April 2013 reviews

The following reviews ran in the Waterloo Record and the Guelph Mercury last month. Highly, highly, highly recommended: AroarA. Merely highly recommended: Rokia Traoré, Joshua Van Tassel.

AroarA – In the Pines EP (Club Roll)


Someone old, something new. You know Andrew Whiteman from Broken Social Scene, Apostle of Hustle and many other projects. You don’t know his new collaborator Ariel Engel, who sings the bulk of this material and brings out the best in Whiteman. The lyrics on AroarA’s debut EP are by American poet Alice Notley, from her 2007 book of the same name, set here to original music made with primitive cigar-box banjos and drum machines. Notley’s poems themselves reference old folk songs, and even a Bob Dylan lyric about Blind Willie McTell, so repurposing Notley’s words for modern avant-garde pop music taps into a natural continuum. If that doesn’t intrigue you enough and you need a big namedrop, it was recorded at Feist’s house.

Concept and pedigree aside, it’s the music of AroarA that compels. Like the Los Lobos side project Latin Playboys, AroarA takes traditional elements—Spanish pop, American blues, Asian melodies, PJ Harvey—and tosses them in a digital kaleidoscope that defies easy description. Engel’s compelling voice is the anchor: a confident calm presence not unlike Feist or Daniela Gesundheit of Snowblink (who all performed together at the 2012 Polaris Prize gala). The sonic density that marked Whiteman’s last album as Apostle of Hustle has been stripped back; each track contains only a few elements: sampler, two guitars and percussion, either electronic, hand-played or of unknown origin.

These five songs are as fulfilling as a full-length album, but they’re just the beginning: nine more are due on AroarA’s debut album in June. (April 4)

Download (tracks only have numbers as titles, as per the original poems; they don’t refer to running order): “#11,” “#6,” “#2”

Arts and Crafts: 2003-2013 – Various Artists (Arts and Crafts)

Many people and many artists across the country contributed to the explosion of great Canadian music in the last decade, but it’s safe to say that Toronto label Arts and Crafts were at the forefront of taking it all to the mainstream: first with Broken Social Scene, whose Kevin Drew is a cofounder, then with Feist and many others. Arts and Crafts has released many classic Canadian records, and it’s a safe bet that a decade retrospective would be a worthy time capsule.

Sadly, it’s not. The selection here appears to have been selected from a shuffle playlist, albeit one that favours Broken Social Scene, Feist and Stars, with three tracks each—odd for Stars, who have released just as many albums off the label as they have on. Many artists are relegated to the “rarities” disc, hence people like the Constantines, Hidden Cameras, Cold Specks, the Dears, Gonzales and Snowblink are not necessarily on their A game. Bell Orchestre, who put out one of the best albums in the label’s entire discography, is not found anywhere here.

Listening to the main disc gives further credence to the notion that the label has faltered the most when it recruits from outside its immediate family: The Most Serene Republic? Los Campesinos? New Buffalo? Dan Mangan? Well, at least Mangan sells a lot of records and deserves to be here. The compiler does deserve some credit, at least, for finding a listenable song by the Stills.

You probably own the best Arts and Crafts albums already, and this compilation won’t shed much light on the rest of the roster. Save your money and buy a ticket for their June 8 anniversary show in Toronto featuring a one-off Broken Social Scene reunion, Feist, Stars, Zeus, Cold Specks, Jason Collett and more—including Hayden and Bloc Party, who are also absent from the comp. (April 18)

Download: “Islands in the Stream” – Feist and the Constantines; “I Want a New Drug” – Apostle of Hustle; “Apology” – Kevin Drew

The Bicycles - Stop Thinking So Much (Aporia)

This Toronto pop band was beloved but underrated during their run in the 2000s; after a four-year hiatus, they remind us what we’ve been missing by returning from various other projects sounding entirely rejuvenated and more eclectic than ever, not unlike a ’70s K-Tel collection where the only real through line is an abundance of sunny California harmonies. Twee pop, country balladry, glam rock, even some Rolling Stones swagger weave their way through these two- and three-minute miracles, where each member brings their own songs to the table—and drummer Dana Snell nearly steals the whole show with her opening track, the lovely “Appalachian Mountain Station.” (April 25)

Download: “Appalachian Mountain Station,” “Bandana Cat,” “Goldeneye”

James Blake – Overgrown (Polydor)

This young Brit wowed plenty with his 2011 debut, with its blend of innovative electronics, live performance and Blake’s androgynous croon, as well as a dreamy Feist cover.  And yet anyone who heard Blake’s earlier instrumental EPs may well have wondered why he appeared to have dropped the ball for his coming-out party, with a collection of tracks that were neither great songs nor particularly cutting edge: clearly this man had more potential than just a great voice.

Blake more than makes up for that on Overgrown, which is both as sonically stunning and seductive as what is ostensibly a pop album could possibly be. He’s obvious invested more time into the songwriting process instead of coasting on his studio wizardry, and yet he’s not about to embrace clichés. What would have happened had Joni Mitchell fled California in the early ’70s and moved to Berlin to work with Brian Eno? They would have spawned James Blake. (April 18)

Download: “Overgrown,” “Retrograde,” “Digital Lion”

The Burning Hell - People (weewerk)

“Inside everyone one of us is a comedian, a cult leader and an amateur rapper.” So says Mathias Kom, singer and songwriter at the core of The Burning Hell. He should know: he’s all three. His band is an open invitational depending on what city he’s living in at the moment (Peterborough, Whitehorse, now St. John’s); he’s a verbose wordsmith who claims he writes songs while listening to the Wu-Tang Clan; and he’s wry, witty, and occasionally hilarious.

Kom writes songs that ask questions no one else dares to ask—never mind set to music. Why aren’t cults ever any fun? Why, as teenagers, were we prematurely nostalgic for the age we actually were at the time? Why not set the legend of Loki to a seven-minute rock epic? When Lionel Richie wrote “Hello,” was it you he was looking for and not the blind girl in the video?

As Kom has shifted from ukulele-wielding folk singer to stream-of-consciousness rock bandleader, he’s less concerned with writing songs than he is using the music as a vehicle for observational ramblings. It can be a recipe for disaster—his last album, overburdened with pop culture references, was proof of this—but here he’s a raconteur par excellence, holding court while his band keeps the party going behind him. (April 25)

Download: “Grown-ups,” “Amateur Rappers,” “Industrialists”

Dusted – Total Dust (Hand Drawn Dracula)

Pick a Piper – s/t (Mint)

Canadians seem to excel at albums tailor-made for long-haul late-night drives: spooky enough to suit the occasion, but with enough volume and pulse to keep the driver awake. And why wouldn’t we? We, especially our touring musicians, spend an inordinate amount of time in the wee hours travelling from town to faraway town. Brian Borcherdt, a rock’n’roll lifer who’s spent almost 20 years on the road, is no different, hence the sound of his new project, Dusted, made during a rare time when he was standing still.

While his all-live electronic band Holy Fuck was touring the world in the last eight years and hailed as one of the best live acts in Canada, Borcherdt was busy releasing quiet solo albums under his own name. When his bandmates took some time off to raise babies, Borcherdt threw himself into Dusted, a collaboration with producer/drummer Leon Taheny (Owen Pallett, Bruce Peninsula, Austra).

Taheny brings out the best in Borcherdt’s songwriting; while his solo work was often lovely but aimless, Taheny tightens everything up with minimal percussion and dropping in ukulele, violin and minimal keyboards when necessary. Borcherdt, who’s also in fine vocal form, plays chugging rhythm guitar with a steady hand and both feet on effects pedals, looping it and running it through various decaying levels of distortion. The result sounds unlike Borcherdt’s good pal Chad Van Gaalen (especially in a live setting), but the album successfully creates its own world, one where the late-night radio is your guiding light.

A similar vibe prevails for K-W’s Pick a Piper, though further astray from the indie rock singer/songwriter genre Dusted is working in. Waterloo drummer Brad Weber has been performing with psychedelic electronica group Caribou for the last decade, and that band’s sound inevitably bleeds through on Weber’s first full-length as Pick a Piper. Comparisons are inevitable not only because of the direct connection, but because very few, if any, other acts working today successfully merge those elements, other than Atoms for Peace, the new band from Radiohead’s Thom Yorke (who is a big Caribou fan). Like Caribou’s Dan Snaith, Weber employs lovely melodies and Beach Boys harmonies, sets them to club beats on both acoustic and electronic drums, and layers in various percussive and jazz elements—and then lets you sit back and zone out. Vocalists from Braids, Ruby Suns and Enon also show up to provide additional scenery along the way, though they easily fade into the blurry background of a fascinating journey. (April 4)

Download Pick a Piper: “Cinders and Dust,” “Once Were Leaves,” “South to Polynesia”

Download Dusted: “All Comes Down,” “(Into the) Atmosphere,” “Pale Light”

Iron and Wine – Ghost on Ghost (Nonesuch)

Iron and Wine’s Sam Beam introduced himself to us many years ago as a solo, fingerpicking singer/songwriter. As his popularity grew, his arrangements swelled and he slowly shifted into swampy, New Orleans psychedelic funk that owed a few debts to Dr. John’s more outré output. Here, however, it sounds like he took a more marked left turn: by getting happy.

Ghost on Ghost is notable for sounding much sunnier than any other Iron and Wine album; the preponderance of major keys helps. For an album with “ghost” in its title, Beam has shifted from spookier sonics into opiated bliss, California soft rock that could be a funkier Fleetwood Mac. Longtime producer Brian Deck continues to provide plenty of tasty tricks underneath the steady calm of Beam’s voice; just because the music is pleasant doesn’t mean it can’t be multi-layered and sophisticated. The other key difference is the increased role of a horn section, providing not just soul shots but even embarking on bebop jazz breakdowns on tracks like “Lover’s Revolution”—didn’t see that coming.

It’s easy to underestimate Iron and Wine, but Sam Beam has just given us yet another reason why we never should. (April 18)

Download: “Joy,” “Low Light Buddy of Mine,” “Winter Prayers”

Kacey Musgraves - Same Trailer, Different Park (Universal)

This 24-year-old Texas artist is notable most for what she is not: she’s far removed from the gloss of new country—no crunching guitars or synths here—yet conventional enough to target the same market; a year older than Taylor Swift, she writes poignant, homespun and youthful observations without sounding like a 15-year-old Twilight fan. Musgraves has a sweet enough voice, though unremarkable; the appeal is her songwriting. Her first single features the opening line, “If you ain’t got two kids by 21, you’re probably going to die alone / at least that’s what tradition told you.” That, and her love of minor chords, makes you wonder how she ever wound up a contestant on Nashville Star (where she placed seventh). This, her fourth album but major-label debut, sounds like the love child of Lucinda Williams and Fred Eaglesmith, with trace elements of teen angst found in a line like, “It’s a fine line between telling a joke and twisting the knife.” The album has already topped the U.S. country charts and sold half a million copies in three weeks, and it sounds like this well is just going to get deeper. (April 11)

Download: “Merry Go ’Round,” “My House,” “Dandelion”

New Country Rehab - Ghost of Your Charms (Kelp) 

The name of this band suggests that they’re tried and true traditionalists bucking against the slick new country scene. Well, they do replace gloss with grit, but the muscular, modern arrangements here aren’t all that far off from stadium-size country music—or Bruce Springsteen circa The Rising. This ain’t no Hank Williams revival act (see: Daniel Romano). Frontman John Showman is not only a convincing belter, but he’s a fine fiddler player, and its those textures that set this band apart from every other roots rock act in Canada. Producer Chris Stringer (Timber Timbre, Snowblink) captures the live energy effectively: this is a record that demands to be played loud. Too bad the performances and the production outshine the songwriting, something that matters a whole lot less on stage, which is obviously this band’s forte. (April 25)

Download: “Rollin’,” “Lizzy Dying of a Broken Heart,” “Midnight Cargo”

The Ford Pier Vengeance Trio – Huzzah! (independent)

Ford Pier is one of Canada’s musical MVPs, playing with members of the Rheostatics, NoMeansNo, backing up arty singer/songwriters Veda Hille and Christine Fellows, and serving time in punk legends D.O.A., cowpunk pioneers Jr. Gone Wild and reggae band Roots Roundup. What does Pier get up to on his own terms? Tightly controlled jazz-punk chaos in a power-trio setting that celebrates “the gift of life” one minute while decrying destruction and banality the next. Pier doesn’t do anything simply: every track here twists and turns inside out and yet never spirals out of control, thanks in part to a phenomenal rhythm section that seem to understand every synapse in Pier’s brain. It’s all overwhelming on first listen; sometimes you wish Pier didn’t feel the need to change chords every two beats. But Pier’s invention and magnetism—and brevity—carry the day. Huzzah, indeed. (April 11)

Download: “When We Were Poor,” “The Gift of Life,” “Newton and the Counterfeiters”

Cam Penner – To Build a Fire (Rawlco Radio)

Cam Penner is the kind of guy who wanders up to your folk-festival campfire and casually starts playing a few songs that sound like howling winds set to blues stomps that suddenly shut up all the drunks, until everyone is spellbound wondering exactly who this travelling stranger is. That’s just how he rolls: Penner is a wandering troubadour who has lived and worked all over the continent (“sometimes I wonder if I’m running or being chased”), performing songs with choruses like “may the good Lord take you in self-defence.” He opens this, his fifth album, with a brass instrumental; the Everlast-esque single “Memphis” drops a drum machine into the rhythm. But for the most part, Penner stays true to his cabin-in-the-woods aesthetic, drawing you in with tales of travel and dollops of inspiration for tough times. (April 25)

Download: “Whiskey Lips,” “No Consequence,” “Memphis”

The Sapphires – Various Artists (Sony)

It’s been over 20 years since The Commitments, one of the finest and funniest movies about rock’n’roll ever made, in which a band of ragged Irish misfits attempt to make American soul music. And unlike 1990, classic R&B is back in style in full force, so the idea of a new film soundtrack stacked with actors singing faithful versions of Motown and Stax classics won’t seem an overworked concept for anyone too young to remember either The Commitments or The Blues Brothers. Plus, this time the artists doing the reappropriation of African-American culture are Australian Aborigines.

But do we need yet another version of “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” or “Land of 1,000 Dances”? (Supplementary question: does CCR’s “Run Through the Jungle” need to appear on yet another soundtrack of a Vietnam film?) The cinematic twist this time is the ’60s story of Australian Aborgine women, who had only recently been granted political and legal rights, who were recruited to form an R&B band to entertain American troops in Vietnam. The story sells the movie, but all you really need to hear is actress Jessica Mauboy open her mouth: she is every bit the equal of Diana Ross, Carla Thomas, Gladys Knight and Mavis Staples, and she even pulls off Merle Haggard’s “Today I Started Loving You Again” and Arthur Lyman’s “Yellow Bird.” On the one modern-sounding track here, “Gotcha,” she enters Beyoncé territory, signalling that she’s poised for much more than a fluke film role. (April 11)

Download: “Gotcha,” “What a Man,” “I’ll Take You There”

Telekinesis – Dormarion (Merge)

People continue to whine about lacklustre new Weezer albums, while young Michael Benjamin Lerner, a.k.a. Telekinesis, is now on his third flawless record of anthemic power pop. What gives? Lerner is a master of melancholic lyrics set to sunny melodies, crushing guitars, fuzzy bass and new wave keyboards, to say nothing of his own buoyant drumming. He gets production help this time out from Spoon drummer Jim Eno, like Lerner himself a multi-tasking percussionist. Eno not only brings out Lerner’s pre-existing strengths, he also drops a drum machine on him and plays up an ’80s influence on several tracks. And majestic closing track “You Take It Slowly” is the song you keep hoping the reunite Pixies would get around to writing. (April 4)

Download: “Power Lines,” “Laissez-Faire,” “Ever True”

Rokia Traoré – Beautiful Africa (Nonesuch)

This Malian musician has collaborated with novelist Toni Morrison, Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones, and toured with Blur’s Damon Albarn. She’s the daughter of a diplomat who was posted to the U.S., Europe and the Middle East. She studied sociology in Brussels. This, her fifth album, is produced by PJ Harvey sideman John Parish. And yet after Beautiful Africa, it’s unlikely she’ll need such name-dropping to be remembered.

She’s a stunning guitar player, steeped in Malian blues (and one of the few female instrumentalists from that scene), but it’s her voice that’s entirely captivating: though she’s capable of projecting, she’s at her most powerful when she applies her strength at a lower volume, with an ever-so-slight tremolo that’s nothing short of chilling, especially on the epic nine-minute ballad N’Teri. Parish gives her a stripped-down backing: a minimalist funky drummer, an n’goni player and a bassist, all used sparingly.

Traoré recently relocated with her son to Paris from Bamako, which is threatened by Islamist insurgents who, among other atrocities, want to ban music in one of the most musically rich regions of the world. Her lyrics are in French, so I can’t assess their political content (if any), but her voice alone is resilience and beauty embodied. (April 25)

Download: “Sikey,” “Melancolie,” “Tuit Tuit”

Joshua Van Tassel - Dream Date (Backward Music)

“Dream date” doesn’t refer here to a fantasy romance; it’s about an appointment with an imaginative, abstract, haunting and playful environment. Van Tassel is an in-demand drummer and multi-instrumentalist for many Toronto singer/songwriters; left to his own devices, he constructs carefully constructed melodic and cinematic instrumentals of all varieties: propulsive, subdued, acoustic instruments manipulated electronically or left to shine on their own strengths. He believes in brevity—only one song here is longer than five minutes—and every sonic layer is entirely deliberate; there’s very little clutter. He does invite two vocalists into the fold—an uncharacteristically gut-wrenching Justin Rutledge, and a soaring Kate Rogers—for two of the album’s strongest songs, but those are by no means the most melodic. Van Tassel has charted an eclectic sonic journey where Calexico, Patrick Watson and the Rheostatics are fellow travellers. (April 11)

Download: “The Sharpest Corner,” “Sentimental Health,” “I Think You’re a Salesman”

Yeah Yeah Yeahs – Mosquito (Universal)

In the first three songs of the first new Yeah Yeah Yeahs album in four years, we hear: a raw post-punk song that culminates with a full-on gospel choir: a brooding, haunting lullaby that samples a New York City subway car as a rhythm track; an unhinged, nonsensical shriekfest that hearkens back to the very first tracks that put this once-incendiary trio on the map. After the smash success of their electro-disco makeover on 2009’s It’s Blitz!, it sounds like the band has no idea what it should be anymore and doesn’t care. Neither should we, if they sound this good flailing in all directions.

No doubt it helps that singer Karen O has returned to New York from California to join her bandmates; Mosquito is much more informal and loose than this band has been since their debut full-length. Invite long-dormant Kool Keith alias Dr. Octagon to rap on “Buried Alive”? Why not. A Cramps-style sci-fi goof-off about alien conspiracy theories? Of course. And then there are the garage rock rave-ups, the ballads, the disco songs and everything in between. O has lost none of her potency as an ever-elastic vocalist—the bonus tracks include three acoustic demos where she’s pitch-perfect and gorgeous, as well as a howling, snarling live version of the title track—and her bandmates rarely resort to rock clichés.

If their former comrades in the Strokes—another band who defined New York City and rock and roll’s comeback in the early 2000s—are getting successively sleepier with each release, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs return fully invigorated. (April 18)

Download: “Subway,” “Mosquito,” “Despair”

Feb '11 reviews

The following reviews appeared in the Kitchener-Waterloo Record and Guelph Mercury this month.

James Blake – s/t (Universal)

Over the course of 2010, James Blake went from being an obscure British bedroom electronic artist to appearing on dozens of year-end lists for three EPs he squeezed into that calendar year. Those EPs were fascinating fractures of the genre known as dubstep, the definition of which gets more dubious every day (especially now that teen emo metal bands are putting out dubstep remixes). Loosely put, it’s a sparse electronic subgenre reliant on subsonic bass, with elements of dub reggae and icy goth.

Blake wants to add another element to the mix: Bill Withers. Unlike his EPs—which were mostly instrumental, or used only cut-up vocal phrases rather than an actual performance—Blake’s self-titled debut portrays him as an R&B singer/songwriter trapped in some digital vortex, like D’Angelo on downers.

Occasionally, it works for him, like on the album’s key gateway drug, an acoustic piano treatment of Feist’s “Limit To Your Love” that finds Blake actually delivering a solid vocal and letting a rumbling bass sound set the whole thing delightfully off-kilter. The mysteriously titled “The Wilhelm Scream” fulfills all the promise of the entire project: a fragile, soulful vocal set to syncopated bass drum sounds, echo-drenched percussion and patiently percolating staccato synths.

But those two tracks aside, Blake sounds like he couldn’t be bothered to get out of bed. The listener gets fair warning right from the opening track: “Unluck” unfolds over no discernible time signature, with beats tripping over each other and Blake singing like he’s buried beneath blankets. The lyrics are often maudlin, and the arrangements sound like a career artist who’s already coasting on an established rep and using an old bag of tricks to do all the heavy lifting.

This is Blake’s first album—as good as 2010 was to him, he doesn’t have that much critical capital to waste. He’d better step up his game soon. (Feb. 24)

Download: “The Wilhelm Scream,” “Limit To Your Love,” “To Care (Like You)”

Buck 65 – 20 Odd Years (Warner)

The duets record is a tired cliché, usually put out by a veteran performer trying to prove to a new audience how young and hip s/he is. For Buck 65, who is only pushing 40 and yet is celebrating 20 years in the business called show, he long ago gave up on trying to prove anything to anyone. And yet 20 Odd Years find him in, well, an odd position: as iconoclastic as ever, and yet also attempting to straitjacket himself into pop music formulas.

As a hip-hop outsider—one who made his mark with a deeply personal album written partially about the death of his mother (1999’s Man Overboard), who signed to a major label and released four 15-minute collages as his debut for them (2002’s Square), who explored folk and country textures on 2003’s Talkin’ Honky Blues and paid homage to subversive art of the 1950s on 2007’s Situation—Buck 65 has always allowed audiences to find him on their own terms.

Now his mainstream day job (using his given name, Rich Terfry) is as a CBC Radio host on a show where he has little control over the programming; there are no rough edges on his Drive show, which is stuffed with mostly decent but overwhelmingly earnest and accessible folk pop.

And so 20 Odd Years finds him playing to every side, and not always successfully. When left alone, Buck 65 returns to the lyrically dextrous and playful terrain he built his career on. The four tracks without guests are among the strongest: “Superstars Don’t Love,” “Lights Out,” the reflective and romantic “She Said Yes” and the intentionally ridiculous “Zombie Delight.”

When he teams up with French pop singer Olivia Ruiz (for whom he co-wrote a chart-topper in France), The Tragically Hip’s Gord Downie (on surely one of the only hip-hop songs set to a 6/8 blues), or Maritime singer/songwriter Jenn Grant (who is an intriguing foil for him on four tracks here, including an unrecognizable Leonard Cohen cover), the results are inspired. Yet when he joins with Vancouver songwriter Hannah Georgas or Gaspé singer Marie-Pierre Arthur, Buck 65 sounds like he’s making a bad Metric album, or constructing singles just to please the major label that’s bankrolled him for the better part of a decade with no commercial payoff.

If 20 Odd Years is meant to represent the arc of his career, perhaps it’s inevitable that would include both the highs and the lows—and to be fair, the lows can only be defined as such based on Buck 65’s own high standards. (Feb. 10)

Download: “Tears of Your Heart,” “Who By Fire,” “Zombie Delight”

Cowboy Junkies ­— Demons: Nomad Series Volume 2 (Latent)

Last year the Cowboy Junkies released their finest album in over a decade, Renmin Park, based on songwriter Michael Timmins’s experiences in China, and the first of what the band is calling its “Nomad Series.” The second installment is different in almost every way: it’s a tribute album to recently departed songwriter Vic Chesnutt, and features a return to the more maximalist side of the Cowboy Junkies from which Renmin Park provided such a breath of relief.

With few exceptions, the Junkies take an often heavy-handed approach to the material, bringing out neither the best in the band or in the songs. The brink-of-suicide song “Flirting With You All My Life”—the “you” being suicide—is given an upbeat rock treatment, which despite the chorus of “Oh death, really I am not ready,” still comes off as exceedingly weird considering that Chesnutt did end up taking his own life on Christmas Day, 2009.

Chesnutt’s death looms large over this recording; though many of his songs deal with frayed personalities who run the gamut between broken and beyond broken, Timmins’s selections here seem determined to remind us of Chesnutt’s own tragedy. “Square Room” contains the line “last night I nearly killed myself,” while “See You Around” is as fitting an epitaph as any.

Not that this could never have worked; Vic Chesnutt’s music was often as sparse as the best Cowboy Junkies recordings, which one would think would make this album a perfect match. But Chesnutt was such an idiosyncratic writer that he’s a hard man to cover; his unique use of vocabulary and phrasing are not easy for any singer to interpret effectively, and though she tries her determined best, Margo Timmins isn’t entirely up to the job here. (Feb. 10)

Download: “Betty Lonely,” “See You Around,” “Supernatural”

The Dears — Degeneration Street (Maple)

Wrong title—this should be called Regeneration Street. It’s the most engaged and exciting this Montreal band has sounded in years, and is as good or better than their 2003 masterpiece, No Cities Left. Every element that has ever defined this band’s shining moments—epic rock guitars, new wave keyboards, Murray Lightburn’s impassioned vocals and large doses of dramatic flair—are front and centre here; every song is buoyed by the confidence of this latest lineup in the band (which features returning members from earlier incarnations, along with new powerhouse drummer Jeff Luciani), but the songwriting is strong enough that this material would likely be just as effective if Lightburn and keyboardist were the only Dears left standing.

But most importantly, the Dears sound, well, happy—which has never been an adjective used to describe this often-dour group of mopes. They haven’t exactly turned into shiny, happy people, but there is clearly a shot of optimism and uplift that runs through that makes all the difference in the world. The orgasmic rock crescendos no longer sound oppressive and ominous; they’re exhilarating, even the wonderfully ridiculous harmonized guitar leads from Robert Benvie and Patrick Krief. The grungier moments are not a mask or a crutch; they carry serious weight.

And while the Dears have always been credited with having a soul influence—which was dubious at best, and more likely a cheap critical cliché because Lightburn is black—this time it’s actually true, as proven by the uncharacteristic jaunty Motown influence on “Yesteryear” and the slow-burning “Tiny Man,” which sounds like an oddball mashup of Pink Floyd and Al Green.

After 10 years filled with plenty of promise, upheaval, strife and stumbles, this is a stunning comeback record. No wonder the band can be spotted smiling onstage these days. (Feb. 17)

Download: “5 Chords,” “Blood,” “Tiny Man”

Deerhoof – Deerhoof vs. Evil (Polyvinyl)

Anything can happen in a Deerhoof song, and it often does. Tempos lurch, speed up, or change on a dime. Delicate beauty smashes up against thundering drums and metallic guitars. Bassist Satomi Matzusaki’s singing voice is that of an innocent, wide-eyed naïf taking in and anchoring the sonic splendour and possibility around her. It’s equally absurdist, complex, simple—and almost always fascinating.

There are also times when Deerhoof can easily get lost in its own labyrinth (see 2005’s The Runners Four). But as its triumphant title might suggest, Deerhoof vs. Evil is one of the most joyous discs in its 10-deep discography, finding them exploring even more so than usual. As always, there are pop hooks to help guide listeners who aren’t sure what they’re in for. And Matzusaki makes it a bit easier this time out, more likely to sing a lyric asking “what is this thing called love?” than she is to invite you to “Come see the duck!” (as one older live favourite does repeatedly).

There’s a much lighter touch here: far more acoustic guitars than ever before, and touches of Brazilian tropicalia and ’60s film soundtracks. Their aggressive side can appear at any given moment—as can any other bump in the road Deerhoof decide to throw in the mix, while they all maintain a firm grip on the steering wheel. Working with even more colours on their palette plate, Deerhoof’s sense of possibility is greater than ever. (Feb. 3)

Download: “Behold a Marvel in the Darkness,” “Let’s Dance the Jet,” “I Did Crimes For You”

East River Pipe – We Live in Rented Rooms (Merge)

East River Pipe is Fred Cornog, who lives in suburban New Jersey with his family and has a day job at Home Depot. While that sounds like a half-decent existence, it’s actually palatial living compared to the depths of addiction he sunk to in the mid-’90s before his music career and his marriage managed to steer him on to a new path.

Cornog’s music tends to stick to a similar, plodding tempo, with a metronomic drum machine, dreamy electric guitars and synths padding out the remaining corners of the sound. It’s as laid-back and idyllic as suburbia is supposed to be—only it rarely is in Cornog’s songs. His characters are either conmen who make backroom deals, or they’re the type who suffer for the sins of the aforementioned while saying to themselves: “I swore I’d never live on my knees,” or “I’m living in the twilight every day / I know the deck is stacked.”

But neither Cornog’s music nor his lyrics cast stones or get riled up with indignation. Instead, East River Pipe exists in its own state of inertia, with an almost easygoing acceptance—if not exactly a resignation—about the way this world and the odd people in it function: “We know most things just don’t work / and it’s not worth the fight.” In “Tommy Makes a Movie,” Tommy doesn’t actually make a movie: he dreams one in his head, afraid that if he were to try to make a reality it would only be altered and compromised—and besides, it’s easier to sit at home and immerse yourself in empty pornography.

While the music is comforting, the lyrics most definitely are not: easy listening is rarely so uneasy. And just like suburbia itself, there’s a lot more going on underneath the placid surface of any given East River Pipe song. (Feb. 24)

Download: “Backroom Deals,” “Tommy Made a Movie,” “Three Ships”

PJ Harvey – Let England Shake (Island)

PJ Harvey was one of the most exciting new artists of the ’90s, and has spent the last decade largely in retreat, after achieving her commercial—and some would say her artistic—peak with 2000’s Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea. The two albums she’s released since then were stripped down, dark and intimate affairs, unlikely to appeal to anyone who wasn’t already a hardcore fan. Let England Shake is slightly more extroverted, but it’s ultimately no different, and no less weird.

Of course, PJ Harvey has always been weird—that’s what we loved about her. There are tracks here, however, where she sounds downright batty, and not even in the in-character way she excelled at in the past. Perhaps that’s because there’s an earnestness to Let England Shake that wasn’t even present during her grungy avenged-lover phase on 1993’s Rid of Me.

This time, she’s detailing the conflicted emotions she has for her home and native land—a country that, for no apparent reason, she insists on pronouncing “Eng-a-land.” Take this verse: “Goddam Europeans/ take me back to beautiful England/ and the gray and filthiness of ages/ and battered books/ and fog rolling down behind the mountains/ on the graveyards of dead sea captains.” On another song she asks: “What is the glorious fruit of our land?” The answer: “The fruit is deformed children.”

Themes of decay dominate. “England’s dancing days are done,” she sings on the title track, a song driven by autoharps and marimbas—and a song she somehow found herself performing in front of then-prime minister Gordon Brown last summer. “Let it burn, let it burn,” she chants on the single “Written on the Forehead,” while a sample of reggae classic “Blood and Fire” plays in the background.

While there are elements here of Kate Bush at her most flighty, maybe Harvey is deep into the Sinead O’Connor stage of her career, where the once-formidable and charismatic performer gets progressively strange and erratic, with only flashes of her previous brilliance. We’ll know when she starts ripping up photos of David Cameron on Later With Jools Holland. (Feb. 17)

Download: “Let England Shake,” “The Glorious Rose,” “On Battleship Hill”

Hooded Fang – s/t (independent)

Orchestral peppy pop music full of glockenspiels, handclaps trumpets and synth bass, topped off with deadpan boy-girl vocals: of course it’s cutesy, but Toronto’s Hooded Fang have plenty of personality and melodic hooks that rise above any schtick. The rhythm section is punchy and the trumpet is majestic, and so even if singer Daniel Lee sounds a bit bored at times, the rest of the band has no trouble keeping the energy up and the arrangements simple but never naïve. With the propulsion of early Hidden Cameras and the slight Swedish detachment of Jens Lekman or Peter, Bjorn and John, Hooded Fang sounds like a first teenage kiss on a spring afternoon. (Feb. 24)

Download: “Straight Up the Dial,” “Highway Stream,” “Promise Land”

Iron & Wine – Kiss Each Other Clean (Warner)

It’s been six years since Iron & Wine bred a new generation of neo-folkie fans, via 2004’s astounding Our Endless Numbered Days. But anyone surprised by the expansive sounds heard on Kiss Each Other Clean obviously hasn’t been paying attention—particularly to 2007’s grossly underrated The Shepherd’s Dog. That record’s sometimes disorienting psychedelia didn’t go down as easy for some as singer/songwriter Sam Beam’s acoustic beginnings did, but Kiss Each Other Clean combines the best of both worlds.

Beam unleashes his backing band (comprised mainly of experimental band Califone and the avant-garde jazz of Chicago Underground) anywhere they want to go underneath his straightforward soft-rock melodies, which can guide the listener through all sorts of unusual musical terrain. That’s why a Stevie Wonder-like clavinet burbles throughout the Tom Waits-gone-dub-reggae groove of “Monkeys Uptown,” or why African and Latin percussion, New Orleans saxophone, jazz flute, spacey synthesizers, and extensive use of textural vocal harmonies all surface intermittently without ever throwing the song in question off course.

Things get a bit swampy on “Big Burned Head,” and the climactic “Your Fake Name is Good Enough For Me” eventually falls under its own weight, but those are merely slight missteps on an album that finds Beam in an entirely bewitching mood, proving that easy listening doesn’t have to be so easy, and an artist can be calming without sacrificing creativity. (Feb. 3)

Download: “Glad Man Singing,” “Tree by the River,” “Rabbit Will Run”

Wanda Jackson – The Party Ain’t Over (Nonesuch/Warner)

At 73 years old, the party most certainly is not over for Wanda Jackson. One of the original rockabilly artists of the ’50s—old enough not only to have been a contemporary of Elvis Presley, but to have dated him—has been going strong for years as a live act (with frequent stops in Ontario and Quebec, using London, Ontario’s Rizdales as her backing band). But even though she’s a member of several halls of fame (Rock and Roll, Country, Rockabilly, Oklahoma Music) and a hero to people like Neko Case, she’s not nearly as well known as she should be.

Enter Jack White, who gave Loretta Lynn’s career a late-career high on 2004’s Van Lear Rose. Jackson’s album isn’t nearly as personal—but then again Jackson never was. Her entire discography is stacked full of sass and snarl, and that’s what she delivers here, right from the opening notes of “Shakin’ All Over” (the same song The Guess Who launched their career with), where her growling, still-girlish voice sings about “quivers down her backbone,” while White puts her voice through a freaky flange pedal on the chorus and rips off a fiery guitar solo. It’s over the top and more than a bit campy—but that’s true of most of Jackson’s discography.

White gives her a recent Dylan song to cover—“Thunder on the Mountain,” where Jackson replaces Dylan’s incongruous Alicia Keys reference with one to Jerry Lee Lewis—as well as Amy Winehouse’s “You’re No Good,” which maintains the soul shuffle but adds haunting pedal steel guitar. He also insisted she re-record one of her earliest hits, “Rip It Up,” and lightens things up with the Andrews Sisters’ calypso-tinted “Rum and Coca Cola.” Jackson’s country roots are on full display in a full-band take on Kitty Wells’s “Dust on the Bible,” and a version of Jimmie Rodgers’ “Blue Yodel #6”, accompanied only by White on acoustic guitar.

It’s all good fun, but not quite full of the fireworks one would expect from this pairing. The horn section in particular is heavy-handed, and with the exception of White and keyboardist Joe Gillis, the rest of the house band sounds a bit clunky. But as anyone who has seen Jackson in recent years will attest, the lady still has a lot of life in her, and White deserves full credit for putting her back in the spotlight again. (Feb. 3)

Download: “Shakin’ All Over,” “You’re No Good,” “Dust on the Bible”

Serena Ryder – Live (EMI)

Serena Ryder was six years old when Melissa Etheridge put out her first album; it’s hard not to believe that the young Ryder didn’t spend at least part of her childhood studying Etheridge’s full-throated, bluesy rock’n’roll wail. And so it sounds entirely natural to hear the two of them singing together on Ryder’s new song “Broken Heart Sun”—in fact, you can barely tell them apart when they let loose at full throttle. It matters not that the song is hardly Ryder at her best; the charisma of the two women carries it through. Is it over the top? Of course—if you had a voice like either of these ladies, you’d be over the top, too.

Listening to the rest of this stop-gap EP, however, it’s obvious that Ryder is actually 10 times the singer that Etheridge ever was or could hope to be. Ryder is a unique force of nature, one that’s rarely captured in full on her studio recordings, and one of the most powerful vocalists working today, in Canada or anywhere else. So hearing her captured a cappella here, on bone-chilling versions of “Melancholy Blue” and “Sing Sing,” is as revelatory as the first time you see her live.

Along with the live material and the new single, the EP is padded with two songs recycled from each of her last two studio albums (including her take on Leonard Cohen’s “Sisters of Mercy,” where she shows she’s capable of subtlety as well), making this the ideal introduction for anyone unaware of Ryder’s phenomenal talents. (Feb. 24)

Download: “Broken Heart Sun,” “Melancholy Blue,” “Little Bit of Red”

Spring Breakup — It's Not Me, It's You (Label Fantastic)

If you loved Ellen Page and Michael Cera duetting in Juno, then Spring Breakup is for you. A duo of Yukon songwriter Kim Barlow and Mathias Kom, the singer/songwriter who fronts rollicking Peterborough band The Burning Hell, Spring Breakup is more than a tad too precious. Kom’s baritone and Barlow’s deadpan alto are pleasant foils for each other, and this album works best when they're playing directly off each other, like a twisted take on old Conway Twitty and Loretta Lynn duets, armed with a smart-ass vocabulary. Their self-penned description for MySpace, under the category "Sounds Like," reads: "Laughing on the inside while crying in front of your ex. The awkward end of the third date. A lonely clown crying. Lost puppies." They're not joking: those are actual song subjects.

Things peter out when one of the two of them dominate; those tracks sound like rejects from their other projects, and aren't enhanced much at all by the other player (Barlow plays banjo, Kom the ukulele). They'd be better off guesting on each other's albums than making records like this together, but no doubt the dry wit sparkles when they share a stage. (Feb. 17)

Download: “The Effect I Have On Women,” “It’s Not Me It’s You,” “You Don’t Need a Heart”

Telekinesis – 12 Desperate Straight Lines (Merge)

Michael Benjamin Lerner is one of the only, if not the only, drummers to front a power-pop band. Which probably explains why he writes such catchy melodies, because if a melody doesn’t sound good against just a drum track, it’s probably not worth keeping.

If that were all Telekinesis was, that would be fine. And in fact, it’s not much more; a distorted bass guitar is the lead instrument on most of these songs. Guitars and keyboards are barely noticeable, if in fact they’re there at all. Producer Chris Walla nonetheless creates a broad sonic spectrum to flesh everything out, but the only thing you’re ever paying attention to is Lerner’s propulsive drums and his vocals, which even on a lyric about a “car crash late in the night” is still surrounded by woah-oh-oh’s to keep everything peppy. And never nauseatingly so, either; 12 Desperate Straight Lines is much more dynamic than Telekinesis’s 2009 self-titled sugar rush of a debut, although the songs are less immediate. Lerner is not yet 25; here’s hoping he’s not peaking early. (Feb. 10)

Download: “You Turn Clear in the Sun,” “Please Ask For Help,” “Dirty Thing”