Arcade Fire - Everything Now

Arcade Fire – Everything Now (Sony)

Did anyone review the actual Arcade Fire album in 2017? Or did every writer who felt conned by its dubiously humorous marketing campaign condemn it on principle?

When Everything Now was released in July, Arcade Fire were hated, for reasons that have little to do with the music and everything to do with the marketing campaign—which tells you almost everything you need to know about the music industry in 2017. 

In the weeks leading up to the album launch, the band planted a bunch of stories on the Internet about elaborate and bogus merchandise, including branded fidget spinners. Silly, but harmless. 

Then it escalated. One story appeared on a lookalike National Post website about a multi-million-dollar Arcade Fire film project with Terry Gilliam that had apparently been ongoing for a decade, costing millions of dollars. People believed it: the band had worked with Gilliam before, and he’s known for expensive projects that blow past deadlines and budgets. Then there was a story on an ersatz Billboard site about how the band was trying to patent the ubiquitous “millennial whoop,” otherwise known as the “woah-oh-oh” refrain alternating between the third and fifth notes of the scale. People believed this, too: Arcade Fire’s 2004 hit “Wake Up” arguably started this scourge of modern pop music, and the intensely private and protective band just might be arrogant enough to think they invented it and deserved recompense—or so the haters were happy to believe.

Finally, ticket-holders to a private, corporate-branded album launch show in Brooklyn were told to wear something “hip and trendy” or they would be denied entry. This followed a request—not a demand—on the 2014 tour that the audience dress up festively, in keeping with the Caribbean carnival theme underlying Reflektor. Both times, people took the news literally, and saw it as extreme arrogance and elitism (guess those people never went to their prom). Just like with U2, there’s a large cohort of music fans who want to believe the worst about Arcade Fire. This time, the band played directly into their hands. 

In addition to being convincing, some of the satirical stories were genuinely funny. The problem was that the butt of the jokes was Arcade Fire’s own fan base. At a time when the media world is (rightfully) obsessed with the concept of “fake news”—somewhat plausible but patently false stories that appear on non-traditional media sites, designed to muddy the political sphere—Arcade Fire held a mirror up to its own audience, and proved them to be just as gullible as a Trump supporter reading Russian propaganda. This same month, when Trump gave a totally bananas interview to the New York Times, a fake clip circulated on Twitter, supposedly from the same interview, in which he claims to be dazzled by the science behind helium balloons—again, completely plausible considering the person involved, but false. 

Absolutely no one will care about that when they listen to this record in 2018 and beyond. Certainly no one cared about anything but the music at the arena show I saw in November, which was virtually flawless, and where not one of these songs would have been considered a lull alongside the classics. As the sixth album in Arcade Fire’s discography, Everything Now is one of their best: right behind Funeral and The Suburbs. Unlike the largely bleak Reflektor, this is dance music you actually want to dance to. The grooves are stronger, the melodies brighter, the tiny sonic details in the background illuminating the corners.

Four singles advanced the album. The title track is a disco song with piano borrowed from ABBA’s “Dancing Queen” and a flute loop lifted from the recently reissued Cameroonian musician Francis Bebey. The handclap-happy “Signs of Life” is a natural extension of Reflektor’s title track, with some of the Clash’s “Magnificent Seven” thrown in. “Electric Blue” is a showcase for Régine Chassagne and is the band’s most obvious ode to one of their biggest influences, Talking Heads (specifically, the Speaking in Tongues record).

“Creature Comfort” is catchy electro-pop, despite its ominous lyrics about self-harm—and self-aggrandizing. It’s this song that rankled advance reviewers, perhaps more for the lyrical content than the LCD Soundsystem groove underneath it. It’s (yet another) Win Butler rant against kids today and the effects of social media, celebrity and consumerism that make him sound like a grumpy grandpa. But that’s who Butler is, and who he has been since day one—when he released the first Arcade Fire EP in his mid-20s—and it’s what sets him apart from all his peers, who don’t dare criticize fans seduced by smartphones and streaming music (which is everyone). I understand why that’s part of what people have always criticized Arcade Fire for, but to suggest that this is what sinks Everything Now is ridiculous.

Admittedly, the two songs that expand on that theme—two takes on a song called “Infinite Content”—are the least successful songs here. But they’re also a total of three minutes out of the whole record, a record we’re led to believe is a disaster on the level of U2’s 1997 album Pop, but where nothing comes close to Reflektor’s lows, i.e. “Porno.”

The five other tracks range from the ska lilt of “Chemistry” to the distorted reggae of “Peter Pan” to the electronic country song “We Don’t Deserve Love” to the slow funk and sparse slow bass line on “Good God Damn.” All of them are glorious.

If part of Arcade Fire’s plan was to lower expectations and then pleasantly surprise us, well, then maybe, just maybe, there’s some counterintuitive genius there. 

“Put your money on me,” sings Win Butler here, on the Donna Summer-esque song of the same name. “If you think I’m losing you, you must be crazy.” I don’t know, is that crazy? 

Stream: “Everything Now,” “Signs of Life,” “Chemistry” 

Geoff Berner - Canadiana Grotesquica

Geoff Berner – Canadiana Grotesquica (Coax)

What happens when a klezmer artist makes a country record? Geoff Berner has certainly posed more unusual questions over the course of his 17-year recording career. The Vancouver accordionist and acerbic singer-songwriter is a satirist of the highest order, one capable of extracting hilarity from horrors and providing the most emotionally complex evening of music you’re likely to encounter at a live show. 

On his seventh album, Berner shifts away from his klezmer escapades and taps Neko Case guitarist Paul Rigby to make something approximately a country record, filled with the kinds of songs that made him a favourite cover choice for his friends the Be Good Tanyas and Corb Lund. It’s the most musically conservative album he’s made in years, but it’s by no means meant to be easy listening. 

It opens with “The Ghost of Terry Fox,” one of the most tragic tales in Canadian celebrity: the story of Steve Fonyo, the cancer-stricken amputee who actually completed Fox’s mission, but suffered from second-banana syndrome in the eyes of an indifferent public, racked up several criminal convictions, was stripped of his Order of Canada, and was the victim of a home invasion in Surrey, B.C. Fonyo was the subject of a 2015 Alan Zweig documentary, and a musical by Berner, from which this song originates. Berner takes a similarly biographical approach to “Gino Odjick,” a song about the Vancouver Canucks’ “Algonquin Assassin,” an on-ice enforcer and residential school survivor who, along with other prominent Indigenous Canadians, met the Pope to hear an apology from the Catholic Church. 

On a lighter note, Berner mocks southern Ontario country singers who articulate with a “Phoney Drawl,” and warns his peers “Don’t Play Cards For Money With Corby Lund.” “Hustle Advisory” references Leonard Cohen, Jesus, and Justin Trudeau, and features Frazey Ford on backing vocals. 

There’s no surer sign of Berner’s continued songwriting strength than “Super Subtle Folk Song,” written during yet another summer of wildfires in B.C. and pipeline debates across the country, in which Berner sings: “My brother was being torn apart by panthers / So I bought a bunch of panthers as pets / My dad was dying of lung cancer / so I bought my kids a carton of cigarettes / Future kin will say we were assholes / we were just trying to fit into our scene / And while the fire’s still burning / let’s make a bunch more gasoline.” That he does so with one of the catchiest melodies on a record full of earworms ensures that the message sinks in. More important, for a man who has often used a blunt hammer to make his point, titling a track “Super Subtle Folk Song” may be a self-deprecating jab, but it also proves that Berner is stronger when he’s subversive. 

Stream: “The Ghost of Terry Fox,” “Super Subtle Folk Song,” “Gino Odjick”

Maylee Todd - Acts of Love

Maylee Todd – Acts of Love (Do Right)

“What is your act of love and how does it bring you therapeutic value?”

That’s a valid question in a time of heightened anxiety and fear. It’s a question Toronto multimedia artist Maylee Todd posed in a questionnaire to audience members who came to see her performance art piece Acts of Love. Describing the show to the CBC, she explained the physical space where it took place by saying, "You walk through a massive vagina and then you are inside my womb." 

Well then. Acts of Love, the album, isn’t soothing music for childbirth or anything else quite so conceptual. Maylee Todd has always been a massive talent who made somewhat light R&B (“Aerobics in Space”) that only hinted at her greater gifts. This, her third album, is an astounding burst of creativity that marks her as a major artist. 

The most immediately gripping songs here are the ones that sound like soft-pop hits descended from Donna Summer and Madonna, from Sade to Solange, rich with ’80s synth bass and tightly wound rhythm guitar lines, or the type of early ’90s house music employed by Bjork on Debut. There’s also some straight-up Studio 54 thump on “Disco Dicks 5000.”

On the more downtempo tracks, however, Todd pushes herself into more political and personal terrain, with the necessary sonic innovation to illustrate it further. On “From This Moment,” she taps into timely conversations that are, sadly, eternally necessary: “Homies, please, help us along / step up and see when you see another man doing wrong / a woman with a voice is deemed a bitch / you fill me up with complex predicaments.” So smooth is her voice and the groove underneath—with its digitally pitched backing vocals, marimbas, stuttering beats, weeping strings and a lilting harp—that Todd can delve into such heavy topics with incredible ease. 

Responsible for all the programming and engineering, she also plays almost all the instruments (including the aforementioned harp). Most affecting is her devastating vocal turn on “That’s All I’ll Do,” set only to a string octet, where Todd dives into the deeper end of her range to thrilling effect. Throughout, Todd’s inventive arrangements make a convincing argument that she could be a new Quincy Jones—there are more than a few Thriller moments here. Hyperbole? Not until you hear it yourself.

Whitehorse, Terra Lightfoot

Two of my favourite records of 2018 come to life this Friday, December 8 at Massey Hall: Whitehorse and Terra Lightfoot make for one hell of a double bill. Limited tickets remain.

Whitehorse – Panther in the Dollhouse (Six Shooter)

Most artists have a burst of inspiration in their youth, and they’re lucky if their prime creative period lasts 12 years, maximum. They might strike gold here and there later in their career, but old habits ossify and both artist and audience fall into a groove.

Then there are people like Luke Doucet and Melissa McClelland, two experienced solo artists who reinvented themselves as Whitehorse at the turn of the last decade. Everyone one of their three previous albums together was the best thing either had done to that point in their career. The fourth, Panther in the Dollhouse, is no different. They keep setting their own bar higher and higher—which would be impressive for anyone, never mind two people whose median age is 40.

Whitehorse is, at its core, two master musicians schooled in folk and rock, juggling guitar, bass and live drum loops in a live setting, with swoony harmonies. This time out, they employ more electronics than just loop pedals, as well as some funkier beats, courtesy of NYC hip-hop production duo Like Minds (Q Tip, the Roots). Nothing drastic: Doucet’s monstrously rich, twangy and tremolo guitar work is still front and centre, as are McClelland’s melodic bass lines. 

The lyrics look at modern politics (“they’re screening refugees for authenticity”) and what happens when “all the normals are shutting off their lights.” “We hear the sniffles behind the bathroom floor,” they sing: “Is it cocaine or heartbreak? / We never can be sure.” If Whitehorse’s music is inherently slick and often pretty, the subject matter is not: especially the incredibly catchy and biting “Boys Like You.”

Both Doucet and McClelland are master storytellers, paying as much attention to lyrics as they do their instrumental skills. And though this has been said countless times before at various points in their career trajectory, they are truly at the top of their game right now.

Stream: “Boys Like You,” “Kicking Down Your Door,” “Nighthawks”

Terra Lightfoot – New Mistakes (Sonic Unyon)

It’s been a hell of a ride, these past few years, for Hamilton’s Terra Lightfoot. Her second album, Every Time My Mind Runs Wild, got a soft launch in the spring of 2015 to expectations ranging from mild to low to zero. Yet almost everyone who heard it realized it was the arrival of a major new singer-songwriter; everyone who saw her realized what a powerhouse performer and guitarist she was. And lots of people saw her: plum festival gigs galore, plus opening slots for Blue Rodeo, Gordon Lightfoot, Daniel Lanois, Rheostatics, Bruce Cockburn and other dream dates. Everyone fell in love with Terra Lightfoot, and deservedly so.

Expectations are sky-high this time out. And she has no problem delivering. 

On New Mistakes, the rockers are bigger. The ballads more intimate. But the real leap here is her narrative voice on tracks like “Norma Gale,” where the John Prine influence, which she references in lyrics elsewhere, manifests itself. (Read the incredible story behind the song here.) Behind her, her crack band add all kinds of tasty bits underneath the swaggering singer up front, never more so on the surefire set-closer “Hold You,” where every member of the band truly shines—as does the guest saxophonist who shows up in the last 30 seconds of the song and almost steals the show, Clarence Clemons style.

When classic rock stations claim they don’t have any room for new artists on their playlists, Terra Lightfoot should stroll through their doors with this new record and give them all a swift kick in their tired, saggy asses. 

Stream: “You Get High,” “Norma Gale,” “Hold You”