resurrection of Daft Punk, the crossover success of their prodigies Justice, or the emergence of live bands like Toronto’s Holy Fuck and Waterloo’s own Bocce.
Woodhands are the latest to toss their hat into the ring, and they’re a bit too late. Here, they run a high risk of coming across as dabblers and not diehards. Paper-thin indie rock vocals don’t help matters, and there never seems to be enough of a bottom end to make any kind of dance floor impact—thankfully the drummer is decent enough to keep it interesting. When they try their hand at Junior Boys-style electro-balladry on "Straighten the Curtain," the adolescent lyrics prove to be far too distracting.
Only on the deliberately delirious track "Dancer"—with a faux-Busta Rymes freak-out chorus contrasting with lovely lady vocals in the verse and synths that threaten to spin out of control—do Woodhands deliver. (K-W Record, March 27)
Hawksley Workman - Between the Beautifuls (Universal)
What a strange four years it's been for Hawksley Workman. After going for the gusto with 2003's Lover/Fighter -- where the flamboyant Toronto singer/songwriter softened his edges in a fair bid for U2-style arena pop -- Workman released a stripped-down piano album, recorded a reportedly dark and adventurous album that was then scrapped, and has finally surfaced with Between the Beautifuls. It's the sound of someone who craves less drama in his life, who's backing off from any grand statements -- musically or personally.
It's entirely possible that the greatest weight on this album is expectation. If this album was made by anyone else -- Ron Sexsmith, say -- it would be a collection of melodic songs nice enough for CBC daytime radio consumption, as delivered by an exceptional male vocalist.
From Workman, however, we've come to expect a bit more swagger, a bit more hunger and certainly more sexuality; if his early records sounded like an artist in love with the world and discovering that "singing is about sexual confidence,'' Between the Beautifuls is made by a guy who not only hasn't been naked next to anyone in a long time, but has lost any desire to.
Apparently Workman is selling his "missing" 2006 album at live shows; it would be fascinating to hear how it contrasts with this comparatively neutered album. "Someday we'll be bored,'' he sings here, "and we won't have time for these catastrophes anymore." It sounds like that day has come. (K-W Record, February 7)
The Heavy – Great Vengeance and Furious Fire (Ninja Tune/Outside)For all their obsessions with American soul and rock music, the British rarely do either right these days. Here, however, is The Heavy—a band from a tiny town outside of Bath who make dirty, raw garage rock and R&B that sounds like Curtis Mayfield fronting the Stooges. Lead singer Swaby bounces between swaggering bravado and a tender falsetto—he sounds like he’s well steeped in the Temptations’ psychedelic period. While none of this would work without his cocky charisma, it’s the devilishly distorted fat bottom grooves that drive this record, even when the tempo slows down to a torchy crawl. None of this is particularly original—especially the one track that lifts directly from the Spencer Davis Group—sitting somewhere between the retro revival of Sharon Jones and the futurist soul of Gnarls Barkley. Yet The Heavy are cheeky enough to pull it off, to get you reaching for the volume knob, and they give us one more reason to forget about Lenny Kravitz entirely—as if we needed one. (K-W Record, March 20)
Magnetic Fields - Distortion (Nonesuch)A man can only wield a ukulele so long before he runs back to the electric guitar. Anyone who thought Stephin Merritt was lost to NPR and Chinese operettas after signing to Nonesuch will delight in the sound of the literally titled Distortion, which sounds like Merritt got caught up in the excitement of the recent Jesus and Mary Chain reunion. On the surface, the sonic atmosphere is the only thematic thread here—unusual for the mind of Merritt, who never sets pen to paper without a concept in mind. Most of the songs are about loathing—of both the self (“Too Drunk to Dream”) and others (the anti-OC anthem “California Girls”). It’s the running order that reveals a loose narrative. Merritt spends most of the first two thirds of Distortion repelling all those around him (“Mr. Mistletoe,” “Please Stop Dancing” before a wave of regret hits (“I’ll Dream Alone”) and he spends the final three songs equally fascinated and frustrated with the emotional detachment of others. Naturally, he uses the most extreme examples possible: a nun fantasizing of being a sex worker, a zombie’s lover, and a musing on the carefree life of a courtesan. Longtime fans will welcome back the vocal presence of singer Shirley Simms, a star of 69 Love Songs who was shut out of 2004’s i. Whether Merritt’s return to lo-fi will fly at the Lincoln Center remains to be seen, but his melodic mastery is never in question. (Magnet, Winter 2008)
Steve Reid Ensemble - Daxaar (Domino)Steve Reid is an elder statesman among drummers. Just look at his resumé: Miles Davis, James Brown, Fela Kuti, Sun Ra, Marvin Gaye, and recent collaborations with electronic composer and producer Four Tet, a.k.a. Kieran Hebden.
Riding a wave of renewed interest thanks to the Hebden projects and some reissues of his free jazz material, Reid recorded this album as an ensemble leader with local musicians in Dakar, Senegal. Sadly, the African influence is largely transparent. Real sparks are few and far between, and it's more than a bit disappointing that the laid-back locals never really rise to Reid's rhythms.
Neither, for that matter, does Hebden. Other than ably serving as the session producer, Hebden adds very little to the music when he gets his hands in there. The electronic sounds on the terribly titled "Jiggy Jiggy," in particular, sound like the band is being attacked by seagulls; elsewhere, he's more subtle but equally ineffective.
As a musician, perhaps Reid is more effective at taking orders than giving them; he deserves greater challenges than this. (K-W Record, February 7)
The Ruby Suns – Sea Lion (Sub Pop/Outside)Singer/songwriter Ryan McPhun has lived by the ocean all his life: first in California, now in New Zealand. It certainly sounds like he’s spent a lot of time meditating in front of vast expanses of water; not only do many of his songs evoke a lush, warm and tropical ambiance, but you can actually hear the ocean in the background of several tracks here, with either actual birdsongs or instruments that are reverb-ed beyond recognition until they sound like aquatic fauna.
At one point McPhun does meditate on the "Morning Sun," and there are certainly moments where it sounds like Sigur Ros staging an operetta in a grotto where the piano is slipping into the sea. But this isn’t one of those soothing “sounds of nature” albums for your massage therapist.
The beauty of Sea Lion is its ability to create an entirely logical, self-contained environment where Phil Spector produces New Order on a remote African island. And despite the beautifully arranged vocals that owe more than a few obvious debts to Brian Wilson, the Ruby Suns are one of those rare bands that have learned from the more outré elements of the Beach Boys’ catalogue rather than aspiring to make a slavish imitation of the clichés that mark that group’s most popular songs.
The Western pop is only one element at work here. An acoustic Brazilian rhythm might be interrupted by an interlude of ukuleles and coconuts, which is then swept away by a loping brass section and Hawaiian guitar before giving way to African guitar lines and a choir singing in Maori. Sure, sometimes it sounds like a lo-fi Fruitopia commercial. More often than not, however, the adventures of McPhun and the Suns add up to a wildly rewarding ride that’s a wonderful left-field surprise. (K-W Record, March 27)
Vampire Weekend – s/t (XL)Here's a band that is often judged by their pedigree rather than their actual music, so let's get that out of the way first. Vampire Weekend are a band composed of New York City university students with song titles like "Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa" and "Oxford Comma." Surely, goes the common critical argument, they must be smarty-pants upper crust cultural tourists who include ironic winks at African music in their heavily layered Big Apple bouillabaisse. “Feels so unnatural,” they sing, “Peter Gabriel too.” Whatever that means.
Yet Vampire Weekend’s debut is refreshing for its simplicity, for the way it feels entirely natural and joyous. It taps into the giddy, propulsive amateurism that has fuelled so much great pop music from the 50s to the great new wave songwriters of the 70s (David Byrne, Joe Jackson) to Toronto’s Hidden Cameras, not to mention the Third World mirror mutations of Western pop music that Vampire Weekend also borrow from, creating an odd cultural feedback loop that provides critics with endless cocktail conversation.
Because of their New York home and African interests, Vampire Weekend have been saddled with endless comparisons to Paul Simon’s Graceland, which is ridiculous for several reasons, starting with the fact that this is much more fun on a Saturday night. Furthermore, Simon hired the best of the best South African session players for that album, and a key part of Vampire Weekend’s unique charm is their ability to draw from that music without attempting to emulate it outright. This isn’t an album for ethnomusicology students, but if you’re trapped next to one at a party where this is playing, I’m sure they’d have some interesting theories.
None of this chatter matters during the course of these 11 songs, especially when arpeggiating cellos dance around the beat breakdown in Walcott, or the joyously strained group backing vocals affect a collective falsetto on Blake’s Got a New Face, or when secret weapon songwriter/producer/keyboardist Rostam Batmanglij pulls out his harpsichords and mellotrons. Drummer Christopher Tomson sounds like he’s fresh out of high school concert band and discovering skinny-tie new wave and calypso at the same time. There’s a martial stiffness to his playing, and yet his timing never falters and the grooves never get too slippery.
The stripped down arrangements are key here; the recording sounds raw and live and doesn’t rely on dense layers—a rarity from bands of any level or genre these days. As a band, Vampire Weekend do all their work in the rehearsal hall, not the studio. This is a band that thinks horizontally, not vertically: sparse, clean guitar leads are unsullied by any accompanying arsenal of rhythm guitars, and every song’s dynamics are driven by simple stops and shifts in the arrangements.
Explaining this music doesn’t make it sound any better than it already does, for Vampire Weekend succeeds primarily with uncomplicated songs and melodies that would work almost as well if Jonathan Richman played them on acoustic guitar. And their timing couldn’t be better: this is ideal musical escapism for the dreariest days of February, though you’re likely to be listening this consistently for the next 12 months and beyond. (K-W Record, January 31)
Woodhands – Heart Attack(Paper Bag/Universal)
It’s been years now since the rock kids discovered how much fun it is to make live electronic dance music, and the benefits of that are now in full bloom. Witness the career resurrection of Daft Punk, the crossover success of their prodigies Justice, or the emergence of live bands like Toronto’s Holy Fuck and Waterloo’s own Bocce.
Woodhands are the latest to toss their hat into the ring, and they’re a bit too late. Here, they run a high risk of coming across as dabblers and not diehards. Paper-thin indie rock vocals don’t help matters, and there never seems to be enough of a bottom end to make any kind of dance floor impact—thankfully the drummer is decent enough to keep it interesting. When they try their hand at Junior Boys-style electro-balladry on "Straighten the Curtain," the adolescent lyrics prove to be far too distracting.
Only on the deliberately delirious track "Dancer"—with a faux-Busta Rymes freak-out chorus contrasting with lovely lady vocals in the verse and synths that threaten to spin out of control—do Woodhands deliver. (K-W Record, March 27)
Hawksley Workman - Between the Beautifuls (Universal)What a strange four years it's been for Hawksley Workman. After going for the gusto with 2003's Lover/Fighter -- where the flamboyant Toronto singer/songwriter softened his edges in a fair bid for U2-style arena pop -- Workman released a stripped-down piano album, recorded a reportedly dark and adventurous album that was then scrapped, and has finally surfaced with Between the Beautifuls. It's the sound of someone who craves less drama in his life, who's backing off from any grand statements -- musically or personally.
It's entirely possible that the greatest weight on this album is expectation. If this album was made by anyone else -- Ron Sexsmith, say -- it would be a collection of melodic songs nice enough for CBC daytime radio consumption, as delivered by an exceptional male vocalist.
From Workman, however, we've come to expect a bit more swagger, a bit more hunger and certainly more sexuality; if his early records sounded like an artist in love with the world and discovering that "singing is about sexual confidence,'' Between the Beautifuls is made by a guy who not only hasn't been naked next to anyone in a long time, but has lost any desire to.
Apparently Workman is selling his "missing" 2006 album at live shows; it would be fascinating to hear how it contrasts with this comparatively neutered album. "Someday we'll be bored,'' he sings here, "and we won't have time for these catastrophes anymore." It sounds like that day has come. (K-W Record, February 7)
Labels: Hawksley Workman, Magnetic Fields, Ruby Suns, Steve Reid Ensemble, The Heavy, Vampire Weekend, Woodhands
Sunday, March 30, 2008
Spring Cleaning 08 pt 1
Now that the first quarter of 2008 is almost through, it's time to get to some spring cleaning.
Most of these reviews ran in the Kitchener-Waterloo Record and Guelph Mercury; two of them ran in the winter issue of Magnet. More tomorrow, but in alphabetical order here, they are: Baby Dee, Erykah Badu, Black Mountain, Burning Hell, Cadence Weapon, Cat Power, Devastations, Fairmont, Forest City Lovers.
Baby Dee - Safe Inside the Day (Drag City)
Life is a cabaret, old chum. Especially if you’re a hermaphrodite harpist in a bee costume who plays accordion on a giant tricycle in a circus, while acting as musical director of a Catholic church by night. Or if you end up back in your hometown of Cleveland working for a tree removal service, while touring Europe with David Tibet’s Current 93 in your spare time.
This kind of life story explains a lot about Baby Dee, whose music immediately conjures up stereotypes of Warholian drag cabaret in 70s New York City. Unlike her friend Antony, Dee’s androgynous voice isn’t angelic—it’s ridiculously melodramatic, especially when she writes herself bewildering choruses with the refrain: “Spill the milk/ steal the meat/ life is bitter and death is sweet/ all the bacon that a boy can eat.” Breakfast pops up as a bizarre life metaphor again when she laments how “father, son and holy ghost/ stole the bacon and burnt the toast.”
Baby Dee is certainly not without talent, especially as a keyboardist; the two instrumentals here are lovely. However, on the high camp of “Big Titty Bee Girl (From Dino Town)” Dee’s vocals sound straight out of community theatre, instead of the restraint and guidance you might expect from co-producer Will Oldham. Baby Dee is an intriguing figure for a variety of reasons, but as the album progresses, one of her titles sticks in the mind: “The Dance of Diminishing Possibilities.” (Magnet, Winter 2008)
Erykah Badu – New Amerykah Part One (4th World War) (Universal)
The last time Erykah Badu wrote an album, George W. Bush was not yet the leader of the free world. Eight years later, her vision of New Amerykah is a druggy, discombobulated moral morass on the verge of societal collapse. To her credit, these vivid nightmares are translated into a brilliant music vision.
Badu draws from the deep well of Marvin Gaye and Curtis Mayfield here, along with other 70s soul pioneers who had seen the dream of civil rights erode under the weight of economic collapse, political apathy and an influx of hard drugs into the community. Consequently, their brand of soul music started painting with abstract colours borrowed from Miles Davis, rather than the punchy rhythms and horn shots that accompanied earlier messages of affirmation.
Similarly, New Amerykah refuses to settle for easy answers, musically or lyrically. Badu spends much of her energy in an inquisitive mode (“What if there were no niggers, just master teachers?”), while the heavy hip-hop grooves beneath her rattle foundations. Badu rounds up an astounding arsenal of producers: ?uestlove of the Roots, Sa-Ra Creative Partners, jazz vibraphonist Roy Ayers, and 9th Wonder.
The two songs featuring Madlib are the trippiest: "The Healer," with its wobbly descending bass line and a clipped cymbal crash that sounds like a burst of white noise; and "My Children," which consists of little more than a monstrous hip-hop beat, African drums and a vocal chant, each element slipping in and out of the beat while Badu sings, “Hold on, my people.”
This isn’t the easy listening hip-hop jazz of Badu’s breakthrough debut album, nor is it the swaggering soul sister of 2000’s Mama’s Gun. Instead, Badu has reinvented herself entirely to address the musical and social climate she awoke to in 2007, and has made a dense, difficult and fascinating soul classic that sounds like nothing else in modern R&B or pop.
And the good news is that, rather than sometime in the next decade, Part Two is expected no later than this summer. (K-W Record, March 20)
Black Mountain – Into the Future (Scratch)
The album title is more than a bit ironic, for Black Mountain’s harshest critics have always argued that there’s a fine line between homage and retro necrophilia. But on their 2005 self-titled album, Vancouver’s sultans of stoner sludge came out swinging with a slab of 70s psychedelic garage rock that pushed all the right buttons, even if it was all too easy to play spot-the-influence.
This time out there are plenty of welcome changes to the band, starting with an increased role for spellbinding vocalist Amber Webb and keyboardist Jeremy Schmidt, both of whom ratchet up the spook factor in some of the ghostlier grooves. Yet singer/songwriter Stephen McBean appears to have dropped the ball entirely, giving his band little more than threadbare sketches to work with. His talented comrades—each of whom has a worthwhile side project when not touring the world with Black Mountain—don’t sound committed to the task, especially powerhouse drummer and longtime McBean collaborator Josh Wells, who approaches most of these songs with little more than a shrug.
At their finest, Black Mountain still outshine most of their peers in this admittedly limited genre, but the Future here is full of little more than wasted opportunities. (K-W Record, January 25)
The Burning Hell – Happy Birthday (Weewerk/Outside)
On the portrait found inside this CD, Peterborough singer/songwriter Mathias Kom is pictured against a bleak, wintry Ontario backdrop in a dapper grey suit, clutching a ukulele case in one hand while he’s being pulled to the heavens by a cluster of bright blood-red balloons, Mary Poppins-style. From the slightly bemused look on his face, this happens to him all the time and it’s getting a bit tiresome.
There’s nothing tiresome about The Burning Hell itself; Happy Birthday is a fully-realized debut album, a perfect balance of mirth and the morbid. Like the Magnetic Fields’ Stephin Merritt, Kom wields a deep baritone and a ukulele and drops tiny, dry and wry punchlines into his songs. And yet underneath the deadpan demeanour are heartbreaking Leonard Cohen-esque songs paying tribute to classic rock dinosaurs and detailing the misadventure of vengeful ghosts, set to aching accordion and mournful cellos played by some former members of The Silver Hearts. Along with his knack for last-call singalongs, Kom also shows off a skill for writing duets—the most gorgeous of which is "Municipal Monarchs," featuring Guelph’s Jenny Mitchell of the Barmitzvah Brothers (now a new addition to the band).
Every song here announces Kom as one of the finest new songwriters in Canada—though don't take my word for it. As Kom himself will tell you on one of the more uplifting tracks here, "Everything You Believe Is A Lie." (K-W Record, January 18)
Cadence Weapon – Afterparty Babies (Upper Class/EMI)
Canadian hip-hop is much like Canadian film—we do better with the weirdoes than with the commercial windfalls. Which, along with his current tourmate Buck 65, is why Edmonton's Cadence Weapon is likely to be the first Canadian hip-hop artist to make a significant international impression since the Dream Warriors (who themselves were decidedly against the grain during their heyday).
Mr. Weapon—also known as Rollie Pemberton—already keeps good company. This, his second album and the follow-up to the Polaris-nominated Breaking Kayfabe, is being released in the US on the same label as Tom Waits; it's coming out in the UK on the progressive 21st century hip-hop label Big Dada; here at home he tours with Final Fantasy.
That kind of introduction gives you an idea of the wealth of influences at work here. Afterparty Babies opens with an a capella doo-wop track titled "Do I Miss My Friends?", which seems apt for an artist who flourishes in the cracks between musical communities. Tellingly, that track is the only nod here to traditions of any kind, either inside or outside hip-hop orthodoxy. From there on in, Cadence Weapon charts his own path.
Afterparty Babies is a rollicking ride through the most inventive strains of late 80s hip-hop (Bomb Squad, De La Soul), neo-electro dance party beats not unlike his neighbours in Shout Out Out Out Out, some tricky turntablism from his longtime accomplice DJ Weasel, abrasive distorted rhythms and playfully glitchy sampling.
Those catholic interests are reflected in his often-arcane list of lyrical references, which include Trudeau's ascot, Aphex Twin, Friendster, James Frey, Ryerson coke dealers, The Globe and Mail, and the perils of wearing pink without irony.
And of course, only a self-deprecating Canadian hip-hopper would write a song called "Unsuccessful Club Nights." Only unlike his debut album, this time out Cadence Weapon drops his tendency for density often enough to make some of these tracks actually suitable for dancing, not just the headier soundscapes heard on his debut.
It's this dexterity that makes Cadence Weapon the great hope of Canadian hip-hop: as a lyricist, as a producer and, as is so rare in this country or in hip-hop itself, as an iconoclast with a taste for the visceral who hits you in the gut instead of stuck there stroking your chin. (K-W Record, March 13)
Cat Power – Jukebox (Matador)
For an established singer/songwriter, covering other people’s songs is more often than not a cop-out—especially when you cut a whole album of them and it turns out to be your breakthrough hit. That’s what happened to Cat Power—aka Chan Marshall—with 2000’s The Covers Record; though it was undeniably superior to anything her nascent talent had released up to that point, it was the way she crawled deep inside and recontextualized songs by Lou Reed, the Rolling Stones and Nina Simone that made it much more than a cheap career move.
Now that Marshall is a pseudo-mainstream indie celebrity—and occasional fashion model—and has earned enough credibility for her own songs that she doesn’t really need to revisit the covers concept. And yet here we have Jukebox, where she tackles iconic songs like "New York New York," Hank Williams’ "Rambling Man" and Joni Mitchell’s "Blue," only to render the chords unrecognizable and the melodies considerably more minor-key, breathing entirely new lives into the lyrics as a result.
To call it her finest album to date isn’t a backhanded compliment: none of these performances attempt to piggyback on our familiarity with the original versions. And this being Marshall’s first post-rehab record, her smoky, sultry voice appears here in full focus, as opposed to the slightly catatonic state heard on 2006’s The Greatest.
That album was recorded in Memphis with vintage soul musicians—and yet the end result was more Sarah McLachlan than Stax Records. Some of those veterans return to greater effect here, including classic soul songwriter Spooner Oldham, and Marshall herself lays off the piano and guitar to concentrate on her vocals.
The song selection frequently draws from music fandom itself: from Bob Dylan’s "I Believe In You," George Jackson’s "Aretha Sing One For Me," Mitchell’s "Blue" and Marshall’s own "Song to Bobby." By immersing herself in the work of others, Marshall once again takes a quantum leap into discovering the best sides of her own talent—which bodes very well for her next batch of original songs. (K-W Record, January 25)
Devastations – Yes, U (Beggars Banquet)
Devastations have the simmering suave nature of Bryan Ferry, the dark and stormy rock atmospherics of Interpol and a dash of Nick Cave, all of which guarantees them a soundtrack spot in some film where it’s always raining and the hero takes late night drives in search of either redemption or revenge. Devastations are experts at conveying mood, which might have something to do with growing up in isolated, expansive Australia and resettling in the European centre of Berlin.
They get full points for production value and the fact that they occasionally catch glimpses of sunlight amidst the gloom and doom, but the songs themselves are plodding and threadbare, the lyrics inconsequential. One of the better tracks here, "Avalanche of Stars," borrows a keyboard riff from Nancy Sinatra’s "You Only Live Twice"; while the aquatic bass, ancient drum machine and pedal steel provide a glorious backdrop, the whole piece still feels like it’s waiting for someone else to bring it all into a tighter focus.
There’s a great backing band here for someone else’s project; on their own, Devastations should farm themselves out for soundtrack work. (K-W Record, February 21)
Fairmont – Coloured in Memory
(Border Community/Fusion III)
Many electronic artists who have built their reputation on techno singles end up choking on a full-length album, especially when they decide to step off the dance floor and lose the pulsating beat to explore different avenues. Toronto expatriate Jacob Fairley, on the other hand, has no qualms about losing his beat crutches and embarking on Tangerine Dream-like voyages into shady cinematic territories, or picking up an electric guitar and whispering into the microphone.
Fairley resides in Berlin these days, but it’s not hard to guess that from Fairmont: the synths sound like vintage 70s gear, the beats are derived from the minimalist clicks’n’cuts movement of the early century, and there are subtle shades of warmth underneath the icy electro exterior, much like the reigning queen of Berlin, Ellen Allien, does in her own work. The glam rock guitars that invaded Fairley’s last release are nowhere to be found; at a time when so many of his contemporaries are branching out into more organic or rockist sounds, Fairley is quite content to make an entirely synthetic record.
But the aesthetic alone doesn’t make this one of the finest Canadian electronic albums in recent memory. His own vocals are barely noticeable and, as to be expected, the beat-friendly tracks rely on repetition and evolution. Yet he still has a songwriter’s ear for melodic hooks and arrangements and knows how to sequence an album: Coloured in Memory never stays in one mood for very long, and the ambient tracks are just as compelling as the beats he’d likely play out for a crowd in a DJ set—which makes it sound just as good on Sunday morning as it does on Saturday night. (K-W Record, March 6)
Forest City Lovers – Haunting Moon Sinking (Out of This Spark/Sonic Unyon)
Beauty lies in the rows of red brick houses in the morning dawn. New possibilities arise every time the streetlights come to life. The small town girl in the big city maintains her poise amidst the bustle, taking carefully detailed notes on her new surroundings and setting it all to lovely melodies that dare to dream beyond all the other bedroom singer/songwriters in her neighbourhood.
On the one hand, singer/songwriter Kat Burns is one in a long line of similar southern Ontario artists with a mastery of minor key melancholy and string-laden songs about leaving those small towns behind. But she’s more multi-dimensional than most, with a band of Lovers who rock out when they have to, are able to step into vintage cabaret mode without a hint of clumsiness, and do a classy dance around Burns’s subtle melodies.
Considerable help comes from bassist Kyle Donnelly (also of labelmates the D’Urbervilles) and violinist Mika Posen. Though Burns often performs solo, this material comes alive in this duo's dynamic hands; even when drummer Paul Weadick backs off, Posen and Donnelly drive the songs away from the more sedate territory of earlier material.
Together with the D’Urbervilles’ debut album and last year’s scene-defining compilation Friends in Bellwoods, Haunting Moon Sinking marks a formidable debut for the new label Out of This Spark. If they keep up this level of quality, they’ll have the best label roster in Canadian indie rock. (K-W Record, March 13)
Most of these reviews ran in the Kitchener-Waterloo Record and Guelph Mercury; two of them ran in the winter issue of Magnet. More tomorrow, but in alphabetical order here, they are: Baby Dee, Erykah Badu, Black Mountain, Burning Hell, Cadence Weapon, Cat Power, Devastations, Fairmont, Forest City Lovers.
Baby Dee - Safe Inside the Day (Drag City)
Life is a cabaret, old chum. Especially if you’re a hermaphrodite harpist in a bee costume who plays accordion on a giant tricycle in a circus, while acting as musical director of a Catholic church by night. Or if you end up back in your hometown of Cleveland working for a tree removal service, while touring Europe with David Tibet’s Current 93 in your spare time.
This kind of life story explains a lot about Baby Dee, whose music immediately conjures up stereotypes of Warholian drag cabaret in 70s New York City. Unlike her friend Antony, Dee’s androgynous voice isn’t angelic—it’s ridiculously melodramatic, especially when she writes herself bewildering choruses with the refrain: “Spill the milk/ steal the meat/ life is bitter and death is sweet/ all the bacon that a boy can eat.” Breakfast pops up as a bizarre life metaphor again when she laments how “father, son and holy ghost/ stole the bacon and burnt the toast.”
Baby Dee is certainly not without talent, especially as a keyboardist; the two instrumentals here are lovely. However, on the high camp of “Big Titty Bee Girl (From Dino Town)” Dee’s vocals sound straight out of community theatre, instead of the restraint and guidance you might expect from co-producer Will Oldham. Baby Dee is an intriguing figure for a variety of reasons, but as the album progresses, one of her titles sticks in the mind: “The Dance of Diminishing Possibilities.” (Magnet, Winter 2008)
Erykah Badu – New Amerykah Part One (4th World War) (Universal)The last time Erykah Badu wrote an album, George W. Bush was not yet the leader of the free world. Eight years later, her vision of New Amerykah is a druggy, discombobulated moral morass on the verge of societal collapse. To her credit, these vivid nightmares are translated into a brilliant music vision.
Badu draws from the deep well of Marvin Gaye and Curtis Mayfield here, along with other 70s soul pioneers who had seen the dream of civil rights erode under the weight of economic collapse, political apathy and an influx of hard drugs into the community. Consequently, their brand of soul music started painting with abstract colours borrowed from Miles Davis, rather than the punchy rhythms and horn shots that accompanied earlier messages of affirmation.
Similarly, New Amerykah refuses to settle for easy answers, musically or lyrically. Badu spends much of her energy in an inquisitive mode (“What if there were no niggers, just master teachers?”), while the heavy hip-hop grooves beneath her rattle foundations. Badu rounds up an astounding arsenal of producers: ?uestlove of the Roots, Sa-Ra Creative Partners, jazz vibraphonist Roy Ayers, and 9th Wonder.
The two songs featuring Madlib are the trippiest: "The Healer," with its wobbly descending bass line and a clipped cymbal crash that sounds like a burst of white noise; and "My Children," which consists of little more than a monstrous hip-hop beat, African drums and a vocal chant, each element slipping in and out of the beat while Badu sings, “Hold on, my people.”
This isn’t the easy listening hip-hop jazz of Badu’s breakthrough debut album, nor is it the swaggering soul sister of 2000’s Mama’s Gun. Instead, Badu has reinvented herself entirely to address the musical and social climate she awoke to in 2007, and has made a dense, difficult and fascinating soul classic that sounds like nothing else in modern R&B or pop.
And the good news is that, rather than sometime in the next decade, Part Two is expected no later than this summer. (K-W Record, March 20)
Black Mountain – Into the Future (Scratch)The album title is more than a bit ironic, for Black Mountain’s harshest critics have always argued that there’s a fine line between homage and retro necrophilia. But on their 2005 self-titled album, Vancouver’s sultans of stoner sludge came out swinging with a slab of 70s psychedelic garage rock that pushed all the right buttons, even if it was all too easy to play spot-the-influence.
This time out there are plenty of welcome changes to the band, starting with an increased role for spellbinding vocalist Amber Webb and keyboardist Jeremy Schmidt, both of whom ratchet up the spook factor in some of the ghostlier grooves. Yet singer/songwriter Stephen McBean appears to have dropped the ball entirely, giving his band little more than threadbare sketches to work with. His talented comrades—each of whom has a worthwhile side project when not touring the world with Black Mountain—don’t sound committed to the task, especially powerhouse drummer and longtime McBean collaborator Josh Wells, who approaches most of these songs with little more than a shrug.
At their finest, Black Mountain still outshine most of their peers in this admittedly limited genre, but the Future here is full of little more than wasted opportunities. (K-W Record, January 25)
The Burning Hell – Happy Birthday (Weewerk/Outside) On the portrait found inside this CD, Peterborough singer/songwriter Mathias Kom is pictured against a bleak, wintry Ontario backdrop in a dapper grey suit, clutching a ukulele case in one hand while he’s being pulled to the heavens by a cluster of bright blood-red balloons, Mary Poppins-style. From the slightly bemused look on his face, this happens to him all the time and it’s getting a bit tiresome.
There’s nothing tiresome about The Burning Hell itself; Happy Birthday is a fully-realized debut album, a perfect balance of mirth and the morbid. Like the Magnetic Fields’ Stephin Merritt, Kom wields a deep baritone and a ukulele and drops tiny, dry and wry punchlines into his songs. And yet underneath the deadpan demeanour are heartbreaking Leonard Cohen-esque songs paying tribute to classic rock dinosaurs and detailing the misadventure of vengeful ghosts, set to aching accordion and mournful cellos played by some former members of The Silver Hearts. Along with his knack for last-call singalongs, Kom also shows off a skill for writing duets—the most gorgeous of which is "Municipal Monarchs," featuring Guelph’s Jenny Mitchell of the Barmitzvah Brothers (now a new addition to the band).
Every song here announces Kom as one of the finest new songwriters in Canada—though don't take my word for it. As Kom himself will tell you on one of the more uplifting tracks here, "Everything You Believe Is A Lie." (K-W Record, January 18)
Cadence Weapon – Afterparty Babies (Upper Class/EMI)Canadian hip-hop is much like Canadian film—we do better with the weirdoes than with the commercial windfalls. Which, along with his current tourmate Buck 65, is why Edmonton's Cadence Weapon is likely to be the first Canadian hip-hop artist to make a significant international impression since the Dream Warriors (who themselves were decidedly against the grain during their heyday).
Mr. Weapon—also known as Rollie Pemberton—already keeps good company. This, his second album and the follow-up to the Polaris-nominated Breaking Kayfabe, is being released in the US on the same label as Tom Waits; it's coming out in the UK on the progressive 21st century hip-hop label Big Dada; here at home he tours with Final Fantasy.
That kind of introduction gives you an idea of the wealth of influences at work here. Afterparty Babies opens with an a capella doo-wop track titled "Do I Miss My Friends?", which seems apt for an artist who flourishes in the cracks between musical communities. Tellingly, that track is the only nod here to traditions of any kind, either inside or outside hip-hop orthodoxy. From there on in, Cadence Weapon charts his own path.
Afterparty Babies is a rollicking ride through the most inventive strains of late 80s hip-hop (Bomb Squad, De La Soul), neo-electro dance party beats not unlike his neighbours in Shout Out Out Out Out, some tricky turntablism from his longtime accomplice DJ Weasel, abrasive distorted rhythms and playfully glitchy sampling.
Those catholic interests are reflected in his often-arcane list of lyrical references, which include Trudeau's ascot, Aphex Twin, Friendster, James Frey, Ryerson coke dealers, The Globe and Mail, and the perils of wearing pink without irony.
And of course, only a self-deprecating Canadian hip-hopper would write a song called "Unsuccessful Club Nights." Only unlike his debut album, this time out Cadence Weapon drops his tendency for density often enough to make some of these tracks actually suitable for dancing, not just the headier soundscapes heard on his debut.
It's this dexterity that makes Cadence Weapon the great hope of Canadian hip-hop: as a lyricist, as a producer and, as is so rare in this country or in hip-hop itself, as an iconoclast with a taste for the visceral who hits you in the gut instead of stuck there stroking your chin. (K-W Record, March 13)
Cat Power – Jukebox (Matador)
For an established singer/songwriter, covering other people’s songs is more often than not a cop-out—especially when you cut a whole album of them and it turns out to be your breakthrough hit. That’s what happened to Cat Power—aka Chan Marshall—with 2000’s The Covers Record; though it was undeniably superior to anything her nascent talent had released up to that point, it was the way she crawled deep inside and recontextualized songs by Lou Reed, the Rolling Stones and Nina Simone that made it much more than a cheap career move.
Now that Marshall is a pseudo-mainstream indie celebrity—and occasional fashion model—and has earned enough credibility for her own songs that she doesn’t really need to revisit the covers concept. And yet here we have Jukebox, where she tackles iconic songs like "New York New York," Hank Williams’ "Rambling Man" and Joni Mitchell’s "Blue," only to render the chords unrecognizable and the melodies considerably more minor-key, breathing entirely new lives into the lyrics as a result.
To call it her finest album to date isn’t a backhanded compliment: none of these performances attempt to piggyback on our familiarity with the original versions. And this being Marshall’s first post-rehab record, her smoky, sultry voice appears here in full focus, as opposed to the slightly catatonic state heard on 2006’s The Greatest.
That album was recorded in Memphis with vintage soul musicians—and yet the end result was more Sarah McLachlan than Stax Records. Some of those veterans return to greater effect here, including classic soul songwriter Spooner Oldham, and Marshall herself lays off the piano and guitar to concentrate on her vocals.
The song selection frequently draws from music fandom itself: from Bob Dylan’s "I Believe In You," George Jackson’s "Aretha Sing One For Me," Mitchell’s "Blue" and Marshall’s own "Song to Bobby." By immersing herself in the work of others, Marshall once again takes a quantum leap into discovering the best sides of her own talent—which bodes very well for her next batch of original songs. (K-W Record, January 25)
Devastations – Yes, U (Beggars Banquet)Devastations have the simmering suave nature of Bryan Ferry, the dark and stormy rock atmospherics of Interpol and a dash of Nick Cave, all of which guarantees them a soundtrack spot in some film where it’s always raining and the hero takes late night drives in search of either redemption or revenge. Devastations are experts at conveying mood, which might have something to do with growing up in isolated, expansive Australia and resettling in the European centre of Berlin.
They get full points for production value and the fact that they occasionally catch glimpses of sunlight amidst the gloom and doom, but the songs themselves are plodding and threadbare, the lyrics inconsequential. One of the better tracks here, "Avalanche of Stars," borrows a keyboard riff from Nancy Sinatra’s "You Only Live Twice"; while the aquatic bass, ancient drum machine and pedal steel provide a glorious backdrop, the whole piece still feels like it’s waiting for someone else to bring it all into a tighter focus.
There’s a great backing band here for someone else’s project; on their own, Devastations should farm themselves out for soundtrack work. (K-W Record, February 21)
Fairmont – Coloured in Memory(Border Community/Fusion III)
Many electronic artists who have built their reputation on techno singles end up choking on a full-length album, especially when they decide to step off the dance floor and lose the pulsating beat to explore different avenues. Toronto expatriate Jacob Fairley, on the other hand, has no qualms about losing his beat crutches and embarking on Tangerine Dream-like voyages into shady cinematic territories, or picking up an electric guitar and whispering into the microphone.
Fairley resides in Berlin these days, but it’s not hard to guess that from Fairmont: the synths sound like vintage 70s gear, the beats are derived from the minimalist clicks’n’cuts movement of the early century, and there are subtle shades of warmth underneath the icy electro exterior, much like the reigning queen of Berlin, Ellen Allien, does in her own work. The glam rock guitars that invaded Fairley’s last release are nowhere to be found; at a time when so many of his contemporaries are branching out into more organic or rockist sounds, Fairley is quite content to make an entirely synthetic record.
But the aesthetic alone doesn’t make this one of the finest Canadian electronic albums in recent memory. His own vocals are barely noticeable and, as to be expected, the beat-friendly tracks rely on repetition and evolution. Yet he still has a songwriter’s ear for melodic hooks and arrangements and knows how to sequence an album: Coloured in Memory never stays in one mood for very long, and the ambient tracks are just as compelling as the beats he’d likely play out for a crowd in a DJ set—which makes it sound just as good on Sunday morning as it does on Saturday night. (K-W Record, March 6)
Forest City Lovers – Haunting Moon Sinking (Out of This Spark/Sonic Unyon) Beauty lies in the rows of red brick houses in the morning dawn. New possibilities arise every time the streetlights come to life. The small town girl in the big city maintains her poise amidst the bustle, taking carefully detailed notes on her new surroundings and setting it all to lovely melodies that dare to dream beyond all the other bedroom singer/songwriters in her neighbourhood.
On the one hand, singer/songwriter Kat Burns is one in a long line of similar southern Ontario artists with a mastery of minor key melancholy and string-laden songs about leaving those small towns behind. But she’s more multi-dimensional than most, with a band of Lovers who rock out when they have to, are able to step into vintage cabaret mode without a hint of clumsiness, and do a classy dance around Burns’s subtle melodies.
Considerable help comes from bassist Kyle Donnelly (also of labelmates the D’Urbervilles) and violinist Mika Posen. Though Burns often performs solo, this material comes alive in this duo's dynamic hands; even when drummer Paul Weadick backs off, Posen and Donnelly drive the songs away from the more sedate territory of earlier material.
Together with the D’Urbervilles’ debut album and last year’s scene-defining compilation Friends in Bellwoods, Haunting Moon Sinking marks a formidable debut for the new label Out of This Spark. If they keep up this level of quality, they’ll have the best label roster in Canadian indie rock. (K-W Record, March 13)
Labels: Baby Dee, Black Mountain, Burning Hell, Cadence Weapon, Cat Power, Devastations, Erykah Badu, Fairmont, Forest City Lovers
Thursday, March 20, 2008
Dave Bidini: Out of Africa
Regular readers of Radio Free Canuckistan likely discerned long ago that much of my adult musical life has been shaped by the Rheostatics, who packed it in almost a year ago now. Since then, founding member Dave Bidini published a memoir/travelogue/rock'n'roll book that's much, much better than its clunky title: Around the World in 57 1/2 Gigs.
It's Bidini's second proper rock'n'roll book, the follow-up to On a Cold Road--a must-read history of Canadian rock music that tells the story of not only the Rheostatics through the 80s and 90s, but that of the bands that came before them in the 70s, when slogging it across the prairie spine in pursuit of rock'n'roll glory still involved plenty of uncharted waters.
Part of that book's charm was its ability to tell stories that we thought we knew, but didn't really--and I'm not just talking about Rheostatics fans, but about all rock fans in Canada who don't think about what happens during the long slogs between gigs, about the horrors and hilarities of the working musician's daily existence beyond the usual biz stories about being shafted by record labels.
This time out, Bidini takes us to places we never think about in the first place--such as what it's like to play Canadian folk songs in a Finnish bar with African women and Azerbaijani piano players. Around the World is about the period of time leading up to the final Rheostatics show at Massey Hall, when Bidini is finding his feet as a solo musician--and doing so in places deep in mainland China and in war-torn Sierra Leone.
The best thing about Bidini's writing is that he always calls it as he sees it; he's not trying to create some kind of overly conscious cross-cultural connection to African hip-hop, or to offer a post-modern analysis of cultural imperialism and white colonial guilt. He's an open-minded , wide-eared Canuck, a rocker first and foremost, one who happens to be an astute observer of the absurdities that bind us together, whether it's a collective obsession that men with skates have with placing a small black disc in a net, or the universal truth of a power chord on an electric guitar.
In Around the World, Bidini finds himself more humbled than ever while facing the impending break-up of his band. As one of his close friends once told me, Bidini is a lifer: he married his high school girlfriend, he still wears ratty old hockey sweaters that he first donned in the early 70s (thankfully only on special occasions--he's really quite a dapper man now), and he's only ever really played in one rock band in his life. Having the rug pulled out from one of the certainties of his life--the Rheostatics--leaves him more open than ever to new discovery, to personal re-invention, to challenging conceptions he's held his whole life. Witnessing that unfold in his writing is a beautiful thing.
I had more in-depth thoughts when I first read the book (I've since given my copy to my brother for Christmas), so don't consider this a proper review. I will say, however, that it's one of the few music books I've even bothered to pick up in the last five years or so. (That it came out around the same time as Carl Wilson's mind-blowing musing on Celine Dion is purely coincidental timing--I'm not going back to rock books, really. They bore me as a genre.)
At the book launch in the fall, Canuckistan comrade Shannon Whibbs told me she had a great conversation with Bidini for Chartattack.com that was, as always no matter the medium, whittled down to a couple of hundred words. Because Bidini and I have gabbed at length countless times before, I thought I'd give Ms. Whibbs the spotlight here instead.
As I'm typing this, I realize that Bidini is playing right now at the Paddock to kick off the Exclaim! Hockey tournament this weekend (an annual event he wrote about in his book The Best Game You Can Name). No doubt you'll see him out and about, on ice and off, at that event all weekend. He is playing April 18 at Call the Office in London. Rheos fans should note that there is a new, downloadable "box set" of Rheos rarities being made available. And he's also been in the news lately for matching fellow hockey rock nut John K. Samson by "winning" the CBC's Canada Reads contest; Bidini championed Paul Quarrington's King Leary. All other things Bidini, music and literary, can be found here--including links to musical works in progress. His debut solo album, The Land is Wild, is expected later this year.
Without further ado, over to you, Ms. Whibbs.
Dave Bidini
Interview by Shannon Whibbs
July, 2007
Locale: McClelland & Stewart office
SW: After you knew the Rheos were breaking up, you did this solo tour that took you all over the world. What prompted you to write a book about all these experiences?
DB: I thought it would make good fodder for storytelling. When I’m away, I’m writing all the time anyways, in my journal and stuff. I want to see this as a bookend to On a Cold Road; that was about all the time up until a certain achievement, and this is the shadow of that. Having achieved that, it was sort of the top of the mountain and this is the other side of the mountain, and I thought that was worth talking about, through the energy of my trip or travelling.
SW: Did it start and end as you envisioned it, or did it change form?
DB: It changed a lot. I had this wish list. Originally it was gonna be 80 gigs; that was the working title. But we ran out of time. Also, family life [was a factor] too, with two kids. Some part of me envisioned just getting on a train and going right across Europe with my guitar; then I realized, practically and logistically speaking, that that was probably a book that was more suited to somebody with a freer lifestyle. And for the travel in this book, I used up all my coupons, all my domestic coupons, so I had to scale it back a little bit. In the end I wanted to have a full enough view, a perspective of “the world.”
SW: The book is a deeply personal reflection of the break-up of the Rheostatics. Do the other guys know what you’re getting into?
DB: Well, usually with Martin [Tielli], I’ve got carte blanche. When I was doing On a Cold Road, he said to me, “You can write whatever you want about me, it doesn’t matter.” And it really doesn’t—mostly because his memory recall isn’t that great [laughs], and so often he’ll be happy that I remembered half the stuff. Also, because of that book, the guys know that all bets are off; they know me as an honest musician, so why wouldn’t I be an honest writer? Actually, in a way it’s a relief that I was able to write about a breaking-up band that’s never really necessarily going to have to work together—as opposed to On a Cold Road, where I did, to a point, have to be a little bit careful that I didn’t say things that would come back to haunt me. But like any piece of art, the only way it would be a good book, an honest book, was to make it completely honest and real.
SW: I definitely felt that when I was reading it. As a fan, it was really heartbreaking to read. Were you able to achieve your goal in writing about it — were you able to achieve some closure?
DB: Yeah, for sure. For me, the closure came with Dave Bookman’s [on-air] interview [at CFNY] when he surprised us with [The Secret Sessions tribute album.] That was a great moment because we were together and we were all really emotionally moved and there were a lot of tears that night. It was good for that to happen a week before the actual show; you get that all out of the way. If we’d just shown up at Massey Hall, or at the few rehearsals at Massey Hall, and had not been together and experienced that emotional sense of closure, relief and comfort, then it probably would have been a different show and it probably would have been really, really difficult on an emotional level. Because we’d had that time, playing the show was more of a celebration than anything. Personally, and also in the literary sense, this book achieves a certain closure, too.
SW: What are you hoping that fans will take away from the book? Do you think that they will be able to achieve a sense of closure through it as well?
DB: I think so. I can relate that mostly to the response to On a Cold Road. I know a lot of the stories in that book were important to readers—not necessarily Rheostatics fans, but musicians, in the sense that they could see themselves reflected. [For] fans of the band, they got a sense of what we had gone through, personally and musically, as the band was coming together and also [the] Dave Clark break-up [Clark was the first Rheostatics drummer, 1979-1995]. That whole thing was illuminated [in the book] and I think—not that this would be the sole reason for the book—that our fans deserve that because they do pay such attention to the musical detail. And I think there is emotional detail in the literature based on the band. So I think people will get a greater sense of who we are and who we were and that, in a way, informs the experience as a fan and the appreciation of the music.
SW: For me, as a fan, it felt like it helped tie everything up. And when I was reading, I found it to be such an interesting mix of genres, which is great because there are so many travelogues written, and so many memoirs, and so many musical history books, but you’ve kind of mixed them all together in a really amazing way. I was wondering about what sort of readership you were envisioning when you put this book together.
DB: When the first two books came out, On a Cold Road and Tropic of Hockey, there was a lot of back stuff in there about playing music as a kid and rediscovering hockey as a young adult and stuff, but I never really saw it as memoir-ish. There was this whole big memoir wave and people were saying, “Oh, your books are like memoirs.” Growing up, I thought that a memoir was something that an 80-year-old guy would write. I always felt a little bit slighted or cheated when people would call it that. But this book, simply because I’m older and I’ve seen more stuff, is slightly more memoir-ish than the others and that’s just a product of age, I think. Maybe that’s informed a little bit by the maturity of the writing. Because I’m traveling to other places there has to be a travel element to it. Because it’s a reflective look at the band’s history there’s going to be a memoir-ish quality, and it’s also going to be a rock ‘n’ roll book because it’s about rock’n’roll! I would have denied it if I had tried to excise those elements and when you’re writing, you’re not necessarily thinking in those terms, either, that it’s three genres in one. You just write and then it’s over and it’s for other people to call it what it is.
SW: Which leg of your trip had the most impact on you?
DB: They all impacted me in a different way, I’d say Africa because I’d never been there before and I met people with such a completely different perspective, just a different life. And it’s the Africans who have been in contact [with me] the most and are probably the most eager to maintain those connections, too. But of all the places that was where I felt like I was truly far away and it felt like real travel writing, going off the beaten path.
SW: Have you found that your travels have impacted your songwriting since?
DB: It’s hard to say because it really hasn’t been that busy musically, but I wrote some stuff when I was over there and these things tend to produce themselves down the road; it might not necessarily make an instant impact. It’s also not as if the Rheos were a straight rock ‘n’ roll band. There were also African elements [in that band], so it wasn’t as if all of a sudden I started making African music and wearing jazz hats and playing a drum. But I have a song on the solo record that’s almost done, which is a long 14-minute song about a guy I met in Africa.
SW: I was trawling around on your website yesterday and I was able to listen to the MP3 of the performance of “Horses.”
DB: [laughs] It’s insane, eh?
SW: It was so great to have an audio to go with the visuals in the book. It was so powerful. I’m trying to imagine you standing there, taking it all in, going “what the hell?!”
DB: Yeah, it was mindblowing, astonishing. One of the things I did find with this book was no matter where you go and no matter who you’re playing with, you’re able to achieve that centre of just pure, musical exchange and musical communication. And I knew for them, that I was a guy playing a guitar and there were guys playing drums and people singing and it wasn’t really so absurd. I didn’t want to project to them that I thought it was really absurd that a white guy was coming to Africa and playing just for them! For them it seemed natural, so in effect, it seemed kind of natural for me, too. At one point this one woman stood up and closed her eyes and put her hands up in the air and started singing this song this hoser anthem that I wrote at King and Parliament and in my parents’ house. When you’re used to playing it in Canada, it was awesome to see that moment of musical translation and seize on to it. It was really beautiful.
SW: How did that and your other musical experiences in Africa effect your perception of how music is made in North America and how it’s structured?
DB: In Sierra Leone, people there are making music in spite of the fact that they have nothing. It’s a destroyed city with no money and no infrastructure or anything like that, but yet people have to play, against all odds. You do get the sense of the pampered-ness of music [in North America]. On a certain level, there are people here playing who live day-to-day and doing it because they have to do it, but it totally makes you appreciate it more. In the Studio D in Sierra Leone, they couldn’t record unless they had money to buy fuel to run the generator. Here, it’s like you go home, you plug in your computer and you tune up and play and you have a song. It’s much harder over there, so it gave me a new appreciation, for sure.
SW: The section about Africa is one of the most intense ones, and some of the stories were just horrifying. Are you hoping to raise more awareness, through the book, about these issues?
DB: Oh yeah, for sure. And not only that, just to tell stories for people who wouldn’t normally have their stories told. The other thing about Africans is that they’ll tell you the story just as if you and I were sitting around talking about hockey. And for them to have absorbed it for it, to come out the other way—completely calm and a sort of natural sense of oneself—it’s pretty amazing. It would have twice the book if I’d told every story.
SW: Regarding another section, that great stream-of-consciousness thing [wherein Bidini constructs a mammoth sentence of rock’n’roll memories that lasts over two pages; it's on pp182-184 for those following at home] in the China section, which ends with “In my life, rock ‘n’ roll has meant everything to me.” What brought it on and did your editor mention anything about it when you handed in the manuscript?
DB: She didn’t touch it, which was amazing. And of course, that was one of those things that you write in four minutes and it just pours out of your wrist. It was really fun to write and when it was done I was like, “Wow. That’s done.” I fiddled with the last line a little bit, but I really didn’t have to touch it that much. It was a blast. I’ve read other books before like this—I guess Roddy Doyle’s books are like that a little bit, in The Commitments when they’ll be arguing about who’s better, Marvin Gaye or Otis Redding— and it just evokes all kinds of memories of those songs and thoughts of those songs. That was kind of the intention, so that you’re reading it almost the way that you listen to a radio dial sort of spinning up and down, all these melodies and these thoughts. At the end of it, you’re so charged and so excited about being a music fan that you’ve shared in that kind of connection, too.
SW: That’s how it made me feel. You get the sense in reading the book about just how much you love rock ‘n’ roll.
DB: For sure. A lot of music criticism and a lot of music books tend to be a little bit bloodless. There’s always exceptions, but [there’s always] a bit of a distance, y’know? Fuck distance! It’s okay to say you love it if you love it and to prove that you do. I always have to kind of bring myself back a little bit remembering that rock ‘n’ roll is important and exciting and fun and huge in a lot of people’s lives and to portray myself as being one of those persons, it isn’t necessarily not more literary or lacking poise. I’m just going to celebrate it, right?
SW: When you travel to new and foreign places, you often go in to these experiences with preconceived notions of what you’re going to find. Did you have some of these notions of your own and were they kind of shattered when you were over in, say, China, or even Finland?
DB: Yeah, and Russia, too. I was certain—well [traveling companion] Al [Piggins] was certain—that we were going to get killed in Russia. The first time I was there I thought that as well. It was completely demystified. That’s why we travel — to have those stereotypes and misconceptions smashed. It’s the same thing with Africa; I thought it was one of those trips that I might never return from—which is a reason for going. But people talk about the fucking bugs, and they talk about how dirty it is and how you’re going to get really sick. In Sierra Leone I had a really bad three-day cold, and I saw like, four mosquitoes, and I didn’t see any guns. I saw some shady characters, but it was an easy place to be. Even though it was very sad—and a lot of parts of Africa where I was, people’s lives are very tragic— it was just really fun. I hadn’t prepared myself for fun because I was so on edge about what it was going to be like. Then you get there and people just want to have a good time. Finland was probably exactly how I thought it was going to be until our last show, in Eastern Finland and everybody was crazy and fun.
SW: I like your whole section comparing Canadians and the Finns and realizing that we’re not nearly as similar as we’d like to think.
DB: Fuck, Canada’s changed a lot. Canadians have really come out of their shell.
SW: What’s next for you in terms of your solo music?
DB: That’s something that’s going to come out eventually. I’m working on it with Don Kerr and The Scribbled Out Man guys — Paul Linklater, Doug Friesen — and Don is producing it in the studio. But Martin [Tielli] and I are doing a lot of stuff, too. We’re doing the soundtrack for this film and trying to figure out what to do, how we’ll go about it. And we did this Five Hole thing [based on Bidini’s book Five Hole: Tales of Hockey Erotica]: it was me, Selina [Martin], Martin Tielli, Ford Pier, and Barry Mirochnik doing the music for this [theatrical adaptation] that happened in Calgary and that was really fun. We did six songs for that and it’s going to go tour on the road as well. It’s going to go across the country in ’08.
It’s funny, before Massey Hall [closed the chapter on the Rheos], I’d done so much [solo] playing, it was really kind of weird: I’d done the Five Hole thing, I’d done these trips, I worked a little bit on my solo record. It was cool because it wasn’t like it was out of form, y’know, playing a big show like that or even the lead-up shows, which I was proud of. It was like, “Cool. Band breaks up, but…” It convinced me that music doesn’t die; it just exists in different forms.
-end-
It's Bidini's second proper rock'n'roll book, the follow-up to On a Cold Road--a must-read history of Canadian rock music that tells the story of not only the Rheostatics through the 80s and 90s, but that of the bands that came before them in the 70s, when slogging it across the prairie spine in pursuit of rock'n'roll glory still involved plenty of uncharted waters.
Part of that book's charm was its ability to tell stories that we thought we knew, but didn't really--and I'm not just talking about Rheostatics fans, but about all rock fans in Canada who don't think about what happens during the long slogs between gigs, about the horrors and hilarities of the working musician's daily existence beyond the usual biz stories about being shafted by record labels.
This time out, Bidini takes us to places we never think about in the first place--such as what it's like to play Canadian folk songs in a Finnish bar with African women and Azerbaijani piano players. Around the World is about the period of time leading up to the final Rheostatics show at Massey Hall, when Bidini is finding his feet as a solo musician--and doing so in places deep in mainland China and in war-torn Sierra Leone.
The best thing about Bidini's writing is that he always calls it as he sees it; he's not trying to create some kind of overly conscious cross-cultural connection to African hip-hop, or to offer a post-modern analysis of cultural imperialism and white colonial guilt. He's an open-minded , wide-eared Canuck, a rocker first and foremost, one who happens to be an astute observer of the absurdities that bind us together, whether it's a collective obsession that men with skates have with placing a small black disc in a net, or the universal truth of a power chord on an electric guitar.
In Around the World, Bidini finds himself more humbled than ever while facing the impending break-up of his band. As one of his close friends once told me, Bidini is a lifer: he married his high school girlfriend, he still wears ratty old hockey sweaters that he first donned in the early 70s (thankfully only on special occasions--he's really quite a dapper man now), and he's only ever really played in one rock band in his life. Having the rug pulled out from one of the certainties of his life--the Rheostatics--leaves him more open than ever to new discovery, to personal re-invention, to challenging conceptions he's held his whole life. Witnessing that unfold in his writing is a beautiful thing.
I had more in-depth thoughts when I first read the book (I've since given my copy to my brother for Christmas), so don't consider this a proper review. I will say, however, that it's one of the few music books I've even bothered to pick up in the last five years or so. (That it came out around the same time as Carl Wilson's mind-blowing musing on Celine Dion is purely coincidental timing--I'm not going back to rock books, really. They bore me as a genre.)
At the book launch in the fall, Canuckistan comrade Shannon Whibbs told me she had a great conversation with Bidini for Chartattack.com that was, as always no matter the medium, whittled down to a couple of hundred words. Because Bidini and I have gabbed at length countless times before, I thought I'd give Ms. Whibbs the spotlight here instead.
As I'm typing this, I realize that Bidini is playing right now at the Paddock to kick off the Exclaim! Hockey tournament this weekend (an annual event he wrote about in his book The Best Game You Can Name). No doubt you'll see him out and about, on ice and off, at that event all weekend. He is playing April 18 at Call the Office in London. Rheos fans should note that there is a new, downloadable "box set" of Rheos rarities being made available. And he's also been in the news lately for matching fellow hockey rock nut John K. Samson by "winning" the CBC's Canada Reads contest; Bidini championed Paul Quarrington's King Leary. All other things Bidini, music and literary, can be found here--including links to musical works in progress. His debut solo album, The Land is Wild, is expected later this year.
Without further ado, over to you, Ms. Whibbs.
Dave Bidini
Interview by Shannon Whibbs
July, 2007
Locale: McClelland & Stewart office
SW: After you knew the Rheos were breaking up, you did this solo tour that took you all over the world. What prompted you to write a book about all these experiences?
DB: I thought it would make good fodder for storytelling. When I’m away, I’m writing all the time anyways, in my journal and stuff. I want to see this as a bookend to On a Cold Road; that was about all the time up until a certain achievement, and this is the shadow of that. Having achieved that, it was sort of the top of the mountain and this is the other side of the mountain, and I thought that was worth talking about, through the energy of my trip or travelling.
SW: Did it start and end as you envisioned it, or did it change form?
DB: It changed a lot. I had this wish list. Originally it was gonna be 80 gigs; that was the working title. But we ran out of time. Also, family life [was a factor] too, with two kids. Some part of me envisioned just getting on a train and going right across Europe with my guitar; then I realized, practically and logistically speaking, that that was probably a book that was more suited to somebody with a freer lifestyle. And for the travel in this book, I used up all my coupons, all my domestic coupons, so I had to scale it back a little bit. In the end I wanted to have a full enough view, a perspective of “the world.”
SW: The book is a deeply personal reflection of the break-up of the Rheostatics. Do the other guys know what you’re getting into?
DB: Well, usually with Martin [Tielli], I’ve got carte blanche. When I was doing On a Cold Road, he said to me, “You can write whatever you want about me, it doesn’t matter.” And it really doesn’t—mostly because his memory recall isn’t that great [laughs], and so often he’ll be happy that I remembered half the stuff. Also, because of that book, the guys know that all bets are off; they know me as an honest musician, so why wouldn’t I be an honest writer? Actually, in a way it’s a relief that I was able to write about a breaking-up band that’s never really necessarily going to have to work together—as opposed to On a Cold Road, where I did, to a point, have to be a little bit careful that I didn’t say things that would come back to haunt me. But like any piece of art, the only way it would be a good book, an honest book, was to make it completely honest and real.
SW: I definitely felt that when I was reading it. As a fan, it was really heartbreaking to read. Were you able to achieve your goal in writing about it — were you able to achieve some closure?
DB: Yeah, for sure. For me, the closure came with Dave Bookman’s [on-air] interview [at CFNY] when he surprised us with [The Secret Sessions tribute album.] That was a great moment because we were together and we were all really emotionally moved and there were a lot of tears that night. It was good for that to happen a week before the actual show; you get that all out of the way. If we’d just shown up at Massey Hall, or at the few rehearsals at Massey Hall, and had not been together and experienced that emotional sense of closure, relief and comfort, then it probably would have been a different show and it probably would have been really, really difficult on an emotional level. Because we’d had that time, playing the show was more of a celebration than anything. Personally, and also in the literary sense, this book achieves a certain closure, too.
SW: What are you hoping that fans will take away from the book? Do you think that they will be able to achieve a sense of closure through it as well?
DB: I think so. I can relate that mostly to the response to On a Cold Road. I know a lot of the stories in that book were important to readers—not necessarily Rheostatics fans, but musicians, in the sense that they could see themselves reflected. [For] fans of the band, they got a sense of what we had gone through, personally and musically, as the band was coming together and also [the] Dave Clark break-up [Clark was the first Rheostatics drummer, 1979-1995]. That whole thing was illuminated [in the book] and I think—not that this would be the sole reason for the book—that our fans deserve that because they do pay such attention to the musical detail. And I think there is emotional detail in the literature based on the band. So I think people will get a greater sense of who we are and who we were and that, in a way, informs the experience as a fan and the appreciation of the music.
SW: For me, as a fan, it felt like it helped tie everything up. And when I was reading, I found it to be such an interesting mix of genres, which is great because there are so many travelogues written, and so many memoirs, and so many musical history books, but you’ve kind of mixed them all together in a really amazing way. I was wondering about what sort of readership you were envisioning when you put this book together.
DB: When the first two books came out, On a Cold Road and Tropic of Hockey, there was a lot of back stuff in there about playing music as a kid and rediscovering hockey as a young adult and stuff, but I never really saw it as memoir-ish. There was this whole big memoir wave and people were saying, “Oh, your books are like memoirs.” Growing up, I thought that a memoir was something that an 80-year-old guy would write. I always felt a little bit slighted or cheated when people would call it that. But this book, simply because I’m older and I’ve seen more stuff, is slightly more memoir-ish than the others and that’s just a product of age, I think. Maybe that’s informed a little bit by the maturity of the writing. Because I’m traveling to other places there has to be a travel element to it. Because it’s a reflective look at the band’s history there’s going to be a memoir-ish quality, and it’s also going to be a rock ‘n’ roll book because it’s about rock’n’roll! I would have denied it if I had tried to excise those elements and when you’re writing, you’re not necessarily thinking in those terms, either, that it’s three genres in one. You just write and then it’s over and it’s for other people to call it what it is.
SW: Which leg of your trip had the most impact on you?
DB: They all impacted me in a different way, I’d say Africa because I’d never been there before and I met people with such a completely different perspective, just a different life. And it’s the Africans who have been in contact [with me] the most and are probably the most eager to maintain those connections, too. But of all the places that was where I felt like I was truly far away and it felt like real travel writing, going off the beaten path.
SW: Have you found that your travels have impacted your songwriting since?
DB: It’s hard to say because it really hasn’t been that busy musically, but I wrote some stuff when I was over there and these things tend to produce themselves down the road; it might not necessarily make an instant impact. It’s also not as if the Rheos were a straight rock ‘n’ roll band. There were also African elements [in that band], so it wasn’t as if all of a sudden I started making African music and wearing jazz hats and playing a drum. But I have a song on the solo record that’s almost done, which is a long 14-minute song about a guy I met in Africa.
SW: I was trawling around on your website yesterday and I was able to listen to the MP3 of the performance of “Horses.”
DB: [laughs] It’s insane, eh?
SW: It was so great to have an audio to go with the visuals in the book. It was so powerful. I’m trying to imagine you standing there, taking it all in, going “what the hell?!”
DB: Yeah, it was mindblowing, astonishing. One of the things I did find with this book was no matter where you go and no matter who you’re playing with, you’re able to achieve that centre of just pure, musical exchange and musical communication. And I knew for them, that I was a guy playing a guitar and there were guys playing drums and people singing and it wasn’t really so absurd. I didn’t want to project to them that I thought it was really absurd that a white guy was coming to Africa and playing just for them! For them it seemed natural, so in effect, it seemed kind of natural for me, too. At one point this one woman stood up and closed her eyes and put her hands up in the air and started singing this song this hoser anthem that I wrote at King and Parliament and in my parents’ house. When you’re used to playing it in Canada, it was awesome to see that moment of musical translation and seize on to it. It was really beautiful.
SW: How did that and your other musical experiences in Africa effect your perception of how music is made in North America and how it’s structured?
DB: In Sierra Leone, people there are making music in spite of the fact that they have nothing. It’s a destroyed city with no money and no infrastructure or anything like that, but yet people have to play, against all odds. You do get the sense of the pampered-ness of music [in North America]. On a certain level, there are people here playing who live day-to-day and doing it because they have to do it, but it totally makes you appreciate it more. In the Studio D in Sierra Leone, they couldn’t record unless they had money to buy fuel to run the generator. Here, it’s like you go home, you plug in your computer and you tune up and play and you have a song. It’s much harder over there, so it gave me a new appreciation, for sure.
SW: The section about Africa is one of the most intense ones, and some of the stories were just horrifying. Are you hoping to raise more awareness, through the book, about these issues?
DB: Oh yeah, for sure. And not only that, just to tell stories for people who wouldn’t normally have their stories told. The other thing about Africans is that they’ll tell you the story just as if you and I were sitting around talking about hockey. And for them to have absorbed it for it, to come out the other way—completely calm and a sort of natural sense of oneself—it’s pretty amazing. It would have twice the book if I’d told every story.
SW: Regarding another section, that great stream-of-consciousness thing [wherein Bidini constructs a mammoth sentence of rock’n’roll memories that lasts over two pages; it's on pp182-184 for those following at home] in the China section, which ends with “In my life, rock ‘n’ roll has meant everything to me.” What brought it on and did your editor mention anything about it when you handed in the manuscript?
DB: She didn’t touch it, which was amazing. And of course, that was one of those things that you write in four minutes and it just pours out of your wrist. It was really fun to write and when it was done I was like, “Wow. That’s done.” I fiddled with the last line a little bit, but I really didn’t have to touch it that much. It was a blast. I’ve read other books before like this—I guess Roddy Doyle’s books are like that a little bit, in The Commitments when they’ll be arguing about who’s better, Marvin Gaye or Otis Redding— and it just evokes all kinds of memories of those songs and thoughts of those songs. That was kind of the intention, so that you’re reading it almost the way that you listen to a radio dial sort of spinning up and down, all these melodies and these thoughts. At the end of it, you’re so charged and so excited about being a music fan that you’ve shared in that kind of connection, too.
SW: That’s how it made me feel. You get the sense in reading the book about just how much you love rock ‘n’ roll.
DB: For sure. A lot of music criticism and a lot of music books tend to be a little bit bloodless. There’s always exceptions, but [there’s always] a bit of a distance, y’know? Fuck distance! It’s okay to say you love it if you love it and to prove that you do. I always have to kind of bring myself back a little bit remembering that rock ‘n’ roll is important and exciting and fun and huge in a lot of people’s lives and to portray myself as being one of those persons, it isn’t necessarily not more literary or lacking poise. I’m just going to celebrate it, right?
SW: When you travel to new and foreign places, you often go in to these experiences with preconceived notions of what you’re going to find. Did you have some of these notions of your own and were they kind of shattered when you were over in, say, China, or even Finland?
DB: Yeah, and Russia, too. I was certain—well [traveling companion] Al [Piggins] was certain—that we were going to get killed in Russia. The first time I was there I thought that as well. It was completely demystified. That’s why we travel — to have those stereotypes and misconceptions smashed. It’s the same thing with Africa; I thought it was one of those trips that I might never return from—which is a reason for going. But people talk about the fucking bugs, and they talk about how dirty it is and how you’re going to get really sick. In Sierra Leone I had a really bad three-day cold, and I saw like, four mosquitoes, and I didn’t see any guns. I saw some shady characters, but it was an easy place to be. Even though it was very sad—and a lot of parts of Africa where I was, people’s lives are very tragic— it was just really fun. I hadn’t prepared myself for fun because I was so on edge about what it was going to be like. Then you get there and people just want to have a good time. Finland was probably exactly how I thought it was going to be until our last show, in Eastern Finland and everybody was crazy and fun.
SW: I like your whole section comparing Canadians and the Finns and realizing that we’re not nearly as similar as we’d like to think.
DB: Fuck, Canada’s changed a lot. Canadians have really come out of their shell.
SW: What’s next for you in terms of your solo music?
DB: That’s something that’s going to come out eventually. I’m working on it with Don Kerr and The Scribbled Out Man guys — Paul Linklater, Doug Friesen — and Don is producing it in the studio. But Martin [Tielli] and I are doing a lot of stuff, too. We’re doing the soundtrack for this film and trying to figure out what to do, how we’ll go about it. And we did this Five Hole thing [based on Bidini’s book Five Hole: Tales of Hockey Erotica]: it was me, Selina [Martin], Martin Tielli, Ford Pier, and Barry Mirochnik doing the music for this [theatrical adaptation] that happened in Calgary and that was really fun. We did six songs for that and it’s going to go tour on the road as well. It’s going to go across the country in ’08.
It’s funny, before Massey Hall [closed the chapter on the Rheos], I’d done so much [solo] playing, it was really kind of weird: I’d done the Five Hole thing, I’d done these trips, I worked a little bit on my solo record. It was cool because it wasn’t like it was out of form, y’know, playing a big show like that or even the lead-up shows, which I was proud of. It was like, “Cool. Band breaks up, but…” It convinced me that music doesn’t die; it just exists in different forms.
-end-
Labels: Alun Pigguns, Around the World in 57 1/2 Gigs, Dave Bidini, Massey Hall, On a Cold Road, Rheostatics
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Kate Fenner
There are few female voices I find as luxurious as that of Kate Fenner's, and yet while that's what immediately commands most people's attention, that's only one of her many gifts.
For much of her 20-year career, she's been breathing life into the lyrics of her inseparable collaborator Chris Brown. That is no small feat—Brown is an incisive poet who addresses issues of community and justice at every turn, both metaphorically and directly, and only a master interpreter like Fenner can truly make heady words such as his sing with the clarity and emotional resonance they deserve. Though Brown is no vocal slouch himself, he's been blessed to have Fenner at his side since they were both Leaside teenagers in the eight-piece soul revue Bourbon Tabernacle Choir. (Who, by the way, may be reuniting for this year's Hillside Festival--details are being finalized.)
Fenner's association with such a prolific writer as Brown meant that her own songwriting muse was slow to develop—though, it should be noted, not because of any lack of support and encouragement from all those around her, including Brown. Fenner finally stepped up to the plate on 2003's Horses and Burning Cars, recorded with Tony Scherr. It was a tentative first step, though the new album Magnet—written and recorded while pregnant with her firstborn—is a much more mature and realized effort, with lush and sympathetic soft-pop orchestration colouring her lyrically vivid and melodically strong tracks like "Autumn Trees," "Old Man" and "Shopgirl." Scherr covers the latter on his new album.
Fenner and Brown also nurture a social nexus of Central Canada's music scene—everybody knows these two, from the Barenaked Ladies to Broken Social Scene, from Propagandhi to Sarah Harmer—and both have worked hard to build bridges between Toronto and their adopted town of New York City (they moved there as a duo in 1997 following the dissolution of the Bourbon Tabernacle Choir).
Since Fenner put out her solo record (and Brown followed suit), they've been performing less as a duo; her pregnancy factored in to that (contrary to popular perception, they are not a couple), and Brown formed the Citizens' Band with Tony Scherr and Anton Fier, with whom Fenner sits in when she can. The ties still run deep, however; Brown produced Magnet and wrote three of its songs.
I first met them when my terrible rock band opened for the Bourbons at the Commercial Tavern in Maryhill, Ontario sometime around 1991. We—or my competitive bandmates, anyway—were cocky and wanted to "blow off the stage" anyone we played with. Not only were we laughably unable to do that beside such a powerhouse band, but they were the most generous and genuine group of people imaginable, who not only taught me lessons about how I wanted to play music, but about what kind of person I wanted to be as a musician.
I'm still humbled by their talent and generosity; they actually drove up from NYC to play a 20-minute set for free at my book launch in 2001, where they stole the show beside the likes of Blurtonia and Neko Case. I'm eternally in debt to them for that alone, never mind the canon of powerful songs and performances that have soundtracked much of my life. Fenner once covered Mary Margaret O'Hara's "Help Me Lift You Up"; both she and Brown have been doing that for me and many of those closest to me for years.
So yeah, I'm hardly objective.
For a great piece on Chris Brown, read my co-author Jason Schneider's Exclaim piece here.
Kate Fenner and her band play the Rivoli in Toronto on Wednesday, March 19.
Kate Fenner
March 16, 2008
Locale: phone conversation from her West Village home
How often do you play these days?
Not as often as I’d like to. But [son] Lucien’s in a pre-school program now. It’s been tricky: the baby thing with the music thing. I do sporadic gigs in the city and a couple of gigs in London, England. And now we’re actually promoting the album, which hasn’t happened yet. Before I was trying to figure out what to do with it and what my plan was. I didn’t even hit my mailing list.
It’s been five years, correct?
Yes. Three of those were baby, and I did what I could with the last one. This period of my life is so fruitful and great and beautiful in all the ways that kids bring, but as a mother, I can’t be the person that I thought I was. I can’t be wandering around schlepping poetry books, drinking too much wine and smoking. Your whole life changes. But that was the person who wrote from pain and was perpetually brokenhearted. So how do I find the next writer in me? That part is really hard and challenging.
When you look at people who struggle with addictions and then they write a clean record, they often find it challenging to write under totally different conditions and processes, and it’s tough to adapt.
Those parallels are fine with me. From the moment I was 13, I knew I was going to be the kind of person who was going to write poetry and drinks their coffee black (laughs). I had it all set up and worked towards it. I also find that being around a new person, it’s hard to take yourself so seriously. It’s 90 per cent about them all the time, so to plumb my inner thoughts and turn it into something is harder than I thought.
Hearing other new parents talk about this time, many struggle with it in different ways. Some say that it actually makes them compartmentalize, and because that time alone is so important to them, they’re actually more productive because they know they only have a couple of hours here and there.
That’s the practice I need. But for me, it’s anti-cynicism and anti-irony to have a child. In some ways, the ways I got used to thinking are not available to me anymore. I can’t say, ‘Oh, global warming—we deserve it, we did it to ourselves.’ I have to think about a hopeful way about the future. Before, you could find me the saddest movie, the saddest poem and I would love it. Now, I can’t take the knock. I can’t go there. I need the energy to do this other thing, which is this constant propping up and being an enthusiasm machine that you have to be as a parent of a toddler. People used to say, ‘I can’t believe you read all this stuff—it’s so depressing!’ And I’d say, ‘Depressing? It’s not depressing!’ Now I don’t fault it for being what it is, but the nerve is too raw. I can’t go there and then turn around and go to the park and jump around like a lunatic.
That requires a whole other level of compartmentalization.
Yeah, and that’s the one that’s kicking my ass.
But you were speaking of not being able to be cynical or ironic—and those aren’t two words I ever associated with your work before.
Those might be the wrong words. Hmmm.
If anything, it was the opposite, and that’s what I always enjoyed about what you and Chris did. Things were written with a knowledge of the shit of the world, and it was knowing there are no ideal solutions, but let’s at least start to talk to each other about solutions. There was always that optimism, or at least demanding that the listener consider optimism.
That was largely due to Chris. He has a lot of hopeful energy. I can go along with that, and I can be the thing that adds a sadness to that, just because of the quality of my voice. When we work together, it’s easy to go between the two worlds, because singing a lot of stuff that Chris writes is about finding the love for humanity. Left to myself, however, (laughs) I’m not really sure!
It’s all "Autumn Trees" and no spring flowers, eh? I’ve enjoyed this record more since I first heard it and processed it and wrote about it. I think it’s a big step up from the first one, where you could hear an artist beginning and taking first steps. I know that first one was a very heavy record to make. Was this one easier?
Definitely. A lot of it was made when I was either pregnant or had a newborn. I could look at it more clearly. The first one, I was very addled and in the middle of having all these feelings. Later, when I could reach back and look at it, I was horrified that I was so raw. I feel like I left myself hanging out there.
This one, I was trying a different kind of writing. ‘Shopgirl’ I wrote for and about Tony [Scherr]. We both had trouble writing a couple of winters ago. We spent this day together, and I went to vis