This year’s Polaris Prize is perhaps the most wide-open race in the short history of the award. It’s proven difficult to predict in the past, of course, but this year I would argue that it could really go in any direction—there are really only three albums on the shortlist that would be a totally shocking winner. The composition of the jury is part of the mystery—the organizers usually pick the most open-minded people they can find, but of the six jury members that I either know personally or read regularly, I can’t honestly say where their biases might lie in this particular contest.So for what it’s worth, this my annual five-part charge to the jury, along with an alternate shortlist of 10 more Canadian albums that I would have loved to have seen sharing space with the artists who will be taking the stage on Monday night. (For the first time in the gala’s history, all 10 nominees will be performing.)
The nominees: 
Elliot Brood – Mountain Meadows (Six Shooter)The album: Well, I might as well start off on a contrarian note: I don’t get this at all. I like music with banjos and mandolins; even more so, I like music that does something more with them than use them in traditional settings. I love a good two-step or driving shuffle. I love raspy voices. And yet Mountain Meadows is like nails on a chalkboard for me, and not just Mark Sasso’s voice, which can give me Rod Stewart nightmares.
And it’s not because nothing ever seems to happen in Elliot Brood songs, but because it always sounds like something might—and never does. Every song is a tease with no payoff—and no melody, for that matter either, and the aesthetic isn’t compelling enough to stand on its own. If their objective is a trancelike state, then they should embrace that fully, and forge a new and bizarre Canadian bluegrass take on Afrobeat or something; instead, it sounds like they just forgot to write songs.
While I understand why people might like this band—I’ve seen them live several times, and people do lose their shit (and, I’d argue, their critical faculties, but that’s just me)—I have absolutely no idea why someone would love them. So… humbug, says I. The chances: Slim, as this seems to be one of the headscratchers for most Polaris observers, proving that this is a polarizing album.
Fucked Up – The Chemistry of Common Life (Matador)The album: When the shortlist nominees were announced at Toronto’s Drake Hotel in July, Fucked Up got the biggest cheer from the assembled criterati. And to be sure, there is much genuine love for these hardcore heroes. But their presence at Polaris is also a breakthrough: they are far and away the most aggressive act yet to crack the list, and they give the fist-pumping contingent something to counterbalance the Great Lake Swimmers of the world. For a variety of obvious reasons, Fucked Up are also the only Polaris act unlikely to be assimilated into the mainstream or CBC Radio playlists.While that is a small victory of sorts, it’s also part of a larger narrative that seems to say: “pretty good, for a hardcore band.” Fucked Up are not only ideal fodder for critics who shelved their Black Flag records a long time ago, but they’ve also made new fans for their epic song lengths and use of synths, strings, flutes and bongos, as well as guest singers to counterbalance the growling rage of frontman Pink Eyes. It’s a kind of genre-crossing that critics eat up, because transgression is always more interesting than an artist who sticks to expected parameters. It makes for a better story (angering purists! polarizing the band itself!) and, sometimes, better music.But is The Chemistry of Common Life any good? If you didn’t know anything about Fucked Up, would the music transcend the tale?Based on the opening track, “Son the Father,” the answer would be yes. The track begins with a lone flute passage that’s soon joined by harmonious guitar feedback; 90 seconds into it, Pink Eyes unleashes a classic rock’n’roll scream, the guitars build and crash with embellishment from some Stooges-style wah-pedal, and Lullabye Arkestra’s Kat Taylor and Justin Small help scream a triumphant chorus that asks the eternal question: “It’s hard enough being born in the first place/ why would I ever want to be born again?”If “Son the Father” was a stand-alone single, it would justify the avalanche of praise that this incredibly hard-working band has accumulated over the past year.Sadly, from there Chemistry falls into the counterintuitive trap of aggressive music that aims for the jugular yet emerges bloodless, if not downright innocuous. Pink Eyes is monotonous, not monstrous; the guitars chug along faithfully, devoid of riffs, solos, or rhythmic intensity; only the drummer shows any signs of life. Carl Wilson makes a case for the lyrical content, but this here grandpa can’t make out a single word.What does it mean that the album on this list that is supposedly the most incendiary is actually a total bore?Full disclosure: I’ve never liked hardcore, despite being surrounded by it my entire adult life and having its gospel constantly preached at me. I’ve always considered it an adolescent phase that musicians go through before they do something infinitely more interesting.The chances: Slim. Though they had sufficient critical traction to crack the short list, I doubt that Chemistry will hold up as an album and not a political genre statement.
The could’ve-beens:
Apostle of Hustle – Eats Darkness (Arts and Crafts)The album: William S. Burroughs can be heard drawling about the “immeasurably old and ravenously young”—a perfect fit for Apostle of Hustle’s Andrew Whiteman. At 42, Whiteman is a seasoned veteran who seems to be still in the early stages of his ongoing creative quest. Eats Darkness encapsulates his infinite musical curiosities—African guitars, Latin rhythms, rock’n’roll fury, soul-inflected pop, poetry, sound collage, hip-hop, dub … shall we go on?—with a precision and brevity that brings it all into a clear focus. Previous albums have been sprawling; this one is dense and delivers. It’s also the least belaboured AoH album, which works to its benefit; the creative combustion that erupts between Whiteman, Julian Brown, Dean Stone and Martin Kinack should be exploited more than once every two years, and preferably in short, sharp bursts like this one.Why it struck out: The obvious reason is that, with a mid-May release date, it came out too close to the June 1, 2009 deadline for Polaris qualification. The larger reason is that AoH has never been particularly popular, with most of the press concerned mainly with Whiteman’s Broken Social Scene connection. Whatever—Whiteman gets more wonderful the weirder he gets, and free from any commercial or critical considerations, he can continue doing whatever the hell he wants to.Interview here.
The Awkward Stage – Slimming Mirrors, Flattering Lights (Mint)The album: Shane Nelken wrote the best pop album of 2008—and by pop, I don’t mean popular, unfortunately. But Slimming Mirrors Flattering Lights catapulted Nelken from a sideman and promising songwriter into the leagues of Aimee Mann, Ben Folds, Joe Jackson, Lucinda Williams—hell, even Burt Fucking Bacharach. Yes, it’s that good.As I’ve argued before, Nelken is a pop music classicist who knows the value of major seventh chords and countermelodies written for trumpet, as well as bridges written in waltz time in the middle of a raging glam rock tune—and he makes it all sound perfectly natural, not like some know-it-all jackass with a composition degree. And when he sits down with just an acoustic guitar—as he does on the devastating modern-day-Mad-Men mid-life-crisis song “We Dreamt of Houses”—he makes Ron Sexsmith sound like a chump.I realize that whenever I write about The Awkward Stage, I sound oppositional: if people love Artist X so much, why not this brilliant record? And Nelken himself had a bit of small-man syndrome in his earlier songs, much like Joe Jackson’s first few albums, and here he sings about having “been an angry baby all of my life.” That was much more in evidence on his debut album, where even the title—Heaven is For Easy Girls—suggested a lifetime of unrequited sexual longing and hints of misogyny.True to his band’s name, Nelken doesn’t shy away from the uncomfortable, whether it’s poignant portrayals of broken lives in “Skeletal Blonde” or “Only Good Days Caught on Camera,” or the squirmy Lolita-baiting “Hey Modern School Girl,” which is a darker take on 50 years of “Chantilly Lace”: “Hey modern school girl, you are one to wear it on your sleeve/ you may be innocent, but your innocence is cruel and naïve.”No matter how dark his themes might get, however, Nelken finds a way to set them to sunny West Coast melodies. And while he used to tend toward the twee—and still does occasionally, as on “True Love on Three With Feeling”—Slimming Mirrors is considerably more muscular at moments (“Anime Eyes,” “Hey Modern School Girl”), and its moods are more diverse overall, resulting in a thoroughly satisfying whole.Older interview here.Why it struck out: Other than the fact that Vancouver has been a musical wasteland for new acts in recent years (go ahead—try and argue otherwise, which makes Japandroids’ breakthough all the more remarkable), it’s a total mystery why this album made seemingly zero impression on anyone other than me. Don’t rock critics froth at the mouth over intensely melodic pop with lyrics that are equally smart, sad and funny?
Tomorrow: Great Lake Swimmers, Hey Rosetta
Reviews from the last six weeks in the mainstream daily newspapers the Kitchener-Waterloo Record and Guelph Mercury.
A Hawk and a Hacksaw – Delivrance (Leaf)When drummer Jeremy Barnes first started playing accordion and writing songs that borrowed heavily from traditional eastern European music, he was very much an interloper trying on a new set of clothes and creating something that didn’t aim to be authentic, but something new entirely. Several albums later, Barnes has been fully immersed in this culture to the point that there are many points on Delivrance where the flying dulcimers, Romanian violins and haunting melodies appear interchangeable with anything by legendary Roma band Tarif de Haidouks. The only time Barnes stumbles is when he sings—in English—in a voice even more nasal than Colin Meloy of the Decemberists, which ruins the illusion; thankfully, he only does this on two of the ten tracks here. (July 9, K-W Record)
Apostle of Hustle – Eats Darkness (Arts and Crafts)
Apostle of Hustle’s Andrew Whiteman has always been an insatiably curious musical soul, and the best and worst thing about him is that he’s tried to do everything. But the older he gets—he’s now 42—the more successful he is at distilling the breadth of his influences into three-minute songs that focus on deceptively simple riffs and rhythms that are packed with attention to minor detail. He’s also getting wonderfully weirder with age: woven through the songs are sound collages that recall the radio art of Negativland, that convey as much thematically as Whiteman’s lyrics do. Musically, dub rhythms, Latin guitars, pop hooks and rock guitars are all rearranged into a unique hybrid driven by the versatility of Whiteman’s powerhouse backing duo of Julian Brown and Dean Stone; each of them is invaluable to the whole, making Apostle of Hustle much more than a solo project outside of Whiteman’s work with Broken Social Scene. Apostle of Hustle pack more into the 30 minutes of this album than most groups do in their entire careers—and still leave the listener space to breathe. (June 11, K-W Record)
Bat for Lashes – Two Suns (EMI)
Ignore the horrible moniker, about which the only positive thing you can say is that it’s purposely vague and lowers expectations considerably. What a pleasant surprise then, to hear Natasha Khan’s musical vision unfold over the course of this, her stunning and singular second album.Kate Bush comparisons are inevitable, for reasons that start with her operatic, British art school approach to singing and songwriting, as well as the ’80s textures that weave their way through Two Suns. Kate Bush’s influence may be on the rise overall—witness acts like Fever Ray, St. Vincent, My Brightest Diamond, Katie Stelmani—but only Bat For Lashes is fully worthy of ascending to the role of High Priestness of Pop Weirdness.
Listening to Two Suns is like the last 25 years never happened; Khan has emerged with the kind of album that Peter Gabriel should have continued making after his third album. Khan is as delightfully unconventional as Bjork without teetering near the edges of cliffs; she writes songs that fall somewhere between the classical ambition of Rufus Wainwright and the shoegaze-y new wave textures of Robert Smith of The Cure. There’s nothing resembling rock arrangements, but nor does she fall into any other set patterns; each song is a world unto itself, and Khan’s layers of vocals light the path through mysterious forests of sound. (June 11, K-W Record)
Billy Talent – III (Warner)
Billy Talent have platinum albums. They sell out the Air Canada Centre. They’re a #1 act in Germany. They could easily rest on their laurels. Instead, they’re getting better.
Producer Brendan O’Brien (Bruce Springsteen, Pearl Jam) has clearly pushed every member of this band to be better songwriters and players. Every one of the 11 tracks here boasts the kind of killer hooks that their best singles have always had; don’t be surprised if they spin a half-dozen radio hits out of this record. But even more importantly, they’ve matured to the point where they can maintain their trademark intensity at half their normal tempo—lead single "Rusted by the Rain" being the best example.
Elsewhere, they leave much more open space and use dynamics to help build tension in ways that all the best rock records do—or should, anyway. Other influences have started creeping in: "Tears Into Wine" and "Pocketful of Dreams" have vaguely Celtic guitar melodies. Not that they’ve mellowed: Saint Veronika boasts some furiously arpeggiated metal riffing, and "Turn Your Back" and "Tears Into Wine" are the kind of barnburners that Billy Talent built their reputation on.
Some things don’t change: Ian D’Sa’s one-note backing vocals are still inflected with a hilariously overwrought sense of frustration, like he stubbed his toe immediately before stepping up to the mic. Lead singer Ben Kowalewicz, on the other hand, has moved far beyond his signature screams—which he still lets out of the bag on a couple of tracks here—to become a much more engaging vocalist; he’s no longer a one-trick pony.
This is not just the album that will elevate Billy Talent above their mall punk fan base and present a convincing case for their longevity—this is the rock record for the summer of 2009. (July 16, K-W Record)
Dinosaur Jr. – Farm (Jagjaguwar)
Reunion albums aren’t supposed to sound this good. When a beloved band gets back together, fans usually grant them one grace album for old times sake, but would really prefer it if they sticked to the hits in the live set. Nothing could be further from the truth for ’90s proto-grunge band Dinosaur Jr., who are writing and playing better than they ever did.
J Mascis is one of the only guitarists of that era who ever took guitar solos seriously, not afraid to flex his virtuosity while focusing primarily on feel—like some perverse cross between Neil Young and Eddie Van Halen. Mascis was out of step then as he is now: well over half of the eight-minute track "I Don’t Wanna Go There" is full-on noodling. As always, his slacker snarl is incongruous with his raging rhythm section, and the strength of his songwriting elevates this band from hundreds of others who merely hide between distortion and destruction.
There are no bells and whistles here: this is a straight-up guitar rock record, the kind you need for long summer drives, the kind that reminds you that maybe the ’90s weren’t the musical wasteland that they might seem like now. (July 2, K-W Record)
Dirty Projectors – Bitte Orca (Domino)Grizzly Bear – Veckatimest (Warp)
Dirty Projectors’ singer, guitarist and songwriter Dave Longstreth acts like he’s making up all of his own rules as he goes along, which he may well be; he is undeniably idiosyncratic and unique in ways similar to Bjork or David Byrne (both of whom have sought him out to collaborate), and may well be crazier than both of them put together.
He has an astoundingly versatile and slippery voice, which means that he could easily pull off an R&B ballad if he really wanted to—if he wasn’t trying to simultaneously juggle his interests in British folk, electronic composition, Asian string music and Led Zeppelin III. All these influences are there if you probe deeply enough; yet on the surface, Dirty Projectors don’t sound like anyone else at all.
The track "Remade Horizon" sounds like several disparate African recordings being pulled apart in ProTools: the Soweto-style female vocals, the hi-life guitar lead, the stuttering funk of Afrobeat rhythm guitars. And yet at the same time, there’s nothing remotely African about the end result; it’s a piece of music that could only have come from Longstreth’s oddball vision and reimagining of existing forms.
There’s no question that Longstreth is immensely talented and capable of creating wondrous magic, which makes Bitte Orca is an easy album to respect, but a hard one to love—immediately, anyway. This could easily be either a future classic that will influence generations, or a passing fad for people who like difficult music for its own sake.
Grizzly Bear will likely suffers the latter fate, with the disadvantage of being more overly mannered than the Dirty Projectors, who at least sound like they’re being playful. Grizzly Bear is the epitome of an art school band—deadly serious and downright stuffy, they sound like the taxidermist has already got to them. There’s nothing particularly linear nor repetitious about any of this material; sadly, it lacks any other charms or mystery to make up for that. Lovely though his voice may be, singer Edward Droste is more distracting than anything, if only because his presence gives the listener some expectation of normalcy, instead of the atonal art-folk that is Grizzly Bear’s specialty. (June 18, K-W Record)
Elephant Stone – The Seven Seas (independent)
This Montreal band is named after a Stone Roses song, which explains much of their musical template: early ’90s British guitar textures with nods to dance rhythms and ’60s psychedelia. Bandleader Rishi Dhir knows a lot about the latter, which was the focus of his former band the High Dials. His own studies of Indian classical music also come into play here, and it’s his sitar playing that sets Elephant Stone apart from other Britpop bands, especially on the raga rock of "The Straight Line." But even the tracks that play down that influence have plenty going for them, drawing on early Blur and Spiritualized influences with the help of fellow Montrealers in The Dears and The Besnard Lakes.(June 18, K-W Record)
Grand Analog – Metropolis is Burning (Urbnet)
Perhaps you’ve been to those workshops at any folk festival where hip-hop artists are paired with local folkies and a funk band and magic is expected to happen—and it rarely does. Grand Analog sound like the product of just such an experiment, but they actually gel their genres together in a seamless summer blend of reggae, pop, funk, and hip-hop, with frontman Odario Williams proving to be a commanding microphone presence whether he’s crooning or rapping. The kazoo solo in the first song—titled, uh, "I Play My Kazoo"—hints that they’re willing to try anything, no matter how ridiculous. Fortunately, it never gets more ridiculous than that; many of these tracks deserve a spot on Top 40 stations, especially the breezy reggae of "Take it Slow" and the electro-’80s R&B track "Stir Crazy," featuring the smooth female vocals of Maiko Watson. (July 2, K-W Record)
Hypnotic Brass Ensemble – s/t (Honest Jon’s)
In a live setting, this Chicago ten-piece will grant you a quick, informal schooling in the possibilities of brass music, from New Orleans to klezmer to funk to hip-hop to jazz. And while all those come into play on this, their first official full-length album, much of this sounds like a sweeping ’70s urban drama with a soundtrack co-written by Curtis Mayfield and Bill Conti (Rocky, An Unmarried Woman). There are more than enough party tunes here to bolster the live show, but this self-titled album is also rich with dynamics, recognizing that the home listeners might not want to be constantly be subjected to the full-blown intensity that is the Hypnotic live show. (July 9, K-W Record)
Iron and Wine – Around the Well (Sub Pop)
The well in question appears to be dry. This is a two-CD compilation of cast-offs from a consistently strong artist; over seven years, Iron and Wine’s Sam Beam has released three full-length albums and three equally worthy EPs. Considering that volume of output, it’s not a sign of weakness that his leftovers are so uninspiring; it is worth wondering, however, whether even Iron and Wine completists need any of the material found here—most of which didn’t cut the mustard the first time around to even appear on CD singles.
Iron and Wine began as a bedroom project, featuring just acoustic guitar and Beam’s hushed vocals, recorded while his baby daughters were asleep. Since then, he’s managed to avoid many singer/songwriter clichés and evolve successfully into a multi-dimensional artist drawing from eclectic textures and rhythms while maintaining a singular sound and identity. Too many of these tracks, however, are still in the solo-man-with-guitar mode, and, by the measure of Beam’s own quality standards on his official releases, the material simply isn’t as strong.
The handful of covers are also uninspiring and predictable—not in their source material (Stereolab, Flaming Lips, New Order) but in the way they sound like every song Sam Beam ever recorded before he evolved into a bandleader.
Material from recent years is slightly more rewarding, if only because one can hear Beam breaking his own formula and arriving at the subtle dub reggae and psychedelic textures that coloured 2007’s The Shepherd’s Dog. (June 11, K-W Record)
Jennifer LFO – Songs from the Alien Beacon (Kanda Kid)
“How close can you get without f---ing up the friendship?” So asks Jennifer LFO on one of the catchiest songs on her debut album (under this name, anyway; she used to record under her given name, Jennifer Foster). But the question may well be metaphorical, as throughout this album she takes her pop songs and stretches them into ’70s prog territory, with tasteful heaps of sonic decoration courtesy of her producer Michael Philip Wojewoda, and a cast of Toronto all-stars. Together, they push this material to extremes and then pull it back to a more straightforward piano ballad or three-chord rocker. Foster’s lyrics stray from conventional fare as well, which makes her all the more believable when she sings: “I know the girl you look for/ you won’t find her too soon/ She’s teaching string theory on Saturn/ she’s playing her synth on the moon.” (July 16, K-W Record)
La Patere Rose – s/t (Grosse Boite)
La Patere Rose could hail from no other place in Canada except Quebec: an eccentric and girlish vocalist/keyboardist (nom du rock: Fanny Bloom) who is well-studied in chanson, absurdist pop and cabaret, backed by two gents (noms du rock: Roboto et Kilojoules) who ensure that no two songs sound alike. If acclaimed acts like Fiona Apple or Regina Spektor were actually as unpredictable and unusual as they’re made out to be, they still wouldn’t sound as inventive as La Patere Rose, especially when Bloom starts shrieking like a theremin on La Marelle. This isn’t dark and mysterious like Bat For Lashes; it’s too goofy for that. It’s not abrasive or aiming for any kind of shock factor, and it’s too off-kilter to be safe and radio-friendly. And once you’re through figuring out everything that it’s not, it’s just to best revel in their unusual pleasures. (July 2, K-W Record)
Lee Harvey Osmond – A Quiet Evil (Latent)
It’s one thing when a veteran artist returns under a new guise and puts out the best record of his career. It’s another thing entirely when he ropes in a group of all-stars who rally for the cause and sound creatively re-energized in ways that their main projects haven’t in quite a while.
Tom Wilson has been the bandleader of Junkhouse, one third of Blackie and the Rodeo Kings, and put out solo albums; here, he enlists Cowboy Junkies’ Michael Timmins as producer and engineer, the Skydiggers’ Josh Finlayson on bass, and various people drawn from each of those three men’s extended musical families. Together, the music they make as Lee Harvey Osmond is a dark and spooky Canadian gothic roots gumbo: sombre folk meets swampy blues meets late-night ambient country music all made for midnight drives, with covers of Lou Reed and David Wiffen thrown in for good measure.
Though Wilson may be front and centre, Lee Harvey Osmond is very much a collective effort, and it succeeds just as much on atmosphere and Timmins’ arrangements as it does on the songs co-written by Wilson with many others. The decades of experience shared between these players works magic when it sounds like they crashed in the studio after a long night of whiskey and decided to let their imagination run wild. This isn’t so much “dad rock” as it is “creepy, weird old uncle music”—and it suits Tom Wilson perfectly. (July 9, K-W Record)
Micachu – Jewellery (Rough Trade)
Micachu is as wonderfully weird as the Dirty Projectors’ Dave Longstreth, but makes music for a much more raucous dance party. Bandleader Mica Levi sticks to 4/4 rhythms and conventional harmony, but her unusual approach to sound sculpture finds her constructing pop, punk and dance music from clipped samples, toy instruments, and any household item that can be transformed into percussion. She gets help from producer Matthew Herbert, who uses a similar approach in his own politically charged electronic jazz and performance art; here, however, he applies his attention to unusual detail toward much more visceral thrills. Micachu doesn’t have any agenda except playful tomfoolery—which makes Jewellery one of the most delightful debuts of the year. (June 18, K-W Record)
Moby – Wait For Me (EMI)
Moby’s landmark album Play turns 10 years old this year. And though its sound quickly became a cliché, it’s worth noting that when it was released, Moby had given up hopes of pop stardom, and made the album as a personal project. And as he admits now, he’s spent much of the last decade trying to second-guess the marketplace and somehow replicate its success. He hasn’t failed per se, but nothing he’s done in the past decade is remotely remarkable—or memorable.
Until this. Wait For Me was recorded at home, and his only motivation was to make an personal album that wasn’t tailored to any pop radio standard. And lo and behold, it’s a lovely, warm, engaging album, which in part revives the template of lush strings and gospel vocals heard on Play, but with nary an uptempo beat to be found; the liveliest number is the only one sung by Moby himself, and it’s about as cheery as Joy Division. Wait For Me is a luxurious mind massage that sounds like Brian Eno producing Pink Floyd. For the most part it’s too sumptuous and sedate to be co-opted by lifestyle advertising, like much of Play was; it is much more intimate and interior—and ironically, by pleasing no one else but himself, Moby may have made his most universal album in a decade. (July 9, K-W Record)
Stuart Murdoch – God Help the Girl (Beggars Banquet)
Belle and Sebastian’s Stuart Murdoch woke up one morning and heard his songs being sung by an all-female chorus, which prompted this, his first solo album, on which he writes the songs and hires various ladies to sing them. The material here sounds like it’s from a ’50s stage play; there’s nary a sign of rock nor R&B influence, instead relying on featherweight piano melodies with saccharine strings and mannered, polite vocals. Belle and Sebastian don’t exactly boast a muscular reputation either—much of their discography is on the lighter side of twee—but this material might be too well-scrubbed for even that band’s biggest fans. It doesn’t help that a couple songs from the last B&S album, their punchy pop masterpiece The Life Pursuit, are recast here in considerably weaker versions; other songs are feeble rewrites of earlier B&S classics ("Lazy Line Painter Jane," "I’m Waking Up to Us") set to new lyrics. That the songs aren’t up to Murdoch’s recent standards is one thing; the fact that none of these arrangements and vocalists are particularly compelling is another. (July 9, K-W Record)
Nomo – Invisible Cities (Ubiquity)
Nomo are a Chicago band who started out playing relatively straightforward Afrobeat, but are all over the map on their latest album. And that’s a good thing. Their horn section is unleashed to allow for jazzier excursions, the rhythm section has become more muscular—even if many of the tempos are slower this time out—and the synths and treated kalimbas that colour around the edges help define the 21st century funk that Nomo is creating.
This album was spawned from the same sessions as their 2008 release Ghost Rock; that album is a better entry point for beginners. Invisible Cities is less of a party record and more of an esoteric head trip for fans of late ’60s and early ’70s jazz, where dissonance and tension are more prevalent in both the solos and the riffs. And while African influences are still paramount, traces of Balkan brass and Asian scales also creep into the mix. (June 11, K-W Record)
Peaches – I Feel Cream (XL)
In 2009, Peaches should be mouldy by now. And yet on her third album, the Berlin-via-Toronto transplant can be heard crooning: “Seems you got a little bit more than you asked for.” After years of maximum personality and minimal musical promise, that statement finally holds true.What started as an electro-punk performance art construct, based on dirty beats and dirtier lyrics, turned into an underground pop and fashion sensation. Peaches is many things: proudly pansexual, smart, sassy, “so sexual and so conceptual.” She’s also an unconventionally attractive older woman who invites you to “lick her crow’s feet”—the polar opposite of the parade of Lolitas peddled in the mainstream.
And yet until now, her message of inclusive sexual liberation was articulated mainly through lugheaded repetition of phrases meant to poke and provoke. No matter how addictive her primitive beats and punk rock guitar may have been, Peaches the songwriter was nowhere near as powerful as Peaches the performer.
I Feel Cream isn’t exactly the sound of Peaches cleaning up her act, but it does drop the sillier side of her shock value and ups the musical ante considerably. She’s moved well beyond simple riffs into fully developed pop songs worthy of early Prince ("Mud," "Talk To Me," "Trick or Treat"), and her buzzing synths and dirty techno puts similar acts to shame—including upstart Torontonians like Thunderheist and MSTRKRFT. Lyrically she’s just as brazen and intentionally ridiculous, but she’s digging deeper by cramming each track with hilarious one-liners—instead of milking each one for three minutes at a time.
The early ’00s electroclash trend that she arrived in the middle of may be on the wane, but seeing how she was one of the only bonafide personalities of that era—coupled with the strength of this album—I Feel Cream should rise to the top. (June 4, K-W Record) (June 4, K-W Record)
Royal City – 1999-2004 (Asthmatic Kitty)
Royal City were always bridesmaids back around the turn of the decade. Feist was in their band. Sufjan Stevens, Broken Social Scene and Hidden Cameras opened for them. They were the impetus to launch Three Gut Records, a Guelph label that helped make Toronto cool again and inspired many of that city’s current success stories. Royal City broke up just as the world’s eyes were turning toward Toronto.
But much more important was the legacy of unforgettable shows that live on in memory: sometimes a total trainwreck, often completely brilliant, always indifferent to whatever people might expect. Arriving as the Canadian music industry was collapsing, they offered a complete alternative to everything around them, including many of their squeaky clean alt-country peers. Dissonant and delicate, fragile and ferocious, Royal City conveyed naked emotion, and demanded that you either love or hate them. There was no middle ground.
The three studio albums they left behind all have their charms; 2001’s Alone at the Microphone is a masterpiece. But this collection of odds and sods captures the overall spirit of the band in their raw glory. Some of their best songs never made it onto albums ("O You With Your Skirt," "Postcards"); they appear here along with revelatory alternate takes and covers of Iggy Pop and the Strokes—the latter’s song is turned into a lilting waltz.
The album closes in the most perfect way possible: a long, slow fade of the band singing their eponymous song (inexplicably titled "In the Autumn" here), chanting “c-i-t-y Royal City” as they march on into eternity, oblivious to the fact that the tape is running out, that the audience has gone home, that soon all we’ll have left is cherished memories and a few records. But now we have one more. (June 18, K-W Record)
Sonic Youth – The Eternal (Matador)
Here’s a little secret about the avant-garde: no matter how groundbreaking you were at an early stage in your career, the older you get, the more boring you are. There’s no better example than Sonic Youth, a band who did nothing less than rewrite the rules of rock’n’roll in the late ’80s, by combining the nihilism of the no-wave movement with Rolling Stones riffs, free jazz and hardcore punk rock. At that point in time, nobody sounded like Sonic Youth.
By the mid-’90s, however, everyone was trying to. Their descendents are plentiful, as is Sonic Youth’s discography: both their “official” releases and their myriad side projects and art projects. So plentiful, in fact, that what was once thrilling and mysterious is now almost as innocuous as, well, as a new Rolling Stones album. And the alternative press prove themselves just as gullible as mainstream media when an old warhorse trots on the stage talking about getting back to their roots and referencing earlier, beloved works—a routine Sonic Youth has been milking for at least 10 years now.
There’s something to be said for sticking to your vision, and tracks like "What We Know" and "Anti-Orgasm" will resonate with anyone who’s ever loved the band. But with the group of cultural sponges that compose Sonic Youth, you’d think their palette would be wider at this point. While there’s some comfort in hearing new songs that are interchangeable with anything they’ve done in the past quarter century, it’s neither weird nor accessible enough to excite or polarize fans. It’s just there.
Which, for former revolutionaries, is faint praise that proves most damning. (June 18, K-W Record)
Regina Spektor – Far (Warner)
Regina Spektor must have heard the word “quirky” used often enough to describe her, that she’s decided to tone down her vocal tics on this, her third album. She still specializes in piano songs best suited for the closing credits of movies set in New York City autumns, with a decidedly more reggae lilt to them this time out, however subtle. Musically, Far is impeccable, aided by an ace list of producers: Mike Elizondo (Fiona Apple, Eminem), Jeff Lynne (Tom Petty, Traveling Wilburys), Jacknife Lee (U2, R.E.M.), and returning collaborator David Kahne (VP of Warner Records, incidentally).
It’s Spektor’s lyrics that distract. She’s fine with opening a song with the sentiment: “no one laughs at God in a hospital/ no one laughs at God in a war.” But she starts to get lazy and loopy when she follows it up with the mouthful: “no one laughs at God when it’s getting late and your kid’s not back from that party yet.” Alanis, your ghostwriter is calling. (July 2, K-W Record)
Street Sweeper Social Club – s/t (Warner)
Tom Morello was considered one of the most innovative guitarists of the ’90s for his work in Rage Against the Machine. Since then, however, his career has largely consisted of wasted opportunities: the non-starter supergroup that was Audioslave, an agitprop solo acoustic act called The Nightwatchman, and now a collaboration with MC Boots Riley of political hip-hop crew The Coup. The idea of returning to Rage-style riff-rock with anthemic choruses and fiery rhymes sounds good on paper, yet Street Sweeper Social Club serves as a reminder at how good Rage Against the Machine was at what it did. There are no guitar pyrotechnics from Morello, and Riley’s politics are plodding and punctuated with far too many “motherfuckers” to be taken seriously. Red Hot Chili Peppers b-sides sound better than this, and at least that band's songs are supposed to be about nothing, rather than ankle-deep agitation and leftist suggestions that add up to something neither instructive nor constructive—nor particularly destructive. Just dull. (June 4, K-W Record)
Sunset Rubdown – Dragonslayer (Jagjaguwar)
What instrument would you use to slay a dragon: a piano or a guitar? Why, a guitar of course, which is why Sunset Rubdown’s bandleader and keyboardist Spencer Krug straps one on for the bulk of this, the fourth album for his main musical outlet.
Piano-based songwriters who migrate to the guitar usually do so with mixed results: either they get deliberately reductionist after discovering the power of three-chord simplicity, or they become overly obtuse. Krug uses the guitar every way he can: as harmonic and rhythmic texture, as an adrenaline shot and power boost, and to continue to write the unique songs that set him apart from almost all of his peers.
If parts of Dragonslayer sound slightly more conventional and accessible than previous Sunset Rubdown recordings, all the trademarks are still there: the epic songwriting with plenty of twists and turns, the impenetrably surreal lyrics, Krug’s hiccup-y vocals, the rich harmonies of keyboardist Camille Wynn Ingr, the melodic guitar lines and unconventional drumming. New bassist Mark Nicol brings added depth on his recorded debut with the band.
Krug has a long and dense discography—including two albums with Wolf Parade and two with Swan Lake on top of the Sunset Rubdown output—but Dragonslayer is the album most likely to convert new ones and satisfy old ones. (July 16, K-W Record)
Think About Life – Family (Alien 8)
There are more than enough indie rock bands shouting and screaming about disco infernos, but Think About Life are one of the few who can boast “I’ll set your world on fire” and actually pull it off. This band had extremely shaky beginnings; I’d go so far as to say that they’re one of the worst opening acts I’ve ever seen, back when Wolf Parade took them on tour in 2005. In the time since, Martin Cesar has become not only a wildly engaging frontman, but a serious R&B singer with a killer falsetto. The pop smarts that guitarist Graham Van Pelt put to use in his other project, Miracle Fortress, come to the forefront here and give Cesar some actual hooks to sing. Tracks like "Havin’ My Baby," "Set You on Fire" and "Young Hearts" are all polished enough to be Top 40 hits, or at the very least fodder for a N.E.R.D. remix.And while much of Family is fodder for an all-night dance party, Think About Life show themselves capable of much more, both texturally and dynamically. They may love their four-on-the-floor beats, but they also love pulling everything apart and tweaking every minor sonic detail, which they do to great effect during the long-decaying closing track, "Life of Crime." (July 2, K-W Record)
Allen Toussaint – The Bright Mississippi (Nonesuch)
There are a lot of musicians vying for the title of Mr. New Orleans, but Allen Toussaint is certainly one of them. The pianist and arranger has been in the employ of all the greats, and though he may not be as recognizable outside musicians’ circles, he’s revered among his peers—and with good reason.
Which is why Toussaint gets help here from the top notch team of producer Joe Henry (who also pens insightful liner notes), clarinetist Don Byron, guitarist Marc Ribot, bassist David Piltch, trumpeter Nicholas Payton and drummer Jay Bellerose, who help him romp through songs that would be tired standards in anyone else’s hands: "Just a Closer Walk With Thee," "St. James Infirmary," and songs by Duke Ellington, Jelly Roll Morton, and Django Reinhardt.Toussaint, however, renders all the material here virtually unrecognizable and completely enchanting. The 71-year-old is rhythmically inventive and melodically playful, especially with Thelonious Monk’s title track. And he’s a generous bandleader, though when he grants solos, it’s often his rhythm part that is still stealing the show. (June 4, K-W Record)
John Vanderslice – Romanian Names (Dead Oceans)
John Vanderslice grew up in Florida and lives in California. Little wonder, then, that his music sounds so sunny—on the surface, anyway. Sunny not necessarily in the way of surf rock and saccharine ’70s singer/songwriters—although there are some obvious vocal debts to the Beach Boys here—but in the way that spending too long in the sun can create a squinty, skewed take on reality where the simplest things appear complex and vice versa. There are certainly nods to normalcy in Vanderslice’s delightfully unconventional approach to pop music. But he is a producer first and foremost (Spoon, Death Cab for Cutie), using the studio to play with sound in the subtlest of ways: these are still pianos, guitars and drums, but there’s always something slightly off about them. His songs used to be busier than they had to be; over the course of seven albums, he’s learned to lay back and let the textures set up the action, leaving the melodies plenty of room to drape themselves or two or three chords. His lyrics are imaginative and suggestive, if not downright cryptic; not many songwriters would try and string a chorus out of the phrase: “fetal horses gallop in the womb.” Fewer still would pull it off. At the age of 42, Vanderslice still likes to mess with his formulas—not out of desperation, but because he continues to improve with age. (June 4, K-W Record)
White Rabbits – It’s Frightening (TBD)
White Rabbits are a six-piece rock band with two drummers—yet ultimately, it’s the entire band that thinks like a drummer, approaching their parts rhythmically rather than filling every dozens of tracks with layers of harmonies. Less is always more with this album, which could just as easily been made on an analog eight-track machine, leaving plenty of space for catchy pop hooks, melodic guitar leads, and piano breaks. That this minimalist approach works so well is due in part to producer Britt Daniel, who employs many of the same tactics in his band Spoon; while both bands share an aesthetic and attention to minute detail, White Rabbits sound like Spoon’s slightly weirder cousins—and yet original enough not to be overpowered by Daniel’s shadow. (June 11, K-W Record)
Wilco – Wilco (The Album) (Warner)
Wilco’s dramatic days are over. After years of line-up upheavals, label battles, drug abuse and controversial artistic shifts, this eponymous album marks the first time in ten years that two Wilco albums have been made with the same line-up, which now includes colourful guitar virtuoso Nels Cline. The Wilco heard here is in full-on dad rock mode—even Feist drops by for a duet on the lovely "You and I"—with the more artsy, soundscape-y side of the band fully integrated into ’70s soft rock that serves as perfect comfort food on a summer’s day. Nothing here raises the temperature, but nothing disappoints, either; where 2007’s Sky Blue Sky shared a similar sound, it was too noodly at times and some of the rockers fell flat. Wilco (The Album) sets modest goals and exceeds them. This is their strongest work since the game-changing Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, and finds them settling into a new stride that shows how mellowing out doesn’t mean giving up. (June 18, K-W Record)
I used to think that the name Apostle of Hustle referred to a disco dance. Which was odd because Andrew Whiteman’s music always seemed too busy and complex to surrender to simple grooves. (That’s changed considerably lately.) I later realized that it referred more to Whiteman’s tireless work ethic, especially when he was down on his luck in the mid-’90s and scampering for any gig he could get. He doesn’t have to do that anymore. As one of the core members of Broken Social Scene ever since they expanded into a full band—that’s Whiteman who is in clear focus on the cover of 2002’s classic You Forgot It In People—he has a high-profile gig that has not only kept him gainfully employed, but given the Apostle of Hustle a much broader international profile than it would enjoy otherwise.
That’s not because it’s not worthy, but because Whiteman had trouble getting arrested on College St. at the turn of the decade; though his talents and charms are plenty, his is a body of work that doesn’t lend itself to easy answers and snap judgments. Indeed, even though I’ve known Andrew Whiteman peripherally for over 15 years, it took me a good year of listening to Apostle of Hustle’s 2004 album Folkloric Feel before its brilliance became apparent to me. I knew enough not to dismiss it right away—it was obvious something special was going on—but such is its density that its many mysteries took a good 12 months to unravel slowly. Even today, I hear new things on that album. I first met Whiteman backstage in London, Ontario (at the now-recently razed Embassy Hotel) when he was still in the Bourbon Tabernacle Choir, the R&B/soul band he joined in high school. Somehow we got on to the topic of the Rheostatics and geeked out about the just-released Whale Music album. After he left the Bourbons, his band Gunwhalebob—featuring future Apostle of Hustle bassist Julian Brown—shared many bills with my own band at the time. While I always had massive respect for his talent as a guitarist, it was obvious that he was still searching for his own voice as a songwriter. With Apostle of Hustle, Whiteman has not only found it, but he’s created something unique. One can hear Latin rhythms, dub reggae effects, Krautrock, Eno-esque production, prog rock and pop songs all coexisting in single songs. More importantly, it works. And on Apostle of Hustle’s third album, it works better than ever. It’s their leanest, meanest album, at once their most accessible and their most experimental. And with an increased focus on one-chord grooves, you can even hustle to it. This conversation took place for this month’s cover story in Exclaim! magazine. I recommend you read that first if you’re new to Whiteman’s world. Here, over breakfast on his way to a Broken Social Scene practice, the ever-animated, ever-opinionated Whiteman waxes enthusiastic on his myriad influences, why he thinks he's a lazy man, and he wasn't interested in either last year's Bourbon Tabernacle Choir reunion nor the recently released oral history book of Broken Social Scene.
Andrew WhitemanMay 6, 2009Locale: the Lakeview Lunch, TorontoOf the many voices that appear in the found sound collages throughout the album, my favourite is the voice of William S. Burroughs reciting the phrase: “We are immeasurably old and ravenously young.” Where is that from? Is that a theme for this album?I stole it for a reason, I guess. I believe it’s from The Place of Dead Roads. It’s from that [Western Lands] trilogy. I stole almost all my stuff from a site called Ubuweb. It’s run by a guy named Kenny Goldsmith. His slogan is: “all avant-garde all the time.” It’s a fantastic site of modern work: film, spoken world, concrete poetry, performance art. I find that’s what I listen to on my iPod all the time anyway: poetry, criticism, ideas. It’s an amazing resource. That was instrumental when I started making this record. Originally I had a collage for each song, and they were longer. I chopped those things down, and I got into sample clearance problems. I really want to leak all of the collages sewed together. It would be an intense listen.Would this be the Apostle of Hustle mixtape?When the album was beginning, we assumed that we wouldn’t even make any copies, that it would be quick and dirty and online. As such, we thought it would be so under the radar that we’d use quotes from Sopranos and Deadwood. We thought: no one will care or find out or buy this record anyway, they’ll take it for free online.You were going to go totally Negativland. That’s exactly how it started. Sometime around September I played it for my A&R guy, Kevin [Drew], and he liked it a lot more than I thought he’d like it. I had perhaps a juvenile distaste for the work it takes to promote the album and get it done right for a proper release. I just wanted to make music and not deal with all that stuff—which is important to deal with.Is that part of the reason it’s so short?No. There were a few more songs that could have gone on. It’s a Latin Playboys thing. I remember getting that album and getting to the end and thinking, “Oooh, it’s only 36 minutes, those fuckers!”I enjoy all three of your albums for different reasons, but this one seems like the longest journey—and yet it’s the shortest. And I mean longest journey in a good way, in a satisfying way. It doesn’t feel like half an hour. It’s more bang for your buck. Yet this is a thin lyric sheet. Is this less lyrically dense than other Apostle albums?Maybe. I got an ultimatum from my band when we finished this: “Next time we record, you have to have all the lyrics written before we go into the studio.” The instrumental, “Eats Darkness,” had a huge lyric to it, which was jettisoned in the end because it was too much. It was an experiment on a book called War Music, which is a retelling of a new translation of The Odyssey, by this British guy Christopher Logue. If you think you never liked that, this will take you right in to ancient Greek stuff. I did an experiment where I took the name of someone I know and wrote it vertically, and then based on the melodic count, I had to make sure each line started with the letter from that person’s name. Then I methodically went through the book page by page until I found a word that started with that letter and followed the melodic structure.You mean the cadence?Yeah, the number of syllables. This was a literary experimental thing going on underneath the music.What attracted you to the line: “Human beings have been commissioned to make war music, music that people will be not only willing, but anxious to die to.” It was another thing from Ubuweb that I’ve been listening to. Stan Brakhage did a series of one-hour radio shows in 1980 when he was teaching at the University of Denver, called the Test of Time. He puts together an amazing program. He’s a huge poetry fan, and a fan of classical music and ancient music. That’s him speaking. What would you characterize as modern war music?Music from northern Mali that we’ve come to know through Tinariwen and all that stuff. That’s one version of it. Another would be The Clipse. A lot of the inspiration for the segues were hip-hop mixtapes I used to get on the streets. But when I sat down to do them, it exploded into this whole other thing I really enjoyed doing. 
You took my question in a positive context of believing in something so much that you’re willing to die for it. I was thinking more about rallying people to a militaristic cause. What music would you be anxious to die for?How about World of Echo by Arthur Russell? No, I guess that would be something to die to, not die for. Would that be the “death you get for the life you lead”? [a line from the song “Perfect Fit”](laughs) Yeah, right. If you’re Mother Theresa, that’s the death you get. Where is that line from?It’s from the writer David Antin. He improvises and speaks on some topic and goes and goes, and later he listens to his cadence and types up his poetry. He’s trained as an art critic and professor. What resonated with you about that line?When I was a kid I would read about Crazy Horse. Before you have to go into battle, you have to make peace with your personal spirits and say, “It’s a good day to die. I’ll be happy if I go out there and die today.” That song is my version of that.You don’t need a battle to feel that way, though. I wake up every morning grateful for the people around me, and every time you say goodbye to someone and you don’t know when you’ll see them ago, you want to know that you’ve made your amends and all is well. If today is the day that the piano falls, I want to know that I’ve made peace with everyone and myself. It’s a technique for living harder, more fully, you know that death is on your shoulder.And living honestly, too.Absolutely.Someone told me that you once said that when you were in the Bourbons, you went to someone’s 30th birthday party at Lee’s Palace—and vowed not to be still hanging around Lee’s Palace when you turned 30.It was the Hopping Penguins, one of those guys’ 30th birthday. I did coke for the first time that night, which is probably where that conversation came from. I was probably 23. I said if I’m celebrating my 30th birthday at Lee’s Palace, I’m going to be fucking sick. Are you asking me to account for such youthful declarations?How old are you now?42.How did you spend your 40th?At SXSW. It was at San Jose Hotel. We did a gig there and the woman who runs it was so nice to us, so great. Time is a giant fucking bullwhip, man. It’s my enemy! But then it’s not, at the same time.You may still be playing Lee’s Palace at age 42, but there’s been nothing about your career that’s been a rut.That’s you saying that.It’s like my favourite Carolyn Mark line: “Is it a groove or is it a rut?” There have been lots of left turns, the three Apostle records all sound different to me, this new one opens new doors. Do you feel like you’re in a rut?No, no. I do feel like I’m lazy, like I haven’t done enough. I don’t know how much I believe in Harold Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence, but when you walk around with Rimbaud on your shoulder…Just tell him to shut up!Exactly: “Stuff a sock in it, you junkie.” You’re comparing yourself to your peers or your people, your immediate peers or your dead peers. I’m very restless. I wish I was a graduate student under Marjorie Perloff at USC in California. I did a cabaret in September at [Toronto theatre company] Soulpepper, and I wish I could jump into that. I’ve got too much to do and I have to make money somehow. I could do better. I wish getting high and watching Aqua Teen Hunger Force wasn’t so funny. Know what I mean? You gotta take a break! “All means to attract and distract,” said the Disposable Heroes. That band was a big wake-up for me. You remember them?Of course. Michael Franti. I saw them. Didn’t the Bourbons share management with them?A little bit for a while. Back when they were performance-y. It was Michael Franti, Charlie Hunter, and that…Table saw guy.Exactly!Rollo? Rono?You remember his name?First time I saw them was opening for Billy Bragg.At the Concert Hall, exactly.What about them woke you up?Recognizing that someone is saying some shit in a really, really good way. Certain cultural skewering is always attractive, whether it’s “all means to attract and distract” or I Am the Slime by Zappa. I don’t get tired of that one.In terms of being restless, I’m curious whether BSS is the biggest distraction in your life, or does it help you focus?It’s not a distraction, that’s for sure.Today it sounds like one. Well, things have changed—massively. Certainly at the beginning, it was no distraction at all. Total joy. Inspired. Jo-Ann [Goldsmith] and Kevin [Drew]’s house was very much a hub. That was absolutely amazing. I don’t know if it somehow focused me, but I wouldn’t have been able to put out my record without Arts and Crafts. Even now (laughs), I feel like I got in on the ground floor and they can’t kick me out! I may be C list, but I’m in! Whew.I feel like you came into that band with the most conventional background to a degree…No kidding, unless you call grunge conventional, in which case it would be [Brendan] Canning.And yet I find your records are both the most melodic and the most experimental.Yeah. So do I. I loved doing that Tagaq thing and having that little release. I don’t like being pigeonholed into quirky pop music or whatever. My trajectory is somewhat more along the Burroughs and Tom Waits kind of thing. I think it’s going to get a little more outside the older I get. The more that a body of work begins to build. I think Tom Waits, before he moved to New York, he had five records or whatever at that point, and they were all of a certain thing. He probably sat down and said, “This feels good, I have this body of work, and now I’m going to take 14 hits of this and move to New York and never come back, artistically.” It’s a lack of time and resources that prevents Apostle of Hustle from being my #1 creative launch pad. But I love Social Scene so much, and it’s my #1 priority.Was 2007 the first time Apostle of Hustle did a full tour?It took us four months to figure out all the parts and how to cover them, and for me to relax a bit and not have Julian having 14 parts to do. After four months, we went to SXSW, did an Andrew Bird tour, and then realized that it’s a vibe, it’s the holy trinity. It’s not about the parts, it’s about what happens between me, Julian and Dean. That was great to figure that out. If I look at bands, the only ones who are climbing is because it’s constant work. And when Apostle can’t do that constant work, it gives us this false question: “Gee, how come we’re not….” Well, because you stop and then you have to start again. It’s a labour of love right now, and that’s all it can be. I can’t afford to have a lighting guy so that we start in total darkness and by the end we’re bathed in beaming light everywhere—which is what I want, I want to do stage-y shit like that. But for these shows, one thing we can do is at least we can learn every song we’ve ever recorded. That’s fun. We have 31 songs that we can play. Those guys won’t get bored and we can mix it up. I’m excited about that. Songs that used to be big rock anthems are now 12/8 maraca-driven Peruvian indie rock tunes. We’re having a looser approach again. I was thinking about an interview you and I did around 1998 for Que Vida [for Id magazine], and my stance on performing was that I wanted to do it but retreated at the same time; I felt exposed in an energy-sapping way. It’s like Barry White said, ‘The ‘’80s were a difficult time for Barry.’So the late ’90s were to you what the ’80s were to Barry White?Exactly. Lost the plot.How do you feel about that time now? I made a little list of your various projects: Fear of Zen. The Strap. Gunwhalebob. Walt Whitman. Que Vida.I also tried to get a publishing deal in there, with EMI. Me and [ex-Bourbon singer] Dave [Wall] did that on the strength of a few Big Sugar hits.And?Never got that, no. I came up with a couple of great boy band songs I could still use, though.How do you look at that period of your life now?I say, fuck it. I wasn’t glued enough to my four-track. I did so much work on my four-track and I should have stayed there. I shouldn’t have ventured out. Alex Lukachevsky [Deep Dark United] and I do this to each other all the time. I think I should have done things like Alex, just put out cassettes for a while. I wanted someone to take care of that stuff for me. So I connected myself with people that I thought would do that, and gave up too much control that way and you get a little lost.That’s very much a ’90s thing, when young bands still thought it was possible to make it in the music industry, such as it was. And now no one has those illusions. But at the same time, you’re on Arts and Crafts now and you play in a band with one of the guys who owns the label.It’s weird. Things work out somehow. Don’t know how, but they do. I got lucky. Lots of people get lucky finds, and you got to be smart enough to know they’re a lucky find or they’re not that lucky. My whole attitude towards performing now is a lot different. It’s a lot healthier than when you and I had that interview.How would you describe it then?It was just guarded. I didn’t know how to unlock.Was it the music you were playing?Maybe a bit. I ceded control voluntarily. I gave it to other people.In the band?Exactly. In the idea that if I’m attached to these guys, then things will go well. But that’s not the case.That was around the time that Que Vida was helping to launch a new label called Sound and Light, which put out the first New Deal album. I remember you telling me about what sounded like a very Arts and Crafts model at the time, at least in terms of a pool of people that cross-pollinate. What was that about? Was that more in name only until New Deal took off?It was. It might have been an idea in [New Deal bassist] Dan Kurtz’s head, a vision. That guy is not short of vision. He has a big palette. That guy is an insatiable worker. He could see that the New Deal was going to kick some ass for a few years, and he went with it. I did see the New Deal back up Feist for a few gigs very early on, which I thought was great. It was only two or three shows at the We’ave on Dundas St. But maybe we’re not talking about the future enough.Back when the New Deal was starting, you were talking about getting into repetitive, dance-y, I don’t want to use the word trance…No, no, use trance, use trance.But I think of really cheesy…(interjects) I don’t. I did an interview for Folkloric Feel, and the woman asked me where we were going, and I said that slowly Apostle of Hustle is transforming into a one-chord band.Polar opposite of Gunwhalebob.That’s for sure.Too many chords!So many chords. We’re closer to moving to one chord now. “Soul Unwind” and “Perfect Fit” are like that. Some of the songs we did for the cabaret were like that. We were discussing strategies for when everyone gets super busy, like when Social Scene’s record comes out. We know the next two or three records we’re going to put out in the next few years. One of them is definitely a trance record.Define a trance record for me.I could be talking about North African music or Jamaican dancehall. It’s ecstatic states. It’s also about sorcery.How so?I think about some of those Sonic Youth jams that are very much about how this reality is surrounded by a net, it’s about looking at the holes in the net and the pores of the fabric and how the music dissolves those momentarily so that you have contact with the non-empirical reality surrounding us. Music is definitely a form of sorcery, and that’s what I want to do.Do you feel you get close to that?Sometimes, yeah. Fuck yeah. It’s a powerful feeling.How do Julian and Dean help you achieve that?It’s impossible to predict what they’re going to do, especially Julian—I have no fucking clue. Every sorcerer needs a monkey familiar!Tell me about Julian Brown. Was Gunwhalebob the first thing you did together?I’ve known him that long. I bailed on the Bourbons in what, 93? [Rheostatic] Dave Clark hooked me up with him and [drummer] Andrew Henry.I know Julian took time off from music and life for a while. Was he important to what your vision of what Apostle of Hustle would be? Did you call him up specifically for that?I did, actually. I don’t know why. Could be unfinished business. When I was in Havana, I knew it had to be Julian. I don’t know what drew me back to him. Somehow I knew that he would be up for the task. I didn’t know what the task would be. Speaking of too many chords, he’s the only guy I knew who could, on a dime, figure out all the chords to “Chega de Saudade” by Jobim. He could transpose it into any key in five seconds. He has limitless potential, musically. It’s terrifying. If I’m frustrating because I’m restless and have so many ideas, he’s frustrating because he’s good at so many instruments. If he’s the monkey familiar who is the chaos part of the equation, he’s also the mule. He will not budge, when things are telling him something’s wrong. Was Dean Stone in and out at the beginning?
No, he’s been there since day one. There was one tour of Europe he couldn’t do, so we got [Justin] Peroff. Dean’s new thing is that maracas are the new cowbell. He was noodling on YouTube and found some maraca technique from Venezuela called joropo, cowboy music from the dry plains of Venezuela and Columbia. The way these guys play is unreal, so Dean has decided this is a huge thing.Do you ever have band practices where you don’t play music, just sit around and play records?A little bit. We were supposed to be rehearsing, because it’s really hard to get together, and we’re taking our approach from listening to records. I didn’t know very early ECM Records, so these guys were playing me Old and New Dreams: Charlie Haden, Don Cherry, Dewey Redman and Eddie Blackwell. Early 70s. That was our jam session. This is who we are, because we’re prevented from being a band that plays all the time. We are itinerant that way. They are willing to indulge me. We just did a recording session with a master voodoo percussionist from Haiti, though a connection with a guy in Hamilton. Jean-Baptiste Bonga. That record will come out next year. That was mind-changing for us, playing with him. We got to play vodun songs and vodun music. He would start and we would try to follow him. We hung out for four days doing that. That was a month ago.Were you versed in what he did before?Oh, no. My knowledge of Haitian music is limited to compas music. Some of the greatest guitar playing I’ve heard is from a a band called Les Gypsies de Baton. Here’s this little titan, Bonga. He lives in Jersey and Port-au-Prince.So that’s one of the upcoming three records.Yes.What are the other two?I can’t reveal those details. But let’s just say I’m comfortable in the conceptual realm.So it will be a trilogy.In the musical sense.I love the line here: “We cultivate resistant hearts.” How did that come to you?I can’t always be bleak.It’s easy to do.That song is a slice of hope. It’s a counter to the song “Xerxes,” where the message is that we’re fucked. Although, if you go back to Thermopylae, we are not fucked.Why?Because at Thermopylae, a handful of Greeks held off an army of 400,000 Persians through skill, luck and positioning. We, the underdog, did win at that juncture. The song “Xerxes” says that we’re not going to win, because Geronimo didn’t win, and he did the same thing. [The song] "How Do You Defeat a More Powerful Enemy” is saying maybe we can win. If you follow these instructions.You can eat darkness.Marc Ribot has a great bit where he talks about loudness and rock guitar. When volume started to creep up, it was the shamanic function of taking the pain away: inoculation. You must be injected with a piece of the darkness to have dealings with the darkness, build up a resistance. Only through the ingestion of darkness and transforming it chemically inside of you, and then you shit sunlight.There are very few lyrics on the record. Is this similar to your one-chord goal?I sat in on a class in Concordia this winter, and we did a fair amount of Ezra Pound. One of his things is to bring it down, reduce it, reduce it.My high school English teacher always told us that brevity is the sole of wit.Unless you’re telling a Borscht Belt joke.Post-mortem, how did the Bourbon reunion feel for you? [The Bourbon Tabernacle Choir was asked to reunite for a one-off show at the 2008 Hillside Festival in Guelph, Ontario.]]
I’m anti-nostalgia. I’m too interested in right now. I’m ecstatic about what’s happening right now. Guess what? Bourbons, I was like, no, not interested. No, no, no. Then some people were like, ‘Get off your high horse and stop being such an asshole. Just do something for the fans. We don’t have to reunite, we just want another party.’ So yeah, okay, if I don’t have any other plans, if I’m not away, okay. So then I get an email: “Do you mind if there’s a film crew around when we do this?” I put my two cents in. “Yes, I do.” Of course that’s ignored, because that’s the pattern from the old. I’m great friends with Kate [Fenner]; I see her every time I’m in New York. I’m great friends with Chris Brown, I stay with him every time I’m in Kingston. There’s no enmity there. Musically? Whatever, man. That was then this is now. It’s not exciting or thrilling. I’m not at the edge of my seat. There’s no trance, no sorcery, no nothing.Is it historical re-enactment?Yeah! And you know what man? Let’s be honest: it was a drag. So that’s how I feel about it. I’m just not into nostalgia. [unprompted] You want to know what I think of the Broken Social Scene book? It’s garbage. It’s not garbage; [author] Stuart Berman isn’t garbage. I love that guy’s music writing. And he’s a friend of mine and I trust that what he does is not going to suck. And it probably doesn’t suck. But in principle? Sure, I mean, if I was a 14-year-old fan whose older brother got me into Broken Social Scene I’m sure I’d find it really interesting. Maybe his angle is also interesting, about how community music can happen. That’s all on the positive side, and I’m being a stick in the mud. But fuck that—nostalgia is for the old age home. What about right now? Maybe it’s just my insider opinion. Maybe it’s because it’s about you and something you’re involved in. But you, as a voracious reader and someone who’s interested in other music, if you read a book about someone else’s career is that also somehow false nostalgia? It verges on mawkish celebrity-ness. I can’t stand that. I’m not interested in that. I’ve attempted for the entire life of my goddaughter to offer alternatives to that for her—not successfully, I might add. We live in an increasingly celebritized milieu. This could all be just another way of saying that it just fucking rubs me the wrong way and I think it’s tacky. It’s cheap and tacky.Is it not a timepiece? And what’s wrong with that?Okay, a timepiece. Let’s talk about time. Is ten years time, really? Is that a timepiece? Come on. Nostalgic exhumation? The corpse doesn’t have a chance to dissolve into the soil anymore. It’s too close. Whenever someone under the age of 80 gets a lifetime achievement award, their first response seems to be: what? It’s over? Are you going to roll me into the grave now? I heard the choreographer Peggy Baker on the radio yesterday, talking about receiving some such honour, and she explained how resistant she was to the concept—especially as a dancer, when she’s spent much of her career proving that dancers don’t have to retire at the age of 19 or whatever. That’s amazing. Peggy Baker is amazing. Give her some other award! You want to fete her? Give her money, I’m sure she’d be happy with that. But that’s the semantics of the phrase “lifetime achievement award.” You’re merely resistant to the idea of a book at this stage in the band’s career.Yeah! I’m resistant to it. It’s mawkish and I’m not into it. The conception of BSS initially was to play new songs all the time, not to play the album. And then that morphed into a machine that had to meet certain expectations of fans coming out to see it. And then flipping through Berman’s book yesterday, there are quotes from people—including yourself, if I’m not mistaken—saying how they could see this band still doing this in 30 years, largely because the structure is so fluid and everybody is old friends. But will you be playing the hits from 2003 then? This is a band that, from the beginning, didn’t even want to nostalgize the album they had just put out. There was meant to be forward motion.Kevin was ranting the other day about how we’ve given up the mystery. And it’s true. Because of the book?Well, that was one thing, but he was ranting at [Brendan] Canning for doing eTalk Daily and all this shit. And I agree, I think it’s bullshit. At the same time, that’s our job. And if we didn’t have that job, we wouldn’t be able to do a lot of this.You said you just learned 31 songs for this tour. Are people nostalgic for Folkloric Feel? What about those old songs?I was thinking about the Dead, or Dylan. I haven’t been to a Dylan show in a long time, but I’m assuming he plays a wide range of his stuff. I hope he does songs from Time Out of Mind and from Blonde on Blonde and from Blood on the Tracks. I’m assuming that’s what it’s about. One thing I took from the Dead was that they’re not the best at what they do—they’re the only ones at what they do. I was thinking about Apostle; I want to be master of this music. Or like Gonzales, who wanted to be the supervillain, the master of music, and that’s why he can afford to have this excellent prankster, shit-disturbing character who can run for the mayor of the Berlin underground. And why? Because when he sits at the piano, he can kill you. And he will kill you, because he’s a master, a genius of music. For Apostle specifically, that’s our strength. We have five releases—three albums, two EPs—and the people that are our fans are introverted, music fans who are on the periphery. These are not centre-gathered people. They are outside the herd for whatever reason, for better or worse. I’ve met them. So for us to become masters of our music, that’s the least I can do for myself and for them. That’s the impetus for learning every song we’ve ever recorded. Even if I can’t do anything else successfully, I want to be master of my fucking realm. When you come to the Apostle show, you’ll hear any song you want and we can twist it four different ways. These internalized music nerds who come to your show—do they dance?In Montreal they do! It’s a heterogenous bunch. For this tour we solicited a bunch of young bands to see who wanted to open for us, instead of choosing one act or having a booking agent do it. It’s been amazing for me to listen to all these MySpace sites and find out what people are doing.So you see how you may be directly inspiring some people, if there fans enough of your music?No I can’t! (laughs) Not for a lot of them, for sure. Listening to a lot of them, I think, really? We are music for introverted people, so I don’t know what they get out of it or read into it. I have no fucking clue. I don’t know anyone else who sounds like our band; I wish I did. It’s always a horrible conversation when someone says, ‘Who does your band sound like?’ or ‘Who do you want to go on the road with?’ No one does what we do—which sounds high and mighty, but when you get down to it, nobody really does do this. -end-
Elliot Brood – Mountain Meadows (Six Shooter)
Fucked Up – The Chemistry of Common Life (Matador)
Apostle of Hustle – Eats Darkness (Arts and Crafts)
The Awkward Stage – Slimming Mirrors, Flattering Lights (Mint)
