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Leonard Cohen's Old Ideas

2012-01-31T13:33:00.003-05:00

Leonard Cohen – Old Ideas (Sony)

Old ideas indeed. Really, really old ideas. After all, the 77-year-old songwriter is an old man, who doesn’t write in tempos that exceed his heartrate, and whose voice has seemingly dropped yet another octave. And yet Leonard Cohen hasn’t sounded this vibrant in 20 years.

Old Ideas may refer to the fact that Cohen often takes years to complete a song. These songs sound even older than they are because, for the first time ever in Cohen’s career, he’s embraced the blues. (Blues music, that is—G-d knows he’s had the blues for a long, long time. But previously, you could count the number of Cohen blues songs on less than one hand.) Like Tom Waits, Bob Dylan, Van Morrison—geezers who are actually younger than Cohen—the godfather of gloom has found the simplicity of the form suits his lyrical mood of reflection, redemption, and atonement.

When he’s not falling into the blues, he’s penning songs that sound like hymns. Darkness and light, the earthy and the divine, the sacred and the profane—these dichotomies have always been Cohen’s preferred themes, but here they play themselves out musically as well as lyrically.

The most overt blues songs here are "Darkness" and "Banjo," both for their structure and the slight twang in the guitar, but four more of the 11 songs on Old Ideas adhere to loping blues rhythms, Cohen’s trademark spoken-sung cadence, and sparse instrumentation with plenty of spaces for ghosts to haunt.

That instrumentation is a key part of Old Ideas’ success. Members of his killer live band appear sparingly (except for one track, "Darkness," featuring the full band); much of the album was made in isolation by Cohen and co-producer Patrick Leonard, a mainstream pop producer best known for his work with Madonna. But acoustic guitars, violins, live drums and vintage keyboards all take precedence over the synths that Cohen has favoured for much of the last 30 years, for better and worse. “Crazy To Love You” is the first song in decades where Cohen has appeared without a band (or synths) and playing only acoustic guitar.

This is not, however, the sound of Cohen rejecting all progress to sound like an old man singing the blues with acoustic instruments. Old Ideas is very much a 2012 recording; the slick production oozes sensual textures out of every gentle tone, and all the vocals—Cohen’s as well as female vocalists Jennifer Warner, Sharon Robinson and the Webb Sisters—are luxurious and intimate in ways they’ve never been before on a Cohen album.

Of course, the music is really only about 30 per cent of the appeal of any Leonard Cohen album. Lyrically, he’s back on his game: he’s not going to return to the avalanche of imagery and insight that marked 1988’s I’m Your Man and 1992’s The Future, but he writes with much more conviction here than he did on either 2001’s Ten New Songs or 2004’s Dear Heather.

Old Ideas is very much the sound of a man taking stock of his life and his surroundings, seeking “healing of the spirit / healing of the limb.” Characteristically Cohen, sometimes he’s dark, sometimes he’s Biblical, and sometimes he’s more than able to laugh at himself—like he does on opening track “Going Home,” where the narrator expresses how “I love to talk to Leonard / he’s a sportsman and a shepherd / he’s a lazy bastard living in a suit.” Of this fictional Leonard, he sings, “He wants to write a love song / an anthem of forgiving / a manual for living with defeat”—which pretty much sums up Cohen’s entire career.

The most affecting song is “Anyhow,” a powerful plea to someone who was not just a lover—of which Cohen has had hundreds—but likely the mother of his children, or at least someone with whom he shared years of deep affection and acrimony, someone who knows all his faults intimately and has no valid reason to forgive him. And yet he persists, knowing full well he’ll never receive full absolution: “Have mercy on me baby / After all I did confess / Even though you have to hate me / Could you hate me less?” That track is followed by “Crazy to Love You,” a lyric co-written with his current flame, singer Anjani Thomas, where a former playboy settles down, somewhat unwillingly, and discovers peace of mind when he’s no longer chasing “souvenir heartache”: “I’m tired of choosing desire / been saved by a sweet fatigue.”

The sound of “sweet fatigue” was taken a bit too far on his last two albums, but here Cohen sounds alive and engaged, as playful as he was on stage in recent years. This is still not an album likely to be played during daylight hours—or even before 1 a.m. But it stands as Cohen’s most consistent set of songs in 24 years, one of his best-sounding albums ever, and a perfect capper to his recent comeback.

But as much as Old Ideas sounds like a Final Statement from Cohen’s tower of song, don’t start thinking that he’s done. Apparently he’s already halfway through his next album—and another tour is in the works.

You can read my lengthy timeline of Cohen's career at Exclaim this month.

January '12 reviews

2012-01-30T14:48:00.007-05:00

These reviews ran in the Kitchener-Waterloo Record and Guelph Mercury this month.

Jim Cuddy – Skyscraper Soul (Warner)

I had low expectations for a Jim Cuddy solo record in 2011, expectations that plummeted when I heard that the first single was about—wait for it—the royal wedding. And yet without realizing that I was listening to “Everyone Watched the Wedding,” I was quickly sucked into a somewhat sappy, straightforward, tough-times family narrative before the chorus clued me in.

It’s tricky, but effective; Cuddy’s argues the wedding was a small moment of hope and perfection for two people, a moment that millions were more than happy to experience vicariously if only as a respite from the downer of daily drama at home. And if he could pull that off—which he does—I figured that boded well for the rest of his third solo record.

Jim Cuddy has always been comfort food, and he rarely changes his recipe, either inside or outside Blue Rodeo. For whatever reason, this is his finest collection of songs in over a decade, songs of survival, resilience and faith—both lost and regained. The title track is about staying true to the town that’s in your blood, no matter how bad things seem—a sentiment many artists are pondering in Mayor Rob Ford’s Toronto. Cuddy is no master of imagery (“why do I need you so / like a drunk needs wine”), but he’s effective at nailing simple sentiments and concise storytelling, as any solid country songwriter should.

Blue Rodeo bassist Basil Donovan is here again, as always, and Cuddy’s longtime guitarist Colin Cripps recently signed on as a member of that band. So the real discovery here is keyboardist Steve O’Connor, who shines both in solo moments and just hovering in the background; Bryden Baird provides some lead trumpet lines that shake up the sound a bit. Cuddy also leaves room for a brief cinematic cello-laden instrumental, and a tiny acoustic song that sounds like Elliot Smith.

The biggest knock on Cuddy’s solo records is that they sound exactly like Blue Rodeo, devoid of the creative tension he has with Greg Keelor. While it would be nice to hear him step outside his comfort zone, he also knows what works best for him—and Skyscraper Soul is Cuddy at his best. (Jan. 5)

Download: “Everyone Watched the Wedding,” “Skyscraper Soul,” “Watch Yourself Go Down”

Ani DiFranco – Which Side Are You On? (Righteous Babe)

There’s no mistaking which side DiFranco is on; she’s not going to be appearing on Fox News any time soon. Which is why, in this American election year, she sounds more powerful than she has in years on the title track here, an interpolation of the 1931 protest song with new lyrics and a children’s chorus, a marching band and—of course—Pete Seeger on banjo.

We expect political fire from DiFranco. After 17 albums, what we don’t expect, necessarily, is subtlety, orchestral production and economical editing, which she delivers here. It’s her first album in four years, which for the ultra-prolific DiFranco is an unheard-of gap (though easily explained by her five-year-old daughter); the extra care in the songwriting is evident.

Producer/partner Mike Napolitano gives her music more bottom end than ever—not just the work of longtime bassist Todd Sickafoose, but every bass drum hit, every baritone saxophone punch, every low note on DiFranco’s distorted electric guitar. Bells, vibraphone, harps and tympani all provide small but effective shading. DiFranco’s voice improves with age, and she’s long ago stopped showing off as a guitarist, and serves each song instead.

The album’s only weak points are when she sets her most political poetry to music (“J,” “Promiscuity,” “Amendment”). On the page, as part of typically lovely album design, the poems are powerful; as music, they’re little more than a speech.

Overall, DiFranco is older, wiser and happier, and it shows. As she herself sings, “If you’re not getting happier as you get older / then you’re f---ing up.” (Jan. 19)

Download: “Which Side Are You On?”, “Hearse,” “Mariachi”

Kathleen Edwards – Voyageur (Maple)

In the advance hype leading up to Voyageur, much has been made of Kathleen Edwards’ creative and romantic partnership with Justin Vernon of Bon Iver, the indie sensation whose 2010 album topped many year-end lists and garnered several Grammy nominations. On the surface, it’s a strange combination: Edwards has rarely strayed from the Canadiana roots rock template of her peers Sarah Harmer, Jim Bryson and Blue Rodeo; Vernon makes sensitive, mellow pseudo-folk music that sounds like it’s sung by space aliens and a ’70s L.A. studio band. What would Vernon do with Edwards’ music? Hook her up to a helium tank? Demand she strip away any literal language in her lyrics? Impose a five-piece horn section on every song?

Vernon is all about the opaque; Edwards is never anything but blunt and direct. Using their lyrics, let’s imagine a typical conversation between them. Edwards: “I know your heart is a sacred thing. You’re a comedian hiding behind your funny face.” Vernon: “In a mother, out a moth, furling forests for the soft, gotta know been lead aloft.” Edwards: “Out of the shadows, out of the cameras and the lights, you’re a chameleon and you hide behind your darker side.” Vernon: “I’m ridding all your stories. What I know is, what it is, is pouring—wire it up!”

Thankfully, Vernon doesn’t impose himself on Edwards’ music; the production is crisp and clean, and there’s little here to distinguish it from any other Edwards album, other than her continuing maturity as a writer—although 2008’s Asking For Flowers was the real sea change, where she expanded her writing voice, constructing strong narratives that were clearly not autobiographical, setting short stories to songs. Here she’s back to writing what could easily be seen as personal stories; in the last year she divorced previous collaborator Colin Cripps before taking up with Vernon, and much of the album is about beginnings and endings of relationships. She and Vernon have very little in common, musically, although her “House Full of Empty Rooms” shares chords and sounds somewhat like Bon Iver’s “Beth/Rest,” only without a Mike and the Mechanics backdrop and with about 1/20^th the amount of reverb.

And yet if enough potential fans who would never give Kathleen Edwards the time of day before are suddenly interested because of the Bon Iver connection, more power to her. Edwards has yet to make a weak record, and Voyageur finds her more than ready for her close-up. (Jan. 19)

Download: “Change the Sheets,” “Empty Threat,” “House Full of Empty Rooms”

Elliott Brood – Days Into Years (Paper Bag)

Schomberg Fair – Mercy (independent)

In iTunes, the band Elliott Brood (or someone in their camp) categorizes the previously acoustic act as “punk,” proof that the now-pointless term really can apply to any band that uses electric guitars, as the Brood do for the first time here. One would be hard pressed to find anything punk about the 10 largely innocuous songs heard here with choruses like, “If I get old I’m living easy, find a nice old country home.”

Trivial semantic genre discussions aside, Elliott Brood—which boasts fiercely loyal, rabid fans—has been treading water for a while, with no sign that the songwriting is improving, Juno nominations and Polaris Prize shortlists notwithstanding. So much of their work is based on trying to get an A for effort: singer Mark Sasso does his best to channel passion, almost always sounding strained instead, and there’s no denying the band’s energy. Here, the electric guitars crackle and crunch fantastically and are a welcome addition to the band’s sonic palette; the production by John Critchley (13 Engines, Dan Mangan) is vivid, rich, and results in one of the better-sounding Canadian rock records of the last six months.

And yet it rarely adds up to anything memorable, other than hazy memories of raising a glass at a live show with their adoring audience. The songwriting is stuck in a rut, and not even the band’s apparent inspiration of visiting WWI memorials in Europe manages to spark much inspiration here.

The Schomberg Fair, on the other hand, who are Elliott Brood’s neighbours in Toronto’s quick-pickin’ roots rock community, are just as punk as Fucked Up. Schomberg Fair may have titled their last album Gospel, but they’re heavier than most metal bands. And right from the blistering banjo opening of the title track of their new EP, they throttle every song to the floor and pound it into submission, and yet still employing dynamics that give the willing victim time to breathe. Nate Sidon’s distorted electric bass is a rumbling melodic force riding the thunder of Pete Garthside’s tom rolls, while frontman Matt Bahen sings like a man who’s lived through tougher times than you’ll ever see and will kick the ass of anyone who wants to send him back there.

This EP is a bit of a stopgap before an upcoming full-length; 2010’s Gospel was a near-perfect barnburner that managed to have songs just as powerful as the performances, and one of my favourite records of that year. The EP doesn’t quite match that standard, but does pump up the production values, leave some more room for the songs to breathe while ratcheting up the intensity elsewhere, and often puts Sidon’s supporting vocals—he has a register about an octave lower than Johnny Cash—on par with Bahen’s lead.

The Schomberg Fair are too good to ignore anymore, and 2012 promises to be their breakout year. (Jan. 12)

Download Elliott Brood: “Hold You,” “West End Sky,” “Lines”

Download Schomberg Fair: “Oh Mercy,” “Orphan Bones,” “Black Train”

Nicolas Jaar – Space is Only Noise (Clown and Sunset)

This album is almost a year old, but is getting a new lease on life with strong showings on many year-end lists. And rightly so. Jaar creates luxurious, minimal techno—the kind that a mere 12 months ago was still being called dubstep, before that term got hijacked to mean electronic remixes of bad teen metal bands. Jaar keeps his tempos low, his vocals discombobulated and alien, and a variety of acoustic instruments—in particular Satie-style piano—offsetting the warm electronic bass and percussion. There are shades of Kraftwerk and even ’80s easy listening, like when a saxophone comes blazing in out of nowhere for a solo. Jaar in clearly love with sonic possibilities, and his strength as a producer outweighs any songwriting or particular beats found here. While it’s great that he’s being recognized as one of the leading lights of 2011—and several steps above the much-hyped James Blake, who mines similar territory—this fascinating but imperfect debut album is clearly just the beginning. (Jan. 5)

Download: “Too Many Kids Finding Rain in the Dust,” “Keep Me There,” “Space is Only Noise if You Can See”

The Roofhoppers – s/t (Fedora Upside Down)

The Boxcar Boys – Don’t Be Blue (Fedora Upside Down)

The record label’s name should give away what you can expect here: old-timey music that sounds the sweetest on a street corner where hats are passed to solicit audience appreciation. Both acts features lyrical clarinetist John David Williams, both acts are reverent traditionalists, both offer simple pleasures with excellent execution and devoid of cliché. The Roofhoppers are a klezmer-ish trio of acoustic guitar, upright bass and clarinet, with occasional female vocals; the Boxcar Boys are a five-piece New Orleans outfit that also delve into anything they feel like, be it Balkan melodies or haunting Hank Williams songs. Both offer much more than passing busker fancy; not only are the original compositions as much of a draw as the performances, but both recordings are perfect portraits of compelling live acts. (Jan. 19)

Download the Roofhoppers: “A Sleuth on a Park Bench,” “Church Street Khosidl,” “Roof Union”

Download the Boxcar Boys: “The Crumb Brothers,” “Paco Junior,” “Waltz for Rotman”

The Weeknd – Echoes of Silence (independent)

The final mixtape in The Weeknd’s 2011 trilogy restores the promise of the debut, House of Balloons—the second release, Thursday, was a disappointing sidestep into industrial/rock/reggae—while expanding the sound to be even more sparse at times, simultaneously more mainstream and more left-field, and thankfully no dark dips into the roofy-romance narratives that made him famous.

The real eyeopener is the opening track, a cover of Michael Jackson’s “Dirty Diana” (listed here as merely "D.D."), an odd amalgam of bad (and Bad) ’80s production sounds mixed with cheap early ’90s industrial and modern R&B—all elements that Tesfaye has toyed with before, but they didn’t sound as cheesy as they do here. Vocally, however, he absolutely nails the song; his range is equal to Jackson’s (no small feat), and the song’s subject matter fits in perfectly with his oeuvre (one of the stronger songs here has a chorus about how “you just want me coz I’m next”). As odd and reclusive as The Weeknd has appeared so far, listening to him cover the King of Pop makes you realize there’s really no reason why he couldn’t be the biggest R&B star of the next 10 years. (Jan. 12)

Download: The entire album is available for free at the-weeknd.com.

Jah Youssouf and Bintou Coulibaly – Sababou (Tall Corn Music)

Jah Youssouf is a musician from rural Mali who rarely leaves West Africa, although southern Ontario audiences got to know him when he recorded and toured with Dave Clark and Lewis Melville of the Woodchoppers Association, including regular gigs at Toronto’s Tranzac club and an appearance at Guelph’s Hillside Festival in 2009.

That same year, Chicago fan Brad Loving travelled to Mali to seek Youssouf out, and, thanks to Melville, found him at home outside Bamako with his wife, Bintou Coulibaly, in a house with no running water and electricity only from a car battery. Loving recorded the two of them—on ngoni, acoustic guitar and calabash—on a portable Zoom recorder, and released the recordings only last fall.

The unplugged intimacy—like a West African version of Gillian Welch and David Rawlings—is only the first of this album’s many charms. Youssouf is a powerful rhythm player, subtly conveying the strength of an entire band on a single stringed instrument, with Coulibaly providing minimal but effective percussion.

Most African music that we hear here involves big bands, big production, or both. Sababou may have been recorded in a living room by two people, but it’s every bit as gripping. (Jan. 5)

Download: "Faco," "Kahlan," "Folkan"

Youth Lagoon – The Year of Hibernation (Fat Possum)

If you didn’t know anything about the singer/songwriter who records as Youth Lagoon, you might think he’s a 23-year-old Midwesterner who suffers from the occasional anxiety attack. Turns out you’d be right: Trevor Powers quietly recorded this collection of fragile, dreamlike songs, and in a few whirlwind months after posting them online he found himself with a record deal, a world tour, and slots on several year-end lists. So he dropped out of the Boise State University, quit his retail job, and went on tour.

It’s hard to imagine Powers performing this material in public, however. The Year of Hibernation is music tailor-made for winter shut-ins, the distant vocals drenched in reverb, a lo-fi haze hovering over every instrument, Powers’s voice often slipping into a breaking falsetto, and crackling drum machines punctuating electric piano sounds—not unlike Beach House’s Teen Dream if someone dragged the master tapes through the mud and then threw them in a washing machine. Though much of it sounds tentative and shy, Powers is actually a great singer when he finally opens up and writes a chorus that allows his voice to soar.

Fans of fellow bedroom recorder East River Pipe will find plenty to love here; everyone else need only find themselves driving out of town on a starlit light, preferably in the midst of an existential crisis, to be ready to dive deep into Youth Lagoon. (Jan. 5)

Download: "17," "Daydream," "The Hunt"

Bidiniband, John K. Samson

2012-01-26T16:52:00.004-05:00

John K. Samson – Provincial (Anti)

Bidiniband – In the Rock Hall (Pheromone)

If Canadian rock had men of letters, Dave Bidini and John K. Samson would be two-thirds of a triumvirate alongside Gord Downie. Bidini, of course, is the author of 10 books about music and hockey (his latest, Writing Gordon Lightfoot, is one of his best), and for over 25 years he was a principal songwriter in the Rheostatics, arguably the most creative Canadian rock band of the ’90s. Samson is the barely prolific songwriter at the core of the Weakerthans, who with only four albums in the past 14 years became one of Canada’s most beloved bands, primarily on the strength of Samson’s prose (which he just collected into his first book, Lyrics and Poems 1997-2012).

Both men have always excelled at setting unlikely characters and situations inside compelling and moving songs. Until recently, they’ve always had help from sympathetic bandmates with whom they grew up, musicians who knew instinctively how to cast every quirky quote. Both men’s solo careers challenge them to think outside the box and make full use of new creative opportunities.

Granted, both had wide leeway before: Samson’s pop-punk bandmates have never stopped him from reciting poetry about retired NHL goalies over a detuned banjo and scraped percussion; the Rheostatics’ best and worst trait was that they were capable of and willing to try anything, making them the Canadian equivalent of equally influential and misunderstood American cult bands like the Minutemen and Camper Van Beethoven.

So what are these two bards up to now?

This is Bidiniband’s second album, so they have the upper hand. The debut, 2009’s The Land is Wild, seemed more like Bidini’s non-fiction writing hurriedly set to music—songs to be played at in-store appearances in between reading passages from his books. Here, his seasoned backing trio have been whipped into shape by regular gigging, to the point where they’re almost as sympathetic as the Rheostatics were to Bidini’s nuances. They obviously share his love of Devo, XTC, The Who and Max Webster, elements that were a small part of the Rheostatics’ avalanche of influences, but are brought to the fore here. And not in an imitative way, either; Bidiniband sounds most like, well Dave Bidini.

In fact, In the Rock Hall sounds far better than any record from the last 10 years of the Rheostatics’ discography, because this band knows how to push Bidini, and he’s more than willing to push back. There’s an explosive, though good-natured, musical tension at work here—largely the work of incredibly elastic guitarist Paul Linklater—watching these men throw endless curveballs at each other before uniting over three simple power chords and four-part harmony in a chorus (Bidini is singing better than he ever has). This is most evident on a recasting of the 1994 Rheos song “Earth,” which Bidiniband rescues from the bloated prog-rock mess of the original and transforms into a driving stadium-rock anthem. Mind you, Bidiniband has its own prog-rock mess in the form of “Eunioa,” a 10-minute adaptation of Christian Bök’s book of poetry that will really only appeal to anyone who understands what a “univocal lipogram” is.

There’s a nautical theme throughout—though there’s no reason for a native English speaker to write a song with the phrase “Big Men Go Fast on the Water” as a chorus (unless this originates as an odd translation of an Aboriginal name). Obvious novelty songs like “Popcorn” and “The Best Thing About the ’80s Was You” sound more like well-produced bar-band set-fillers than anything else—but hey, so do most of the Black Eyed Peas’ greatest hits, and (much to my chagrin) these earworms are just as catchy, if not more so, and not as dumb.

The performances—as well as the production from longtime partner in crime Michael Philip Wojewoda—outshine many of the actual songs, most of which are a baffling series of seemingly non-sequitur images and phrases. (There’s also a queer fondness for the word “tits.”) “I Wanna Go to Yemen,” Bidini sings—but why? “I’ve been waiting all this time to shine a light.” Is this a song about the Arab Spring? Doesn’t sound like it. And: “I want to see your face, eyeliner and burka” doesn’t make any sense when you realize that with a burka you don’t see any part of the face, never mind eyeliner. And why are there Burmese police shooting fishermen in a song also about a “two-bit Neil Young rip-off attack”? No matter: that latter track, “Last of the Dead Wrong Things,” is one of the most fantastic four minutes of visceral rock’n’roll Bidini has ever recorded. (Hear it here.)

And so Bidiniband’s literacy is not so much lyrical as it is musical; the real thrills here are listening to Linklater’s persistent fretboard wizardry, the throbbing, pummelling yet soulful grooves of the rhythm section of ex-Rheo Don Kerr and bassist Doug Friesen, and Bidini’s own underrated rhythm guitar skills. (Here’s your next bar argument: is there any essential rock’n’roll instrument more undervalued than rhythm guitarists? They don’t even get their own set of jokes.)

On John K. Samson’s solo album, his lyrics are the sole focus of attention; the accompanying music is mere background. He’s a prose writer first and foremost; every image and phrase is pondered over until it’s just perfect, yet there is no laboriousness heard in any single lyric. Though the ever-modest Samson will tell you that his vocal range and guitar skills are limited—hey, so is Leonard Cohen’s—he writes tiny perfect melodies and enlists trusted collaborators to fill in all the blanks.

Here, producer Paul Aucoin (Hylozoists, Cuff the Duke) casts Samson solo against just a horn section, in folk-country modes, as a piano balladeer, and—less successfully—in situations not unlike the Weakerthans. Those latter tracks are the only times when the otherwise impeccable Provincial manages to stumble. Even though the hired guns are no slouches (including Bidiniband bassist Doug Friesen and Constantines drummer Doug MacGregor), Samson already fronts an incredible rock band—anything else is going to sound second-rate. His solo work should stand further apart.

On the first single “When I Write My Master’s Thesis,” Samson steps into self-parody: any songwriter beloved by legions of English grad students is probably tempted to write a title like that all the time, but I’m not sure even Colin Meloy (Decemberists) would get away with that. Samson’s most successful narratives here are much better off set to delicately arranged downers like “The Last And,” “Stop Error,” or (a typical Samson title) “Letter in Icelandic from the Ninette San.”

As Samson sounds older (or, more accurately, his age), Bidini sounds more youthful; both promise their fans even bolder moves in the future.

Bidiniband's Toronto release show is this Saturday, January 28, at the Dakota Tavern in Toronto, 7 p.m. More dates are here.

John K. Samson was just in Toronto; Chromewaves wrote about it here. His North American tour begins on March 7 at the Grad Club in Kingston.

2011 Year in Review

2011-12-20T12:22:00.027-05:00

1. tUnE-yArDs – Whokill (4AD). This is the one. No other record in 2011 was this inventive, this exuberance, this powerful, this stimulating, this much fun—and sounded so current, so unlike anything else either in her current peer group or comparison points. Merrill Garbus plays ukulele, percussion and sings her ass off, doing each in various layers that she loops together live. On Whokill, she fully embraces the studio and paints vivid moving pictures with the help of bassist Nate Brenner, a horn section and every conceivable percussion instrument she can find. In a year when everyone seemed excited about sexless wonders like Bon Iver and M83, Garbus reached out to all the mopey wallflowers of indie rock and dragged them by the hand onto the dancefloor. Garbus is nothing if not gutsy; she doesn’t half-step anything here, even the quieter lullabies, but she also knows when to tone down the bluster. For all the bells and whistles on Whokill, however, these songs would work just as well with only drums and voice. Elemental, in more ways than one.

2. Mark Davis – Eliminate the Toxins (Saved By Radio). This Edmonton songwriter successfully combines the comfort food of Canadiana roots rock with spooky sonic spellcasting in ways that few artists other than Daniel Lanois even attempt. (Plenty of credit should also go to producer/instrumentalist Lorrie Matheson.) Davis manages to pull off pop melodies worthy of Fleetwood Mac, folk songs that could come from Lightfoot, overtones of doom ala Nick Cave, Eno-esque production, and some twang mixed into to the chunky rock songs and pop hooks. Lyrically, Eliminate the Toxins may be full of ghosts, but you’ll want these songs to haunt you for a long, long time. The most underrated Canadian album this year is also the best.

3. Gillian Welch – The Harrow & the Harvest (Acony). “Hard times ain’t gonna rule my mind”—if that’s not an anthemic line for 2011, what is? Like Tom Waits, Welch and her partner David Rawlings took a long break from recording until she felt she had something to say, and it was worth the eight-year wait: 10 songs that are pure, perfect portraits and directly to the point, performed on little more than acoustic guitar and banjo that sounds like the duo is in your living room. It’s haunting, powerful, and impossible not to sing harmonies to. The simplest pleasure was also the strongest.

4. Feist – Metals (Arts and Crafts). Leslie Feist always had too much talent to be reduced to a one-hit wonder, and Metals is the record she’s been building toward for the past decade. This album is note-perfect without being slick; it’s deceptively heavy for such a featherweight sound; and it’s far more musically inventive than Feist gets credit for, being as she is an easily digestible artist commonly associated with coffee shops. The songwriting, arrangements, performance and production are all vivid and top-notch on every track, making Metals one of the most satisfying albums of the year, not merely one of the best.

5. Destroyer – Kaputt (Merge). A lot of people have trouble getting past the unabashedly ’80s lounge-lizard production here—apparently, this kind of homage is the last retro crime worth committing. Thankfully, there are a lot more people who made this Destroyer’s most commercially successful record to date, who cottoned on to the fact that bandleader Dan Bejar was writing his strongest melodies in years, and doesn’t seem like he’s in a hurry to get each verse over with (unusual for him). The lovely, lush arrangements were too intricate and inventive to be some kind of ironic joke—full credit is due to guitarist Nicolas Bragg and trumpeter JP Carter, who weave stunning textures—and it’s also the first Destroyer album one could imagine dancing to.

6. The Weeknd – House of Balloons (independent). 2011 was full of creeps: Tyler the Creator, Kanye West sinking to new lows, and, arguably Drake. But none of them sounded creepy like The Weeknd does, and none of them were able to express the complex combo of self-lacerating doubt mixed with aggression the way that Abel Tesfaye can; a gifted singer, he successfully navigates the ambiguity of drugged-out moral relativism without getting too uncomfortably literal (or, um, stupid: see above examples). Everything that Drake gets credit for, Tesfaye does far, far better. House of Balloons was also a musical game-changer for the way it approached the dark side of R&B. The fact that it’s still only available as a free download, and that Tesfaye spurned all media at every turn, was a zeitgeist story that helped define the year.

7. Wye Oak – Civilian (Merge). The Baltimore duo Wye Oak don’t sound like a rock band. They sound like a force of nature: a rushing river, a towering mountain range, an expansive Montana plain. Not that they sound natural: there’s nothing acoustic about Civilian, their third album, which is full of raging electric guitars and distorted sounds. But the way this duo conjure the elements at their disposal is magical, the way a sonic gust suddenly slaps you like a gale-force wind, the way dub textures stratify the sonic layers, the way Andy Stack’s drums gallop and lurch, following the push and pull of Jenn Wasner’s guitars, the way Wasner’s calm and understated vocals anchor everything like the eye of a hurricane.

8. Lykke Li – Wounded Rhymes (Warner). This is the sound of an awakening, of this Swedish singer getting her heart broken, getting her hands dirty and embracing the big sounds of ’60s Phil Spector pop (quite directly: she sounds like Ronnie Spector on much of this record) with extra amplification given to huge backing vocals and thundering percussion—every other instrument, other than her lead vocal, is secondary. Recorded in California, it’s not a sunny sound—there’s a goth melancholy barely beneath the surface throughout—but it’s joyous, cathartic, and incredibly catchy. It’s also 10 times better than her wisp of a debut record.

9. Nick Lowe – The Old Magic (Yep Roc). This 61-year-old performer reminds you what magical songwriting spells an old coot like him can still cast. Sure, the entire album has a ’50s supper-club vibe that sounds like rock’n’roll never happened, but that's just Lowe acting his age. He often croons with a gentle wink, but there's nothing ironic about anything here. Clever, yes, but Lowe never sounds anything less than completely sincere. This old magician is a guy you can trust to never let you down.

10. Kathryn Calder – Bright and Vivid (File Under: Music). The second solo album by this New Pornographer finds her embracing a wider sonic palette (with help of new husband Colin Stewart, one of the finest sonic architects on the West Coast) and writing more complex prog-pop songs that owe more to the Rheostatics or early Peter Gabriel than they do the bubblegum rush of her regular gig, or the type of safe music that most women with a voice as gorgeous as hers end up making. Calder is in a class of her own.

11. Grace Jones – Hurricane (Pias). This is not technically a 2011 album; it came out in the U.K. in 2008, and was inexplicably unavailable in North America until this past September, where it was packaged with a dub remix record. Jones reunites with the musicians who made her classic early ’80s recordings, filters that sound through late ’90s trip-hop and writes her most personal and powerful songs to date. Jones was always much more than a fashion freak and a b-movie actress, traits that unfortunately comprise her caricature today. This is a potent reminder of a powerful artist.

12. Geoff Berner – Victory Party (Mint). Berner has long been one of the finest entertainers and songwriters in Canada, but the aptly named Victory Party is a quantum leap forward in his discography. With the help of Montreal producer Socalled, Berner calls in a full band and pumps up the volume on his accordion-driven neo-klezmer arrangements, moving from rousing drinking songs to hipster smackdowns to anti-authoritarian anthems to plaintive political ballads—and then there’s the deranged electro retelling of the Golem legend, which only someone with Berner’s sharp sense of humour (and dread) could pull off.

13. Booker T. Jones – The Road From Memphis (Anti). The 57-year-old keyboardist and soul legend delivered one of his career highs with the help of the Roots’ ?uestlove, Daptones engineer Gabe Roth, Motown guitarist Dennis Coffey and vocalists including Sharon Jones, My Morning Jacket’s Jim James, and The National’s Matt Berninger. The Road From Memphis must lead to New Orleans, because this sounds like a dream collaboration between Booker T.’s MGs and the funkiest band of all time, the Meters.

14. Shabazz Palaces – Black Up (Sub Pop). Anyone who still thinks Kanye West is a hip-hop innovator needs to spend time in Shabazz Palaces. On Black Up, grooves pulse on distorted bass with nary a snare drum in sight, tempos are pushed and pulled apart, old-school soul meets 21^st century clicks and cuts, and wiggy synths set everything just off-centre. Main man Ishmael Butler made a splash in the ’90s with Digable Planets, but this trippy project, where anything and everything seems possible, doesn’t seem to belong to any particular trajectory—unless early George Clinton and Black Album-era Prince dropped acid with Trent Reznor and Burial.

15. Seun Kuti – From Africa With Fury: Rise (Knitting Factory). In the year when a Fela Kuti musical was the toast of Broadway, the Nigerian legend’s youngest son released a firecracker of a record with his father’s old band and Brian Eno behind the boards. Modern African dance music rarely sounds this good—it’s usually either stuck in a retro groove or is full of unwelcome cheeseball synths. This sounds entirely modern while capturing the frenetic energy of a seasoned band, and perhaps needless to say, Kuti himself is more than a commanding frontman—one who’s nonetheless happy to take a backseat to the beat.

16. Sloan – The Double Cross (Outside). The best rock albums are always front-loaded with a group’s best songs. But after the strong “Follow the Leader” opens Sloan’s tenth album, they take their own advice and deliver gem after gem, making this milestone of an album sound more like a greatest hits compilation. All four members are writing at the top of their game, and one has to wonder if they have been purposely been saving their best songs for 2011 to celebrate their 20^th anniversary.

17. Tom Waits – Bad As Me (Anti). What’s the definition of timeless? A 62-year-old who is weirder and more wonderful than he was when he was 20, writing songs that could be from the 1950s filtered through various distortions of the past five decades and with lyrics that, when they’re not about satisfaction and lives lived and eternal love, could just as easily be about the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street: “It’s hard times for some, but for others it’s sweet / someone makes money when there’s blood in the street.” And while it’s true that Waits’s eccentricities have become encoded and somewhat predictable, he convincingly begs you to “kiss me like a stranger once again.” Yeah, okay, why not? This may be his best album since 1992’s Bone Machine.

18. Rich Aucoin – We’re All Dying To Live (Sonic). Every other album that made this list is fairly consistent and easy to peg. Halifax multimedia adventurer Rich Aucoin, on the other hand, does it all: disco, psychedelia, rock numbers, rousing pop songs, piano concertos and contemplative neo-classical pieces. For such an epic record, Aucoin makes it all flow seamlessly, with interstitial segues that ease the incongruity with the skill of a pro DJ. It’s not slick, however; Aucoin maintains an earthy feel throughout, and engages 500 musicians (not an exaggeration) to help him out. One song is titled “We Must Imagine Sisyphus,” a nod perhaps to the enormity of Aucoin’s ambition, but there’s nothing world-weary about the joyous celebration in these grooves.

19. Colin Stetson – New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges (Constellation). When discussing what is by far the strangest album to get major attention in 2011 (including a Polaris Prize shortlist position), it’s easy to talk only of Stetson’s methodology: solo saxophone performed with circular breathing and incorporating every possible element of the instrument for both melodic and rhythmic ends, all recorded in one take. But Stetson’s mood and melodic sense—along with lovely cameos from Laurie Anderson and Shara Worden—are the main reasons Judges broke through the usual avant-garde circles in which albums like this are usually ghettoized.

20. Beastie Boys – Hot Sauce Committee Part 2 (EMI). Yes, “grandpa’s been rapping since ’83,” as the Beastie Boys admit here, but no one who’s been in hip-hop that long has ever released an album this good this far into their career. The last 10 years have been rather creatively fallow for the Beasties, which is why it’s so rewarding to hear them come back swinging as they do here, to say nothing of Adam Yauch’s recovery from cancer. The videos were hilarious as always, the ska single “Don’t Play No Game” (featuring Santigold) was their finest pop song ever, and the entire record was full of life.

Runners-up:

A Hawk and a Hacksaw – Cervantine (LM Dupli-cation)

Dennis Coffey – s/t (Strut)

Couer de Pirate – Blonde (Gross Boite)

Crooked Fingers – Breaks in the Armor (Merge)

The Dirtbombs – Party Store (In the Red)

Tim Hecker – Ravedeath 1972 (Kranky)

Iron and Wine – Kiss Each Other Clean (Warner)

J Rocc – Some Cold Rock Stuff (Stones Throw)

My Morning Jacket – Circuital (ATO)

Rural Alberta Advantage – Departing (Paper Bag)

December '11 reviews

2011-12-19T13:43:00.004-05:00

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

Kate Bush - 50 Words for Snow (Fish People/EMI)

Compared to her last album, the disappointingly conventional 2005 album Aerial, 50 Words of Snow sounds much like the Kate Bush that her fans cherish, the iconoclast who has influenced several generations of boundary-pushing performers.

Opening track “Snowflake” is instantly familiar, in part because it sounds like it could have appeared on 1985’s masterpiece Hounds of Love, but also because it consists of little more than a relentless piano riff that—while beautiful—doesn’t change over the course of nine minutes (making it one of the shorter tracks on this seven-song album). As the rest of the album unfolds, it becomes apparent that even though Bush is still in magnificent voice, still writing outside of any pop music convention, still sounding gorgeous, her songs simply don’t match the rest of her talents.

In many cases, they’re unintentionally funny. Granted, intention is difficult to gauge, but 50 Words for Snow is such a sombre, po-faced album that one can only assume it’s deadly serious. There’s a song written in the first person as a snowflake, a song about Yeti, and a song about dreaming a sexual encounter with a snowman (and his “ice-cream lips”) who, of course, ends up melting in her bed.

Then there’s the extremely literal title song: Bush strings together 50 poetic synonyms for snow—i.e., “swans-a-melting,” “vanilla swarm,” “icyskidski” and “whippoccino”—while she intermittently urges on the male narrator (played by actor Stephen Fry) with lines like, “Come on, Joe, just 22 to go … just like the Eskimos … let me hear your 50 words for snow.” Bush has always had a playful side that’s helped her realize her best work; this song, however, is asinine.

That leaves Elton John, of all people, to save the day. He shows up as a duet partner on "Snowed in at Wheeler Street," a story about star-crossed lovers throughout history. It sounds like an odd pairing—although Bush scored a hit in the early ’90s covering “Rocket Man”—but John relishes the role and sings his ass off, giving the song his all and emoting in ways he hasn’t really done in over 30 years. It’s an inspired moment in both of their recent discographies (which might not be saying much), and that track alone is enough to suggest that Bush’s best days might not be so far behind her after all. (Dec. 1)

Download: “Snowed in at Wheeler Street,” “Snowflake,” “Wild Man”

Couer de Pirate – Blonde (Grosse Boite)

Montreal’s Béatrice Martin was kittenish and coy on her fey debut album in 2008, but now this cat has grown claws. The young francophone pop singer has gained considerable swagger on this, her second album, as she struts through swinging-’60s throwbacks that owe as much to British pop of the period (think Petula Clark) as well as Parisian yé-yé and Lee Hazlewood productions. Her voice, while still girlish, is rarely if ever cutesy—Duffy, please take note. Engineer Howard Bilerman (Arcade Fire, Godspeed You Black Emperor) and arranger Michael Rault (a young Edmontonian who records raw retro rock under his own name) help Martin expertly dress up her songs in lovely colours without ever sounding ostentatious. Sam Roberts drops by to sing a duet—in French, of course, as Martin sticks to her native tongue throughout. Anyone who’s ever fallen in love in or with Montreal will find plenty to love here, but the real success of Blonde is that it is much more universal than that. She’s already got a Top 10 album in France, but there’s no reason a language barrier should stop her from conquering the rest of the world. (Dec. 1)

Download: “Adieu,” “Danser et danse,” “Les amours dévouées”

Pink Floyd – Discovery (EMI)

Pink Floyd’s back catalogue has been a cash cow for at least the last 35 years; most famously, 1973’s Dark Side of the Moon holds the record for having the longest run on the Billboard charts (25 years), and has already been remastered and re-released twice before. It appears again, of course, in this deluxe box set—merely a small component of extensive Pink Floyd reissues this autumn—which coincidentally came out around the same time that legendary major label EMI announced that it was being broken up and its parts sold to Universal and Sony. On the heels of endless Beatles repackaging and a new blockbuster from Coldplay, Discovery is EMI’s swan song.

No one really needs to own yet another copy of Dark Side, Wish You Were Here or The Wall, each of which are also being re-released individually in ridiculously expanded packages meant only for the fan who thinks he has everything. And certainly no one needs the three albums that followed The Wall (or, I would argue, even The Wall itself, one of the most wretched albums in the rock canon), though of course they are included here.

The real appeal—other than a lovely 60-page booklet detailing the band’s artwork and imagery through the years—is having all the pre-Dark Side material assembled together; it comprises half of this 14-album, $200 set (less than $15 an album, including doubles, in case you want to break it down). Some of it holds up better than the rest—Atom Heart Mother in particular is revelatory, Meddle is merely muddling, the Barbet Schroeder soundtracks are trifles—but it’s gratifying to hear Floyd in such a playful, exploratory mode, making music that can conceivably be executed by four creative people in a room.

Naturally, it all sounds fantastic; Pink Floyd is nothing if not an audiophile’s band, and this doesn’t disappoint. And albums like Ummagumma still manage to sound remarkably fresh and devoid of cliché; it’s somewhat mindblowing, in today’s culture, to imagine an album this far out there could ever sell platinum (which it eventually did). It’s a welcome contrast to the often-bloated, super-serious, rock-operatic blowhards they became.

Come for the acid, leave for the cocaine. (Dec. 8)

Rihanna – Talk That Talk (Universal)

Rihanna wants to be all things to all people: pop star, dancehall queen, raunchy electro diva, arena-rock power balladeer. She’s a perfect chameleon, and with her cool, collected and compelling voice she soars above the armies of fembots and divas she shares space with in the Top 40. Yet on Talk That Talk, she merely alternates between feel-good, inspirational pop music for the whole family—“we all want love!” goes one track suitable for a Disney movie—and then lurid, hypersexual strip-club soundtrack material that’s about as artful and seductive as a 30-second clip on a free porn site.

Rihanna scores best when she amps up the Eurodisco techno on Lady Gaga-style club bangers like “We Found Love,” or takes a left turn by rewriting the song “Intro” by downbeat British band The XX. Though it’s entirely based around a sample of the original, Rihanna uses it as carte blanche to insert her own melody and soaring vocal. Rather than a ripoff, it sounds like an inspired collaboration—and not a terribly surprising one, as The XX, despite their minimalist moodiness, has always professed their love for modern American R&B.

The tarty tracks are also the weakest here, though they’re obviously the subject of more media scrutiny. Rihanna’s played the bad girl more than once before—last time we heard from her, she was wielding whips and chains—and now she’s into genderbending, urging you to “suck my cockiness, lick my persuasion,” or singing, “Let me grab my dick while you sit on top / do it right there while the whole world’s watching.” Somewhere, Prince is blushing—and more than a few parents of tweens are scrambling for the off button. (Dec. 1)

Download: “Where Have You Been,” “Drunk on Love,” “Roc Me Out”

The Roots – Undun (Universal)

This veteran hip-hop group will try to convince you that Undun is a concept album about one man’s urban struggles and the choice between an honest life and the criminal element. Don’t hold your breath for a Broadway musical, however; there’s precious little to distinguish this from the other 12 albums in the Roots’ discography, thematically or musically. That said, it comes on the tails of their late-career high, 2009’s How I Got Over, where they proved that taking a gig as a house band on a late-night talk show actually reinvigorated them creatively. And yet while that album worked on a variety of levels, Undun finds the Roots returning to well-crafted albums that are easy to respect but hard to actually like. There are more guest vocal hooks this time around, and a short four-song classical suite to close the album, but mostly the appeal remains in ?uestlove’s drumming and production aesthetic—which isn’t enough to carry an entire record on its own. (Dec. 15)

Download: “Stomp,” “The Other Side,” “Make My”

Sigur Ros – Inni (XL)

If there’s a proper heir to Pink Floyd in the last decade, it’s Sigur Ros. Exploratory, fragile, bombastic, obsessed with the science of sound, and—on their best days—mind-blowing, this Icelandic band have released five albums of varying quality; every one has its high points, but mostly they each feel overwhelming and a bit overproduced. It’s odd, then, that this two-disc live album (the soundtrack to an acclaimed concert film directed by Arcade Fire collaborator Vincent Morisset) doesn’t feel bloated in the least.

Recorded in 2008, Inni features just the core four members of the band—no strings, horns or other window dressing (and barely any crowd noise). And yet the music consistently sounds massive, even at its most minimalist. This band has the ability to convey volumes with the sparsest arrangements of notes; when the tension erupts, it’s positively thunderous. What keep it grounded are the small moments of imperfection amidst the otherwise epic constructions: a feedback squall, a whimsical accordion line, singer Jonsi warbling off-mic. Even though they’re a seasoned band, nothing here sounds rote or bled to death; Inni is full of vitality, and a snapshot of a band at the height of their powers. This is the definitive document of Sigur Ros. (Dec. 8)

Rae Spoon – I Can’t Keep All of Our Secrets (Saved by Radio)

When someone close to you dies, nothing makes sense anymore. Black is white, up is down, and somewhere in the middle of it all you can hopefully find some sort of clarity and insight that leads you to a greater truth. Rae Spoon wrote this, his sixth album, in just such a state, and the result is his strongest work to date.

Spoon is often found between states. Once a solo country singer from Calgary, who identifies as a transgender man, Spoon spent time in Berlin before settling in Montreal and transforming into a full-on electro artist with a singer/songwriter’s heart. Here, his strong, boyish voice is put to work over arrangements that old-timers will think are reminiscent of New Order, and youngsters will think sound like Diamond Rings; unfortunately, they don’t have a lot of teeth to them to work as actual club songs, which leaves the material in a tentative state between reflective ruminations of loss and a desire to bust out on the dance floor.

Either way, these are the finest melodies he’s penned to date, and so the disembodied, in-between state of the material works in its favour. On “Are You Jealous of the Dead?” there is enough reverb on his voice to sound like he’s singing from the other side; the song itself starts out as a fractured bossa nova before becoming an electro anthem. “Curse on Us,” which is set to a sort of techno reggae backdrop, is improbably one of the strongest tracks here.

Nothing is predictable about Rae Spoon at this stage of his career. While it’s a shame that a tragedy is what brought this fine work out of him, it’s inevitable that it will open even more creative and commercial doors. (Dec. 15)

Download: “Curse On Us,” “Ocean Blue,” “When I Said There Was an End to Love I Was Lying”

Kreesha Turner - Tropic/Electric (EMI)

While the new Rihanna record gets attention for its potty mouth and little else, Edmonton singer Kreesha Turner hopes to sneak up from behind and capture some of the same musical terrain on pop radio. Turner is still getting mileage out of her 2008 single “Don’t Call Me Baby” (that is, based on the number of times I still hear it in grocery stores and banks), and there’s nothing here remotely as catchy. Apparently she had four albums’ worth of material before settling on these 10 tracks; one has to wonder what it would take to be rejected from this record. That said, Turner is a far better singer than most pop moppets, and half the tracks on this album—split into two short discs labelled Tropic and Electric—draw from Caribbean and South American influences, filtered through Top 40 production values. That means there’s plenty to work with for remixes, even if the songs themselves are slight. (Dec. 15)

Download: “Rock Paper Scissors,” “I Feel My Darling,” “Love Again”

U2 – Achtung Baby (Universal)

Achtung Baby, now 20 years old, carries the most mythology of any U2 album: the earnest stadium rock band reinvents themselves in Berlin, embraces new sounds, stop taking themselves so seriously, and hit the road with a revolutionary stage show that has yet to be topped by anyone. In Jonathan Franzen’s 2010 novel Freedom, the album also becomes the soundtrack to a sexual awakening for two teenagers who later embrace capitalist excess; they lose their virginity on a pile of $20 bills while listening to “Zoo Station,” and later on “Mysterious Ways” somehow alludes to self-mutilation as well as seduction. Fill in your own metaphor.

The new anniversary reissue contains plenty of distractions: there are no less than five versions, from the basic disc itself to a two-disc set with outtakes and remixes to a ridiculous package involving six CDs, four DVDs, four vinyl records and, of course, Bono’s “fly” shades. There’s also a documentary about the album by an Academy Award-winning director, which opened the Toronto International Film Festival in September.

What about the album itself? Devoid of context, it is indeed a classic: 12 nearly flawless tracks that stand the test of time, many of which are still staples of U2’s record-grossing tours. It’s the rare mainstream success that is as intriguing sonically as it is full of accessible pop songs.

It’s hard to contextualize, however, without remembering 1991. U2 was not a band you danced to. U2 was not a band that ever used much more than bass, guitar and drums. And until then, Bono was perhaps the most earnest man in rock’n’roll, one who wouldn’t be caught dead singing “baby” nine times in a row in each chorus of a song (as he does here in “Ultraviolet”).

The first 30 seconds of opening track “Zoo Station” do sound like they would have been a game-changer in 1991—not for music in general, but certainly for a stadium rock band. Otherwise, there’s nothing revolutionary about Achtung Baby. Most of Larry Mullen Jr.’s beats sound like they were lifted from the Stone Roses. The Edge does develop his signature guitar sound further, but it’s not so drastically removed from his earlier work. On the whole, it’s not as if U2 turned their back on rock’n’roll, or at least the version of it they’d already been developing.

The second disc of outtakes contains some gems: b-sides (“Salome”), experiments and embryonic versions of songs that made the album. But it’s certainly not essential: the remixes are either pointless (minor tweaks of the original) or dated (not in a good way), and the covers, excepting The Velvet Underground’s “Satellite of Love,” are otherwise terrible ideas (Rolling Stones’ “Paint It Black,” CCR’s “Fortunate Son,” Cole Porter’s “Night and Day”).

Is Achtung Baby a great album? Yes. Is it an important album? Not really. But as the old American saying goes, when a legend becomes fact, print the legend. (Dec. 8)

Amy Winehouse - Lioness (Universal)

The cynic has to wonder how quickly this was assembled after Amy Winehouse’s tragic death this past summer. Indeed, it includes her final recording—a duet with Tony Bennett for his September release, Duets II—but much of this material comes from various points from the last nine years, with a lot of it reminiscent of her pre-Back to Black breakthrough. In other words, there’s little of the spark, the vitality and the sass that made that one album an instant classic.

Any time a major star passes away prematurely, everyone ponders the possibilities and what-ifs. Lioness doesn’t offer any hints, other than suggesting that maybe Back in Black was the result of a time and place—and a producer, Mark Ronson, who has little to do with the tracks here—and not necessarily Winehouse herself, her astounding voice notwithstanding. Her voice and the arrangements are often better than the material here, but even the covers are hit and miss. On Carole King’s “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow,” she again teams up with the Dap-Kings—Sharon Jones’s backing band who were integral to the sound of Back in Black—and achieve the impossible, breathing new life into a song that’s been covered to death in the last 40 years. However, she stumbles through “The Girl from Ipanema”—complete with awkward scat solo—and is clearly out of her league on the Bennett duet. On a newer original such as “Like Smoke,” she takes a back seat to verses by Nas, who raps circles around her lacklustre vocals.

For a lioness, this is incredibly tame. (Dec. 15)

Download: “A Song for You,” “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow,” “Our Day Will Come”

Wye Oak, stadium rock

2011-12-06T21:49:00.005-05:00

Opening a stadium show is a thankless task. It doesn’t matter who you are: ask any of the sacrificial lambs who land “plum” gigs opening for the Rolling Stones and the like. The one and only time I saw Chrissie Hynde and the Pretenders perform, they were the inconsequential soundtrack to the hot-dog lineup at a Neil Young amphitheatre show. I was a huge Los Lobos fan in high school (perhaps the only Los Lobos fan in high school, ever), but the first time I saw them, in 1987, they were being patently ignored by a full CNE Stadium waiting for U2.

And yet this week I’m headed to the Air Canada Centre only to see the opening acts. Granted, it’s the “theatre” setting of the venue, which is only half the size of the arena. And the headliner is The National, a band mysteriously popular with my demographic—i.e. 40-year-old dads who still try and keep up on new music—but I know at least the group has taste in other bands, as evidenced on the excellent Red Hot compilation they assembled, Dark Was the Night. Further proof comes in their choice of opening acts for their first arena tour.

Opening the show is Neko Case, a woman who needs no introduction. The last two times she played Toronto, if I’m not mistaken, she played Trinity St. Paul’s church and the Danforth Music Hall. There was a time when I saw Neko every time she came to town; then I decided I needed a bit of a break, after being underwhelmed by her much-awaited Fox Confessor Brings the Flood album. That was before I fell in love with 2009’s Middle Cyclone, an astounding record that still gets regular rotation in my household, and one she promoted in Toronto with merely one visit (that sold out instantly). [Ed. note, Dec 8: I forgot that she headlined Massey Hall as well, whoops.] She’s always had a voice that could fill caverns; I can’t wait to hear it fill the cavernous corners of our hockey hall. And because her commercial stature is almost that of The National—and she has many close ties to Toronto—it’s safe to say that she’ll have a rapt audience.

But almost as exciting is the presence of Wye Oak, a Baltimore duo whose excellent third album, Civilian, I gushed about here.

Jenn Wasner’s guitar playing is massive—or at least, it is when she wants it to be, as one of this band’s many strengths is its sense of jarring dynamics. Her partner Andy Stack tackles a drum set and keyboards simultaneously—and flawlessly. If for some horribly tragic reason this well-travelled band ever suffered a Def Leppard-style accident, they’d only need a new keyboardist; Stack has the one-armed beat-keeping down pat. He’s also a big fan of mallets, which draws out much more texture from his kit than most rock drummers do (at least, those who aren’t named Glenn Kotche or Jason Tait).

While Stack’s multi-tasking is impressive, it’s really Wasner’s show: she’s electrifying on stage and completely owns her instrument, each delicate note and thundering chord resonating through every bone in her body. Their music together isn’t afraid to embrace a dramatic pause before lurching forward or push and pull tempos apart in ways that only the most symbiotic musical relationship can.

On Civilian (and its predecessor, The Knot), their Neil Young/Dinosaur Jr. template is laced with dub textures, country shadings, and subtle synths, with barely a major key in sight. Wasner’s husky, androgynous, almost sleepy voice seeps with melancholy; Wye Oak doesn’t do happy. And yet there is joy and release when a tension breaks, when a song busts wide open and gallops into the distance, chased all the while by ghosts whose siren calls threaten to pull the protagonist back to the claustrophobic bedroom where their secrets are stored. But honestly, I can’t make out Wasner’s lyrics, so it’s the music that does all the talking.

So yes, it’s a big sound. One that deserves to heard in large venues. And yet Wye Oak themselves are ambivalent about big venues; for a pair of 24-year-olds, they’re as realistic as they are idealistic, and like their many esteemed labelmates on Merge Records, they know that big isn’t necessarily better. They’ve said that 2011 is the year they say “yes” to every opportunity that comes their way, so who knows—maybe this will be the only time to see them in a venue this size. Get there early and make them feel loved—and you’ll more than likely fall in love yourself.

Ed. note, Dec. 8: 'Twas an amazing show, proving their one of the only bands who actually sound better in a hockey arena: sparse but massive drums, ringing guitar, haunting voice. They have better energy in a club, but this was a sight to see. And it was much more thrilling than the two headliners that followed.

Wye Oak give good interview: check out this Venus article, this piece on The Huffington Post, and this from something called Swide.

And don’t sleep on Civilian, one of 2011’s finest rock records.

November '11 reviews

2011-11-21T22:28:00.005-05:00

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

Rich Aucoin – We’re All Dying to Live (Sonic/Warner)

Who made the most exuberant, life-affirming, triumphant and anthemic stadium rock record to come out this year? Woah, Coldplay, take a seat—you’re not even close. The answer is a guy who has yet to play a stadium, although Rich Aucoin deserves to reach Freddie Mercury status in no time.

Like Queen, Aucoin is much more than a rock act: his exuberance works best when he goes four on the floor and builds a disco dance party one layer at a time, inevitably erupting in gang vocals and synchronized fireworks. He’s at his best when he’s being everything to everyone, like on the single “It,” with the don’t-think-do chorus, “We won’t leave it all in our heads.” The entire song sounds like the rousing, climactic conclusion of Arcade Fire’s “Rebellion” on a loop, as sung by hundreds of your closest friends.

Actually, this Halifax musician probably knows at least a few of your closest friends: this album features over 500 guests (all photographed in the liner notes, as proof) culled from every corner of Canada’s indie music scene. If you’re a musician and you’re not on here, frankly, I’d feel left out if I were you. It’s not enough that Aucoin employs several choirs (children’s and otherwise) over the course of the album; the epic journey concludes with all the album’s voices forming one massive choir (in what was surely a mixing nightmare), singing the title phrase repeatedly.

This isn’t all a buoyant disco rock party with choral accompaniment—thankfully—even though those songs are certainly the highlights. Over the course of 22 tracks (in an economical 55 minutes), Aucoin maintains dynamics and flow, at times dialling the intensity back entirely for cinematic instrumental passages driven by malletted percussion. He knows when to aim for the jugular, and when to sit back and take a breather, and this is a stronger album because of that.

Rich Aucoin is not some overachieving indie kid; he’s made a widescreen, kaleidoscopic pop record that is thoroughly satisfying and deserves to be heard by as many people as possible. And I say that as someone unbiased by his live show—which I have somehow missed, despite many opportunities—which is apparently nothing short of mindblowing. (Nov. 3)

Download: “It,” “Brian Wilson is ALIVE,” “Living to Die”

Bruce Peninsula – Open Flame (Hand Drawn Dracula)

Everyone loves a choir. Bands of every genre like to gather all their friends together to holler in harmony as a sign of solidarity, of community, of celebration or defiance. Toronto’s Bruce Peninsula is one of the only bands to fully integrate choral vocals into their sound, an aesthetic based in folk and blues but that sounds decidedly modern, drawing influences from the likes of the Rheostatics, West African guitar music, and Chicago so-called “post-rock,” jazz-influenced prog bands like Tortoise. Assembling those disparate factions together, Bruce Peninsula forge a unique sound and scene they have entirely to themselves. The material here is even more intent on incorporating the choral parts into the songwriting, as well as boosting the profile of husky lead female vocalist Micha Bower as a counterpoint to gruff guitarist Neil Haverty, who dominated earlier material.

And yet rather than sounding like the fruition of a journey, this still sounds like a band in a state of transition. Their earliest material drew heavily from Alan Lomax-era folk recordings; their excellent debut, 2009’s A Mountain is a Mouth, moved into more modern directions, while retaining the bluesy base. This band is full of impeccable musicians, and although they can make every counterintuitive rhythmic twist sound entirely natural, many of these songs could stand to surrender to simplicity. Even then, the band’s refusal to take an easy way out is more often than not rewarding than it is frustrating.

But just because Bruce Peninsula are difficult to pin down and make it hard for writers to summarize easily doesn’t mean they’re not still one of the most original and exciting bands in Canada today. (Nov. 10)

Download: “As Long As I Live,” “Pull Me Under,” “Open Flame”

Florence and the Machine – Ceremonials (Universal)

What a voice—and what a waste. Few would argue that Florence Welch has an astounding voice, the kind that could not only fill stadiums, but entire mountain ranges. She has the soul of Adele, the depth of PJ Harvey, the prettiness of Sarah McLachlan, the star power of Bono. And yet here on her second album, she fails to come up with tunes to match her talent. It’s like watching Robert DeNiro in a low-rent comedy full of fart jokes: too much of Ceremonials falls back into breast-beating histrionics more suited to Celine Dion. When she does come up with a spine-tingling, showstopping anthem, it merely casts the rest of the material into sharp relief. (Nov. 10)

Download: “Breaking Down,” “Let Me Go,” “Lover to Lover”

Gonzales – The Unspeakable Chilly Gonzales (Arts and Crafts)

Love the new Feist record? Then you should check out her longtime friend, producer and collaborator Chilly Gonzales—and quickly discover that his solo work is far removed from the world of socially acceptable singer/songwriters.

Gonzales is a high-concept prankster and “entertainist” who’s never shied away from boasting about his musical genius—which he does here on a musical concept album setting his self-obsessed raps to entirely orchestral arrangements, with nary an electronic instrument to be found. It’s as ridiculous as it sounds; it’s also amazing.

Here’s a guy who launched his current stage persona with obnoxious, unfunny rap records and then released a straight-up Satie homage of solo piano music that made him a star in France. On Unspeakable, he marries his high- and low-brow loves brilliantly. The orchestrations are bold, majestic, and often lovely, making those once-ballyhooed collaborations between Jon Brion and Kanye West sound like child’s play. Meanwhile, the rhymes and the delivery are downright hilarious, a crude tour-de-force that is alternately self-loathing (“Who Wants To Hear This?” and “Shut Up and Play the Piano”) and braggadocious, best summed up with the line, “Here’s a melody to lubricate your tearducts / you’re about to be earf---ed.” It helps to know a bit about Gonzales’ bizarre career trajectory, but even if you don’t, there’s plenty to laugh at—and with: “It’s like hearing my dad rap / abstract / like porn with a laugh track.” (Nov. 3)

Download: “Supervillain Music,” “Self-Portrait,” “Beans”

High Places – Original Colors (Thrill Jockey)

High Places vocalist Mary Pearson has a wisp of a voice, one that sounds like she’s daydreaming while singing. And for most of this duo’s brief history, High Places’ music sounded just as abstract and amorphous, with unconventional electronics and household instrumentation (bowls, bells, plastic bags, etc.) manipulated into unique beats and soundscapes by Pearson and musical partner Rob Barber. Here, the sound has toughened up considerably without changing the initial aesthetic: there’s more bottom end, more definition in the mix, and more of a pulse. In other words, what at first sounded like an uncertain, flirtatious courtship now feels like things have moved to the bedroom and started to get real serious. Original Colors is sensual and immersive, the kind of record that feels like a luxurious, aromatherapeutic hot bath. Just in time for winter. (Nov. 3)

Download: “Year Off,” “Banksia,” “Dry Lake”

Amai Kuda – Sand From the Sea (independent)

The debut album from this Toronto artist opens with just her voice and handclaps: it’s all she needs to instantly establish herself as a captivating presence. The instant the fully fleshed out instrumental arrangements appear, it’s obvious those are just gravy. Kuda herself is the whole package.

Indeed, one of the biggest strengths of Sand From the Sea is that Kuda’s voice is always front and centre; the arrangements never clutter her space, and even on the modern-day R&B tracks she often strips everything to their essence, and more than a few tracks could be blues hollers or traditional African songs. Kuda draws from diverse black diaspora traditions—central African music, blues, hip-hop, reggae and soul—immersing herself in whatever sounds are surrounding her at the moment. She also has the songwriting chops to pull it all off. For all its eclecticism, Sand From the Sea doesn’t sound like a hodgepodge; it’s a consistently strong debut that instantly marks Kuda as the brightest new Canadian talent this year.

And yet for Kuda—who is painfully modest in her blog postings on her website—it’s obvious that music is a means to an end for her: almost every track carries a message of social justice. Sometimes it’s extremely effective, sometimes it sounds like every activist musician you ever saw play a benefit show in the ’90s. Even at her preachiest, however, Kuda is still compelling, her voice recalling the best work of Tracy Chapman, Michelle Shocked, Alicia Keys and Lauryn Hill. She’s definitely her own woman, however: smart, sensual, and righteous—and with one hell of a debut behind her. (Nov. 17)

Download: “Woman,” “All My Fine Shoes,” “Dance Chaka”

David Lynch – Crazy Clown Time (Sunday Best)

If you’ve ever heard David Lynch’s oddball, nasal, Southern deadpan drawl of a speaking voice, you’d be hard pressed to imagine him as a singer. After listening to Crazy Clown Time, that’s still the case.

Lynch spends most of this album speaking or singing through various voice modulators, affectations and effects, which are suitably disorienting and set to eerie tracks that sound like, well, like David Lynch soundtracks (or a more unhinged Timber Timbre). There are times when it’s mysterious and magical, like the slide-guitar instrumental “The Night Bell With Lightning” or “Noah’s Ark,” although more often than not Lynch sounds like an outsider artist/idiot savant croaking non-sequiturs. On the confounding and appropriately titled track “Strange and Unproductive Thinking,” Lynch rambles on breathlessly in a Vocoder monotone about all sorts of pseudo-philosophy before he ends with a rant about dentistry and “negative distortion of the mouth.”

If Julee Cruise’s Floating Into the Night album—which featured the Twin Peaks theme, “Falling”—was the product of the David Lynch who made Blue Velvet, Crazy Clown Time is the work of the David Lynch who made Inland Empire. If you managed to sit through that film, then there are times when this album makes perfect sense. Mulholland Drive is a Disney movie in comparison. (Nov. 10)

Download: “The Night Bell with Lightning,” “Good Day Today,” “Noah’s Ark”

Bry Webb – Provider (Idee Fixe)

Most CanRock fans first heard Bry Webb sing on the Constantines’ 2001 debut album; he sounded hoarse, hungry, like a rock’n’roll veteran seeking redemption. He sounded a lot older than the twentysomething he was at the time. Here on his debut solo album, Webb sounds considerably softer and, well, younger. His voice has a tenderness that has never been present on record before—not even on the Constantines’ quietest moments—and Provider is a fascinating album because of it.

The entire album is low-key and subdued, consisting of little other than electric guitar and the subtlest shades of slide guitar, marimba, ukulele, a droning horn section and occasional female backing vocals—all of which is practically invisible. There’s a weightlessness to this material, a delicacy that draws you closer and demands your attention. It’s not bedtime background music; it’s meditative and focused while Webb paints vivid character portraits in his lyrics.

No matter what you think you know about Bry Webb’s music, Provider is a most pleasant surprise. (Nov. 17)

Download: “Ex-Punks,” “Zebra,” “Get You Up in Peace”

Lugheads and Lothario

2011-11-21T10:03:00.003-05:00

Drake – Take Care (Universal)

Nickelback – Here and Now (Universal)

Two of Canada’s biggest stars—and two of the most loathsome characters in modern music. This month, their new records came out within a week of each other, allowing the world to compare and contrast the lugheads and the Lothario, two acts who do more damage to this country’s international reputation than the tar sands.

Nickelback haters are legion; look no further than Detroit, where there was a popular petition to stop the band from performing at that city’s Thanksgiving football game. But what’s so loathsome about Drake, you ask? Why, wasn’t he that charming young man who hosted the Junos? Isn’t he a well-adjusted TV star from a tony Toronto neighbourhood? Isn’t Stevie Wonder on this new album? Isn’t his new single with Nicki Minaj, called "Make Me Proud," supposed to be an empowering ode to the fairer sex?

Drake can play the sensitive guy all he wants, but his lyrical output is nothing short of vile, a portrait of a guy who is “addicted to naked pictures and sittin’ talking ’bout bitches,” and who loves breast-implanted strippers even more than Chad Kroeger does. It’s not like he hides this part of his personality: on the first track, "Over My Dead Body" (with music by Chantal Kreviazuk), Drake goes on about his six-figure salary, white women, and gives a bizarre “shout out to Asian girls / let the lights dim sum.” As an opening salvo, it doesn’t bode well. It’s actually one of the better tracks here.

“I don’t make music for niggers that don’t get pussy,” he claims, a throwaway line that would be more offensive if it wasn’t so ridiculous—especially over decidedly unsexy beats. What’s actually offensive is how much insipid whining he does about his broken heart, like a crybaby emo teenager instead of the supposedly macho playa that he pretends to be on 80 per cent of the tracks here. His defenders claim that dichotomy is part of his appeal; mostly he sounds like a two-faced hypocrite. “I know you’ve been hurt by someone else,” he pays his ex-girlfriend Rihanna to croon to him on the title track. I’m sure it wasn’t her idea.

Take Care is one of the most anticipated albums of the year. It’s also by far the dullest: 17 songs of Drake discussing his fame and sexual conquests over hook-less music that’s just as tedious as his so-called rhymes. It’s one thing to make a terrible album; it’s another to make a terrible album that’s interminable.

Drake’s dry delivery throughout—when either singing or rapping—is deadpan, devoid of charisma and impossible to take seriously. That doesn’t stop him from aiming for maximum gravitas at every available opportunity, especially on the eight-minute drunk-dialling epic "Marvin’s Room." It’s ostensibly a Marvin Gaye homage (?) about a jilted lover cursing his ex’s new partner. But the lyrics are downright laughable—he croons softly, R. Kelly style, in the chorus, “fuck that nigger that you love so bad,” calls his lover only after he’s been left alone by all the bitches he invited over to party, and he boasts about having sex four times that week to help him get over his pain and adjust to fame. It’s all made worse by Drake’s earnest, AutoTuned vocals, which shamelessly try to ape his protégé The Weeknd—an artist who, on his own records, nails the fine line between distasteful decadence and self-loathing better than Drake could ever dream of doing. (Plus, Abel Tesfaye of The Weeknd can actually sing.)

So why does Drake get such a free ride, not just from his audience but from respectable mainstream media? Is his million-dollar smile really so blinding that we can overlook his countless shortcomings? Speaking of millions of dollars, listening to Take Care—what a condescending title, by the way—is like enduring 70 minutes listening to Marie Antoinette blather on at the precipice of the French Revolution. After we’re done occupying Wall Street, let’s occupy Drake’s condo: he is the soundtrack of the filthy-rich-and-loving-it “one per cent,” rapping about “me, myself and all my millions”—and precious little else other than what Twitter refers to as #firstworldproblems. Do regular schmoes listen to Drake for the same deluded and self-defeating reason that poor people vote Republican?

Even worse—Drake doesn’t make it sound like his life is any fun at all. Say what you will about Nickelback, they’re having an amazing time being kings of the world and don’t care what you think. What’s shocking on their new album, and to their credit, is that even Nickelback itself is now a bit weary of the tried-and-true formula that’s made so much of their wretched catalogue interchangeable.

Here and Now is ever so slightly more diverse—and even listenable. Granted, it’s certainly hard to take Chad Kroeger seriously as he plays jaunty pseudo-ska on the single "When We Stand Together," singing, “We could feed a starving world with what we throw away / but all we serve are empty words that all taste the same.” Who does he think he is, Sting?

Stephen Harper’s favourite rock band still revel in babes, boobs and beer, extolling the virtues of ladies who are “like a scene from a Baywatch rerun,” who “lick my pistol clean” and who “walk like a model and talk like a trucker.” As far as skeezeball anthems go, "Midnight Queen" is pretty good at sounding like ZZ Top on meth. Meanwhile, piss-up party anthem "Bottoms Up" induces projectile vomiting rather than good cheer.

Nickelback’s popularity should not be a mystery. Kroeger wins those Best Songwriter Junos for a reason: he knows how to write a pop hook, set it to grungy metal riffs, and squeeze every ounce of subtlety out of the result. The 14-year-old AC/DC fan in me is somewhat impressed—by both that and some of the guitar sounds on this record. (Guitarist Ryan Peake has been studying those lightning-fast eight-bar hair-metal solos of the ’80s, and pulls it off.)

As painful as it is to admit, Here and Now is packed with 12 future hits and is probably the best album Nickelback has ever made. Which means you won’t be able to avoid it for at least the next year, if not the rest of your life. You’ve been warned.

October '11 reviews

2011-11-16T21:35:00.006-05:00

The following reviews ran in the Guelph Mercury and Kitchener-Waterloo record last month

Bjork – Biophilia (Warner)

Biophilia is not an album; it’s an iPad app—or rather, a series of them, one for each of the album’s 10 tracks. Only the most devoted Bjork fans are likely to fully immerse themselves in that intricate and involved experience. The rest of us are left with just the music, which involves unique instruments (a Tesla coil, a combination of a celeste and a gamelan, a “gravity harp”) employed as much for their theoretical relevance to the project—which has something to do with astrophysics, string theory, neurology and the nature of the universe, of course—as they are for their musical properties.

It’s more fascinating to read about than it is to experience. Bjork takes this all very seriously, and it shows. In the 10 years since her last great album, Vespertine, Bjork has become increasingly impenetrable, her musical output succeeding neither as pop music nor art project (a few standout tracks notwithstanding). Some would blame her hubby, the equally talented and obtuse filmmaker Matthew Barney. On Biophilia she doesn’t sound as adrift as she did on 2005’s Drawing Restraint 9 soundtrack (for a Barney film) or on the weaker tracks of 2007’s Volta, but her intellectual approach to this material is ultimately off-putting; it’s great that each track was designed to be an interactive iPad app, because there’s certainly no emotional engagement with the listener.

I say this as someone who thought she could do no wrong during the first 10 years of her solo career. It therefore pains me to say that while there is much to respect during many moments on Biophilia, there is precious little to love. (October 13)

Download: “Moon,” “Crystalline,” “Dark Matter”

Kathryn Calder - Bright and Vivid (File Under: Music)

At the end of 2010, I was convinced that Kathryn Calder’s album Are You My Mother? Was one of the finest Canadian albums of that year, behind only Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs, and that its obscurity was downright criminal—especially considering Calder’s role as a supporting player in the not-unpopular band New Pornographers. Her second album is every bit as rewarding as that debut, though more richly layered, not as easy to pin down and, for better or worse, without as many anthemic choruses. On her debut, Calder had mastered the art of the pop song, no doubt from hanging out with the Pornographers for so many years. Now she’s ready to take her songcraft somewhere deeper.

At the centre is Calder’s choirgirl voice, which is lovely without being precious, clear and confident without sacrificing emotion. And she has a stellar cast of session players to help her out, although seeing how she handles keyboards, guitars, vibraphone and percussion herself, she hardly needs any assistance at all. She creates the kind of music that the young Sarah McLachlan who debuted with Touch would have gone on to make if she hadn’t embraced easy listening. It sounds like what innovative 2011 Polaris shortlist nominees Braids would make if they knew how to make pop music instead of swimming in abstraction. It owes a small debt to fellow Vancouverite Veda Hille, of whose more accessible moments this album shares several traits (including guitar work by CanRock MVP Ford Pier). It could well be Canada’s answer to new European arthouse chanteuses like Bat For Lashes, Lykke Li and Fever Ray.

But Calder is definitely her own woman forging her own path, and no amount of facile comparisons does justice to her talent. Bright and Vivid is an album that more than lives up to its billing; let’s hope Calder doesn’t get slept on a second time. (October 27)

Download: “Turn a Light On,” “Walking in My Sleep,” “Who Are You?”

Cowboy Junkies – Sing in My Meadows: The Nomad Series Vol. 3 (Latent)

It’s safe to say that most people don’t associate Cowboy Junkies with raging electric guitars. And yet that’s been a big part of their sound for at least the last 15 years, co-existing with the quieter, folkie elements and dark pop songs they’ve built their career on. So if the loud electric moments were a distraction on some previous records, Sing in My Meadows consists of nothing but. If you think that side of the Junkies usually brings out the worst of them, then feel free to ignore this album entirely.

However, any longtime fan is advised to at least listen first to “Continental Drift,” with its Zeppelinesque drums and searing distorted harmonica work by Jeff Bird; it gives modern bands like Black Mountain and the Besnard Lakes a run for their money. And, like their recent high-water-mark album Renmin Park (the first in this four-part Nomad series), the material is strong: here it is biting, both musical—allowing plenty of room for improvisation between Bird and guitarist/songwriter Michael Timmins—and topical (“3rd Crusade” is the only song in the last 10 years I’m aware of that mentions Kandahar, which is odd considering how long Canada has been at war there).

For a band best known for its mellow moments, this band is not mellowing in their old age; this is heavier than they’ve ever been, in more ways than one. (October 20)

Download: “Continental Drift,” “Hunted,” “3rd Crusade”

Crooked Fingers – Breaks in the Armor (Merge)

Over 20 years and 12 albums, Crooked Fingers’ Eric Bachmann has nothing left to prove to anyone: especially after his slick 2008 masterpiece Forfeit/Fortune (a perfect album that’s easily one of the most underrated albums of the last five years) and this year’s triumphant reunion of his ’90s indie rock band Archers of Loaf, the legacy of which overshadowed his singer/songwriter work as Crooked Fingers for far too long.

So rather than return to past glories, Breaks in the Armor sounds like Bachmann starting fresh, alone in the studio (except for female vocal harmonies by longtime bandmate Liz Durrett) and feeling his way around a drum kit with a primal pounding that brings a refreshingly raw amateur feel to otherwise carefully constructed and arranged songs. Despite its solitary nature, Breaks in the Armor is not a quiet affair; Bachmann belts it out throughout, even when tempos dip. He plays with your expectations; the catchiest rock song on the album (“The Counterfeiters”) is played mostly on just bass and drums.

Bachmann has a rich and deep discography; newcomers will be surprised to learn that Breaks in the Armor is just the tip of the iceberg. (October 20)

Download: “The Counterfeiters,” “Went to the City,” “Your Apocalypse”

DJ Shadow – The Less You Know The Better (Universal)

A DJ’s primary job—whether it’s at a wedding, in a club, or as part of a band—is to make a perfect mix, to blend different elements into a seamless flow. It’s odd, then, that one of the greatest DJ artists of the last 20 years has made an album that, for all its various strengths, almost entirely lacks flow.

Ever since making arguably the first landmark DJ-as-artist album, 1996’s Endtroducing, Shadow’s output has been sporadic and spotty; this album is one of his most diverse and consistently strong, despite some ill-advised forays into clunky heavy metal/hip-hop hybrids (Shadow of all people should know better). “Sad and Lonely” is a beatless piano ballad, and “I’ve Been Trying” sounds like a languorous Pink Floyd song sung by a soul singer and featuring synth bass and a martial snare drum underneath it all. Closing track “Give Me Back the Nights” is an increasingly unhinged spoken-word rant set to little more than a Black Sabbath bass line an spacy keyboards. In between are pop songs, folk songs, and cinematic instrumentals akin to Endtroducing’s high points.

And yet while Shadow does it all well, it rarely works well together. This is a DJ album where the DJ can’t be trusted; hit shuffle instead. (October 13)

Download: “I’ve Been Trying,” “Redeemed,” “Stay the Course (feat. Posdnuos and Talib Kweli)”

Eccodek – Remixstasy (independent)

Ten years ago, Andrew McPherson probably didn’t envision that his world-music fusion project Eccodek would be an internationally acclaimed outfit and popular live act on the festival circuit, never mind exchanging remix favours with the likes of genre leaders Transglobal Underground. But listening to Remixstasy, it’s easy to see why: McPherson isn’t content to make massage-table music with easy synth washes and vaguely “exotic” elements scattered over limp beats. McPherson focuses on the funk first and foremost, and these remixes bring the tougher edges of Eccodek into the open. In some respects, these tracks are better the originals, and are an ideal way to mark the project’s anniversary. (October 13)

Download: “Calling the Rain (Eccodek Afrodisiac mix),” “From the Flames dub (Transglobal Underground mix),” “Red White and Mali (Adham Shaikh Wobble Tip mix)”

Feist – Metals (Arts and Crafts)

After taking on a full-on break from making music, Feist returns singing: “Makes me remember the things that I forgot / it’s as much what it is as what it is not.”

What Metals is not is obvious. It is not an album with a peppy hit single like “1234” or “Mushaboom.” It is not an album that gives away all its goods on first listen. Though it is rich in melody and harmony, it is not a pop album. Though there are many intimate moments featuring only Feist and her guitar, it is not a singer/songwriter album. Though it has supple grooves borrowed from the slowest, sexiest side of Al Green, it is not a soul album. And though it contains elements of The Reminder’s quieter moments and the majesty of her long-unavailable debut album Monarch, Metals marks new territory for Feist.

Many songs start from a bluesy base, something very simple and primal, built around a tension of delicate but forceful instrumentation; but from there, a song can easily move from a solitary guitar motif before erupting with a strident choir, electric guitars crashing in a loping waltz time, and punctuated by clanging chain percussion. Few songs here fall into a steady template; they wait to be pulled or pushed apart, to have their meter toyed with, suspended while a string section or the sound of scraping metal sneaks into the background scene.

Then of course there is Feist’s calm, steadying, pitch-perfect voice, one that’s almost devoid of emotion, conveying everything and nothing at the same time. What is she singing about? Who cares? It’s “true life in haiku,” she sings, but whatever you’re looking for in these songs—either love or loss, comfort or concern—you’ll find them.

That tabula rasa extends to the music. While Feist was the undisputed star of earlier Feist records, Metals is much more communal. The various accompanying ensembles are one reason: string sections, brass sections, and choirs all transform the most intimate moments into something larger and yet still tender. But even though Feist’s voice is front and centre, it’s just as important as every piano chord, bass drum kick, or subtle sonic shading; together, every carefully arranged element establishes the tenor of the album, which works remarkably well as a whole. The only odd duck is “A Commotion,” pushed along by pulsing cellos and a man choir shouting the chorus; it’s curious, joyous, sparse and somewhat unsettling, the closest Feist gets to rocking out here, and it’s one of the most captivating tracks she’s ever recorded.

Metals also sounds like the most honest album since her debut: if Let It Die was her role-playing as a pretty pop star, and The Reminder found her trying to reconcile several different sides of her musical personality, Metals is its own world entirely—a world where Feist roams freely, devoid of expectation or constraint, a world with plenty for all to explore. (October 6)

Download: “Bittersweet Melodies,” “A Commotion,” “The Circle Married the Line”

Peter Gabriel – New Blood (Universal)

When Peter Gabriel resurfaced last year with a covers album, Scratch My Back, it was disappointing on several levels: not just because there was no original material, but because the dirge-like tempos and his belaboured vocal delivery didn’t help matters. When he went out to tour the album with an orchestra, he decided to rearrange an hour’s worth of older material to suit the occasion.

Thank God he did, because if Scratch My Back made fans wonder if Gabriel still had any charisma left in him, New Blood finds him revisiting his back catalogue with an entirely fresh approach. Gabriel doesn’t just add strings to existing arrangements; he takes all rock instruments out of the equation altogether (except piano), but loses none of the force and rhythmic thrust of the originals—no small feat considering the polyrhythms going on in something like “Red Rain” or “The Rhythm of the Heat.” The result is an orchestral tour de force that finds Gabriel as creative as ever, despite the fact that he’s working with well-trod material. Not that this is just a greatest hits set list: many classic tracks don’t appear here, while lesser-known ones like “Darkness,” “Intruder,” and “Wallflower” provide some of the most intriguing moments. Guest vocalist Ane Brun shines on “Don’t Give Up” and “Mercy Street”; her quivering vibrato could easily be mistaken for Mary Margaret O’Hara.

At 61 years old, Gabriel’s heyday may well be behind him, but New Blood is a classy move—not just a classical one. (October 20)

Download: “Red Rain,” “Intruder,” “Mercy Street”

Mayer Hawthorne – How Do You Do (Universal)

Is Mayer Hawthorne really a 32-year-old guy from Michigan who stumbled into singing soul music after starting as a hip-hop instrumentalist? Or is this Daryl Hall in disguise, staging a covert comeback?

In fact, Hawthorne and the Hall & Oates singer have been seen in the same place at the same time (on Hall’s TV show), so that theory doesn’t hold water. But listening to “A Long Time,” the second track on Hawthorne’s major label debut, with its “Maneater” drums and Hawthorne’s butter-smooth blue-eyed soul voice, he stakes his claim as Hall’s heir apparent. (Not only does he sound great, he looks great, too—like a dorky, cuter version of Tobey Maguire—thereby guaranteeing him some mainstream success. Touring with Bruno Mars helps, too.)

Hawthorne first appeared with a decent though paint-by-numbers indie debut, but How Do You Do marks a major move into territory ruled over by Raphael Saddiq, Sharon Jones and the ghost of Amy Winehouse. The songwriting has taken several steps up, and though the lyrical content rarely strays from affairs of the heart, he does manage to pen a few zingers: on lead single “The Walk,” he sings one of the most biting kiss-offs since Cee-Lo Green’s F--- You, likewise set to a bouncy, major-key melody: “You heart is like a black piece of coal / and I doubt you ever had a soul.” (October 20)

Download: “Dreaming,” “The Walk,” “No Strings”

Mighty Popo – Gakondo (Borealis)

Ottawa’s Mighty Popo has been an integral part of Canada’s African music community for 15 years, as a solo artist and as one third of the acclaimed African Guitar Summit, known mostly for his approach to blues. On Gakondo, his first all-acoustic album, Popo explores his Rwandan roots, adapting traditional songs and exploring the inanga, a nine-stringed instrument. Though it’s largely a lilting, gentle album, it’s on the quietest moments of all that Popo sounds downright magical, singing haunting lullabies and odes to family tradition set to sparse solo arrangements.

This album came out in 2010 and was nominated for a Juno, but is deservedly getting a wider release now through one of Canada’s foremost folk music labels. (October 13)

Download: “Ngire Nte,” “Uw’lbuhoro,” “Rwatsinda”

William Shatner - Seeking Major Tom (Cleopatra)

In his liner notes for this, a pseudo-concept album about David Bowie’s Major Tom character (which is actually just a collection of almost every sci-fi space-themed pop song ever written), William Shatner admits to sitting with his producer and both of them asking themselves, “Is this absurd or is this awesome or is it absurdly awesome?”

For starters, it’s rarely, if ever, awesome. It’s certainly absurd, and intentionally so. Shatner has been in on his own joke for years; his classic debut album The Transformed Man, released in the ’60s at the height of his Star Trek fame, was funny only because Shatner seemed outright oblivious to the absurdity of his Shakespearian spoken-word delivery of hippie-dippie lyrics of the day. Now the 80-year-old (!) has decades of self-awareness behind him, which makes his deadpan delivery here of Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” not funny at all, just sad. The same is true of at least half of the tracks here, from Deep Purple’s “Space Trucking” to to Steve Miller’s “Space Cowboy” to The Police’s “Walking on the Moon” to Pink Floyd’s “Learning to Fly.” And what is The Tea Party’s “Empty Glass” doing here? Who knows.

And yet amidst the 20 tracks on this ridiculously long double album are some real moments of beauty, albeit underscored by the perpetual strangeness that is the Shat. Elton John’s “Rocket Man,” a song Shatner has actually been performing since 1978, is oddly poignant, with Shatner sounding like a lonely, delusional raconteur at closing time in a hotel bar. U2’s latter-era ballad “In a Little While” is uncharacteristically subtle, with Lyle Lovett helping out with parts that require an actual melody (which of course the Shat is unable to sing). And when Shatner sets out to be absolutely, unabashedly ridiculous—there is no other way to describe his performance alongside Bootsy Collins on Thomas Dolby’s “She Blinded Me With Science”—it’s a giddy delight.

But most of Seeking Major Tom just sounds like bad karaoke—Shatner’s soliloquies over faithful arrangements—with one notable exception: it’s not hard to show up Simon LeBon, and so Shatner’s monotone makeover of Duran Duran’s “Planet Earth” (featuring Steve Howe of Yes) is actually an improvement on the original.

Ultimately, however, this is a 90-minute album that, at best, can hope to provide one or two Internet memes for a week or so. (October 27)

Download: “Rocket Man,” “She Blinded Me With Science,” “Planet Earth”

Yukon Blonde – Fire/Water (Nevado)

The sweetest sounding rock band from Kamloops, B.C., since the Grapes of Wrath, Yukon Blonde have been touring relentlessly since the release of their debut album—and it shows. On this four-song EP, they show how quickly they’ve progressed from one of the most promising bands in Canada to one of the best. Expertly recorded by Colin Stewart (Black Mountain), the lead track “Fire” features distant atmospheric guitars swirling around a rolling bass line, straight-up countrified acoustic guitars and rich harmonies applied to every line, including the infectious, wordless chorus. The two songs on the b-side (or last two tracks on the CD) explore their slightly more abstract side, sounding not unlike their equally luscious West Coast peers, Fleet Foxes; closing track “Choices” features an almost entirely choral opening, before the Neil Young-ish electric backing track kicks in. A full-length culled from the same recording session is expected early next year, while this tease of an EP keeps them on the road in the meantime. (October 13)

Too Cool to Live, Too Smart To Die

2011-10-24T17:02:00.006-04:00

While revising Have Not Been the Same for the 10^th anniversary edition, it was very much on the mind of all three co-authors that the last 10 years has been incredibly fruitful in Canadian music, and left a recorded legacy even greater than the time period of 1985-1995 that we documented in the book. We also felt that it wasn’t enough to just put out a new, improved version of the book: we felt that the music we discuss had to feel alive, not out of print and hidden in a dark corner of a campus radio station’s soon-to-be-dismantled vinyl library. And so while my co-author Jason Schneider is working on Vol. 2 of this series, which will unearth out-of-print classics and make them available again—including the long-sought-after title track (!!!)—I asked current artists to pay tribute to Canadian acts that inspired them early on.

I feel blessed to know many incredible musicians personally, and so that helped narrow my scope when it came to who to invite to be a part of this. I also wanted to focus on the new, so while I could have asked some legends associated directly with the book to cover their contemporaries, I wanted people who made some of my favourite records of the last 10 years to be the first people I approached. Unbelievably, over 25 of them responded positively, and the 19 heard here managed to record a track in time. Interest was so strong that I could easily commission a second installment at a moment’s notice.

I couldn’t be happier with the end result: every single artist gave this their A-game, and it’s clearly audible what a labour of love this was all around.

All proceeds from this project will go to the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, the leading such facility in the country (and right across the street from me). I feel like every musician I know—including myself—has been affected either directly or indirectly (through peers) by the issues that CAMH deals with every day. And there are more than a few tragic tales in the book about artists who lost precious time, talent, or even their lives to personal demons that plagued them. The life of creative people is as complex as it is rewarding, and sadly addiction and mental health are occupational hazards.

Without further ado, here’s the track listing:

Pop Goes the World (Men Without Hats) – The Burning Hell

In Contempt of Me (Jr. Gone Wild) – Corb Lund

What Was Going Through My Head (Grapes of Wrath) – Great Lake Swimmers

Daylight (The Nils) – Owl Mountain Radar (Jim Bryson and Chris Page)

I Will Give You Everything (Skydiggers) – Bry Webb (of the Constantines)

The Lines You Amend (Sloan) – Forest City Lovers

Happens All the Time (Eric’s Trip) – Light Fires (Gentleman Reg and Ohbijou's Jamie Bunton)

Grace, Too (The Tragically Hip) – Selina Martin with the Faceless Forces of Bigness

Too Cool to Live, Too Smart to Die (Deja Voodoo) – Mark Davis and Lorrie Matheson

Your Sunshine (Hardship Post) – Jill and Matthew Barber

North Window (The Inbreds) – Cuff the Duke

Throw Silver (Mecca Normal) – Hidden Cameras

Buddah (Al Tuck) – Snailhouse

Odette (Circle C) – Veda Hille

Teenland (Northern Pikes) – Andrew Vincent

Bound for Vegas (Art Bergmann) – Geoff Berner

Shaved Head (Rheostatics) – Neil Haverty (of Bruce Peninsula)

When You Know Why You’re Happy (Mary Margaret O’Hara) – Little Scream and Richard Reed Parry (Arcade Fire, Bell Orchestre)

We Got Time (Bob Wiseman) – Kevin Drew (Broken Social Scene)

Have Not Been the Same Vol. 1: Too Cool to Live, Too Smart To Die will be available on Zunior.com on November 15. Artwork by Nick Craine. Mastered by Andy Magoffin. Liner notes by myself and all contributing artists.

Portishead live

2011-10-17T22:05:00.004-04:00

Portishead

Sound Academy, Toronto

Monday, October 10, 2011

I turned 40 two days before this show. It was awfully nice of Portishead—in Toronto for the first time in 14 years—to allow me to cross their name off my list of must-see acts, acts whose music has altered my life in one way or another. At this point, I’m not sure there’s anyone left on the list who is a) alive, b) still performing, and c) not in an artistically decrepit state.

Though their beloved debut album came out in 1994, Portishead are not an oldies act; their 2008 album Third found them pushing themselves into darker directions much more abrasive than anything they’d ever done, and worlds away from the trip-hop movement they helped spawn—and that they quickly grew to despise for the milquetoast yuppie sex-party soundtrack it was. In Eye Weekly’s 2008 cross-Canada critics’ poll, Third took the top spot.

That album is now three years old and apparently there’s a new one on the way. Despite defining the zeitgeist in the mid-’90s, Portishead have always existed in a timeless continuum, borrowing heavily from the past (soul, jazz, blues, hip-hop, film soundtracks) while simultaneously forging future sounds. So while there was the occasional moment at this show where Geoff Barrow’s scratching sounded gimmicky whereas it once sounded groundbreaking, Portishead still sounded as fresh as they did the first time I heard “Sour Times” in a record store and was stopped cold in my tracks.

Portishead don’t do anything half-assed; they take their time, do what they want when and how they want to do it. It’s well worth waiting for. The visuals, a mix of live editing and animation resembling early ’70s children’s TV shows (hello, fortysomethings), were stunning. The band was almost flawless; the only quibble I could make was that the keyboardist didn’t use the theremin placed right in front of him for “Mysterons.” Beth Gibbons’ voice is even more impressive live: not just for the way she injects extra intensity into every line, but for her ability to convey fragility and strength at the same time. Like Feist, she can project intensity without belting it out; unlike Feist, she sounds like she deeply feels every single word.

The set leaned heavily on Dummy and Third, almost ignoring the self-titled second album, which is my personal favourite (only “Over” and “Cowboys” made the cut). I’ve barely listened to Dummy in the past 15 years, just because it was played to death in the college town where I spent the ’90s; hearing this seasoned band dig into those grooves now was extremely satisfying.

It seems silly to criticize Portishead for being too good at what they do, but the cumulative intensity was almost overbearing. Welcome breathers came from tracks like “Magic Doors,” with its cowbell funk, and a stripped-down version of “Wandering Stars,” with Beth Gibbons singing over just two guitars and embarking on the scariest scat solo you’ll ever hear in your life.

So: amazing band, amazing show, bla bla bla. Here’s the thing: as someone who spent the better part of his 20s in love with the first two Portishead records, finally seeing them live as I turn 40 was revelatory. I’d never really fully absorbed the torturous angst in Gibbons’ lyrics, although I obviously knew they were there, and her delivery alone speaks volumes more than the words themselves. Mostly I was in love with the music. Listening closely to her now, I realize how perfect her pain sounded to an owner of a lonely heart—and how I’m no longer that person, thank God.

In my youthful naïvete, the song “Glory Box,” with the chorus “Give me a reason to be a woman,” went right over my head. Why does she need a reason to be a woman? I wondered. Now I hear the narrator as a young person slightly terrified of her own sexuality, tired of playing teasing games with childish men, and longing for deep connection with someone outside the shallow small-town dating pool she’s swimming in. She’s stuck in an arrested adolescence, longing to transform into a confident, mature adult—which most of my generation (and my small college town) did for far too long, myself included (and some are still there). What’s more, the song ends with Gibbons abbreviating the line to just “Give me a reason to be”—an existentialist demand if there ever was one.

The newer material from Third is musically just as impressive as anything they’ve ever done, with the exception of “Machine Gun,” which works well enough on the recording but is interminable live, saved only by the visuals. And yet there’s something missing for me; I don’t feel it as deeply as I did when I wallowed in woe alongside Gibbons, when I felt every emotion with much more intensity than I do now. On Third, she’s still in that same emotional place—in her lyrics at least, I hope not in real life—and sings, “I’ve travelled so far but somehow feel the same / I’m so unsure.”

Now that I’m 40 and under the illusion that I’m somehow more mature and wise, I don’t expect nor want Portishead to sing about shiny, happy people. I want them to continue to do whatever the hell they want and make brilliant records and stunning stage shows. And I want to thank them for coming back into my life at this particular milestone—and not just so I can check them off on my gig scorecard.

September '11 reviews

2011-09-29T22:06:00.004-04:00

The following reviews ran in the Kitchener-Waterloo Record and Guelph Mercury during the month of September.

Active Child – You Are All I See (Vagrant)

What happens when a Philadelphia choir boy who plays the harp makes music that sounds a lost ’80s new wave classic mixed with modern dubstep like The Weeknd and James Blake?

That’s not a question anyone would ever have thought to ask, but Pat Grossi of Active Child is happy to provide the answer. In one of the most inventive debut albums of the year, Grossi drapes his Sigur Ros-esque falsetto over fluttering harp, pillowy synths, and carefully conducted electronic beats, creating songs that—were they not primarily about heartbreak—sound spiritual and devotional, despite, or perhaps because of, the otherworldly artifice of the instrumentation. Like Bon Iver’s new album, there are some decidedly unfashionable ’80s production touches, but there’s nothing in Grossi’s self-contained sonic atmosphere to suggest that he’s trying to follow any trend at all. (Sept. 1)

Download: “Hanging On,” “You Are All I See,” “High Priestess”

Atropolis – s/t (Dutty Artz)

Adam Partridge grew up in the New York City borough of Queens, but he’s been spending a lot of time in South America in the past few years, journeys that pay off on his debut as Atropolis, on the record label run by DJ Rupture, one of the leading cross-cultural curators in the U.S. Partridge recorded in Colombia with several vocalists, cumbia musicians, and local accordion legend Hugo Carlos Granados. Other tracks draw from modern Brazilian digital rhythms, not unlike Portugese/Angolan group Buraka Som Sistema, and there are trace elements of Argentinean tango as well. Though traditional elements are always in the mix, Partridge plays with them all in a decidedly 21st-century context. (Sept. 29)

Download: “Che Bo,” “Som Sista,” “NY Chero”

Blitzen Trapper - American Goldwing (Sub Pop)

The cover art looks like an 8-track tape you’d find in a truck stop in Montana. And it’s not a joke, nor is the inside photo showing the band in tattered jean jackets, trucker hats, plaid shirts and clutching cans of beer. Blitzen Trapper don’t sound a day older than 1975, playing boogie rock somewhere in that not-so-vast distance between Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Doobie Brothers. Harmonized guitar leads, slide guitars, roadhouse piano, touches of mandolin, the occasional conga: these guys have probably played more than a few cabin keg parties in their time. By their own admission, it’s music that will “make you want to shotgun a beer in the shower while listening to the Stones or Joe Walsh,” according to the self-penned bio by frontman Eric Earley.

There’s no shortage of retro ’70s bands, and excellent ones at that, such as Toronto’s Zeus, but few feel as fossilized as Blitzen Trapper. You could easily knock them for that, or you could respect how incredibly good they are at it. This is not a fashion for these guys; they wouldn’t have nailed every minor detail and vocal harmony if they were merely auditioning for a sequel to Almost Famous (a part they would get in a Hollywood minute). (Sept. 22)

Download: “Might Find It Cheap,” “The Way You Walk Away,” “Your Crying Eyes”

Ry Cooder – Pull Up Some Dust and Sit Down (Nonesuch)

It’s hard not to respect Ry Cooder as a guitarist, especially the albums where he’s acted as a Western conduit to Cuban music (Buena Vista Social Club), Mali desert blues (Ali Farka Toure) and Mexican-American culture (Chavez Ravine). Considering that he’s a vocalist of limited means, however, you have to be a big fan to sit through one of his singer/songwriter albums. Except this one.

Like many Americans, Cooder is angry. This is his State of the Union address, written as Woody Guthrie might have done and set to a backdrop of blues, reggae, gospel, TexMex, Cajun and country songs. Bankers, warmongers, racists, environmental pillagers, politicians of all stripes, religious fundamentalists—they all get an earful from Cooder, who delivers his tirades in folksy songs that are welcoming rather than alienating.

The only odd thing about this album is that it seemingly stands alone: considering the populist anger from every corner of the political spectrum in the last five years, and now that the “Occupy Wall Street” movement is gaining momentum, why isn’t more music as direct and fiery as this? It’s not like Cooder is writing from the headlines, either; a song like “No Banker Left Behind” has nothing at all to do with the 2008 crash and bailout, although it certainly carries plenty of resonance.

It’s easy to be cynical about the decline of America; it’s a skill to channel that and turn it into art filled with joy and beauty along with the bile. (Sept. 8)

Download: “No Banker Left Behind,” “Christmas Time This Year,” “Lord Tell Me Why”

Grace Jones - Hurricane (Pias)

“Who can define infinity?” Grace Jones asks on “Love You to Life.”

The answer is easy: her North American fans, who are only getting to hear Hurricane now, an interminable three years after its U.K. release. That’s an entirely inexplicable and inexcusable delay in this digital age, especially considering renewed interest in not only her legacy as a style icon (her image suddenly started appearing on t-shirts and buttons again), but also her classic early ’80s albums, which fused reggae, new wave and R&B in progressive ways rarely heard since.

Not only is Hurricane Jones’s first album of original material in 19 years (well, 22, for this continent), but it’s also one of her best. She’s once again working with the Compass Point All-Stars, the ace studio musicians assembled in Nassau, Bahamas, for her early records (as well as for Black Uhuru, Robert Palmer, and Tom Tom Club), a group that includes the legendary rhythm section of Sly & Robbie, keyboardist Wally Badarou and guitarist Barry Reynolds.

As one can imagine, Grace Jones has a lot to say now that she’s back. The first words you hear are: “This is my voice, my weapon of choice.” On the title track, co-written with and featuring Tricky, she boasts, “I can be cool, soft as a breeze / and I’ll be a hurricane, ripping up trees.” This album originally came out a mere month after the financial collapse, but she has a piercing song called “Corporate Cannibal” (“legalized criminal!”), where she snarls, “I’ll consume my consumers with no sense of humour” (there’s also an amazing video for this song, naturally).

Hurricane is also one of her most personal statements. There are several songs here with autobiographical overtones, but none more so than “Williams’ Blood,” co-written with Wendy & Lisa (of Prince and the Revolution), which tells the tale of her mother, a Jamaican girl who married a preacher at age 17, and moved the family to Syracuse, New York, when Jones was a teenager.

Musically and lyrically, this is everything Jones has ever done well. She no longer sounds cutting edge—the most modern tracks here sound like ’90s trip-hop, which is not surprising considering that Massive Attack invited her to play a festival of theirs right before she made this record, and Tricky is a guest—but she’s embraced gospel choirs and large string sections that enhance her already rich sound, making this perhaps the most lush album in her discography. Her powerful voice hasn’t diminished a bit, and for every darker trip-hop turn such as the title track or “Corporate Cannibal,” there’s a gospel-tinged pop-reggae song like “Love You to Life” or “Well Well Well.”

It only makes sense that when such an icon has been silent for so long, she should come roaring back with a comeback as successful as this one. This is one Hurricane that North Americans should welcome ashore. (Sept. 22)

Download: “Williams’ Blood,” “Love You to Life,” “This Is”

Nick Lowe - The Old Magic (Yep Roc)

When a beloved 62-year-old songwriter puts out an album called The Old Magic, fans of his early work might anticipate a return to his late ’70s power pop sound.

Instead, however, the title is more literal: it’s a magical record by an old guy who’s acting his age. Whether he’s musing about his “Checkout Time,” boasting about how well-read he is (“I read a lot / and not just magazines”), getting a new start on life (“House for Sale,” “Restless Feeling”), or reading too much into flowers (“Stoplight Roses,” “The Poisoned Rose”), Nick Lowe does it over classy, ’50s-tinged lounge arrangements that allow his well-matured voice to luxuriate over every note. Sometimes he dips into a country shuffle, sometimes a reggae backbeat, but mostly The Old Magic is rich with lush balladry that calls out for candles, a fine red wine and dark chocolate.

Every track here makes a case for Lowe getting even better with age. Score another one for the geezer. (Sept. 15)

Download: “Checkout Time,” “Shame on the Rain,” “You Don’t Know Me At All”

Mister Heavenly - Out of Love (Sub Pop)

Mister Heavenly owes a debt to ’50s pop music, filtered as it is through three guys—Nick Thorburn of Islands, Ryan Kattner of Man Man, and Modest Mouse drummer Joe Plummer—who built their careers on herky-jerky, off-kilter indie rock. It’s inventive, catchy and occasionally cartoonishly creepy; they call it “doom wop.” Mostly, it’s just a lot of fun.

Thorburn knows how to bring out the best in people with slower creative processes than himself; likewise, they’re responsible for his best albums with the Unicorns (with Alden Penner), Human Highway (with Jim Guthrie) and now this. In each of these projects there’s a tossed-off, carefree air to the recordings that keeps the songs simple, the harmonies clear, the arrangements uncluttered. There’s nothing lazy about it, however: Mister Heavenly doesn’t sound like a half-baked side project, but a fully realized unit unto itself, one that can even get away with ridiculous songs that have choruses like “cut me off a slice of reggae pie.”

The album ends on a suspended note; hopefully this is not the last we hear of Mister Heavenly. (Sept. 8)

Download: “I Am a Hologram,” “Mister Heavenly,” “Charlyne”

The Pack A.D. - Unpersons (Mint)

When you’re a young, two-piece garage band who put out four albums in four years and tour your asses off around the world, it’s a matter of time before you either a) burn out or b) make your masterpiece. And so if previous albums by this Vancouver group have been somewhat underwhelming, Unpersons finds them firing on all cylinders, crafting one of the most exciting rock records of the year.

They play with the intensity of a band determined to make the most out of every second on stage, no matter the venue, no matter the audience. And with the help of Detroit’s finest garage rock producer Jim Diamond (Dirtbombs, White Stripes), and recorded in Vancouver’s finest studio, The Hive (Black Mountain, Destroyer), The Pack A.D. are snarling, spitting and ready to knock you on your feet. Guitarist/vocalist Becky Black sings like a woman done wrong, who’s ready to exorcise any and all demons in song.

The sound is heavy, the performances are raw, and they’ve honed their songwriting for maximum riffs, hooks, and melody. What more do you want in a rock’n’roll record? (Sept. 15)

Download: “Sirens,” “Seasick,” “8”

Red Hot + Rio 2 – Various Artists (E1)

When the first Red Hot + Rio compilation came out 15 years ago, Brazilian music’s proximity to the mainstream seemed distant, notwithstanding flirtations from David Byrne and Paul Simon (the albums Rei Momo and Rhythm of the Saints, respectively). That first album, which featured Everything But the Girl, Stereolab, Maxwell, Sting, and PM Dawn, focused mainly on the bossa nova era of Brazilian music, playing into the easy listening revival of the time.

Today, Brazilian music of every stripe has taken off, whether it’s the smooth stylings of Bebel Gilberto or the aggressive favela booty bass that drives bands like Bondo do Role, and Brazilian rhythms can be heard on any number of mainstream pop singles. And so Red Hot + Rio 2 boasts 33 tracks, over two hours of music, and a lineup that includes Beirut, Devendra Banhart, Eugene Hutz of Gogol Bordello, John Legend, Madlib, and dozens more. Money Mark (best known as the Beastie Boys’ keyboardist) and Marisa Monte are the only repeat performers.

Many tracks are covers of songs from the tropicalia era of late ’60s and early ’70s Brazilian music, a psychedelic pop movement that was considered politically subversive by the country’s military regime at the time. Therefore tropicalia pioneers Os Mutantes are paired up with like-minded contemporaries Of Montreal for an inspired romp through their original “Bat Macumba,” while soul singers Alice Smith and Aloe Blacc breathe new life into “Baby,” a Caetano Veloso song of which Os Mutantes did the most recognizable cover. Brooklyn weirdo dance-pop duo Javelin team up with tropicalia’s most delightful and inventive oddball, Tom Zé, on “Ogodô Ano 2000.” And new-school Brazilian singer Seu Jorge duets with Beck on a cover of the latter’s song “Tropicalia,” which helped rekindle interest in the movement when it came out 13 years ago on Beck’s Mutations.

This is not all tropicalia all the time, however. Marina Gasolina and Secousse bring some modern favela funk to “Freak le Boom Boom,” while Los Van Van and Carlinhos Brown bring a big brass sound to more traditional rhythms. And it makes perfect sense that the group Brazilian Girls show up here, with Angelique Kidjo and Forro in the Dark in tow. Indeed, the only downfall of this compilation is that it’s exhausting: there’s too much of a good thing.

As always, this Red Hot album is a benefit for AIDS charities; the Red Hot organization was founded 22 years ago and has been responsible for 15 compilations in various genres, although there have only been three in the last decade (all of them are wonderful: the other two are 2003’s Red Hot and Riot, a tribute to Fela Kuti, and 2009’s Dark Was the Night, which was curated by The National). With the 30th anniversary of AIDS being marked this year (note the excellent cover story in the September issue of The Walrus), the disease is still the subject of misunderstandings and problematic solutions, despite the fact that being HIV-positive is no longer a death sentence. Cheers to the Red Hot folks for effectively enhancing their activism with excellent music. (Sept. 1)

Download: “Tropical Affair” – Money Mark, Thalma De Freitas & João Parahyba; “Um Girassol Da Cor Do Seu Cabelo” – Mia Doi Todd and José González; “Boa Reza” – Vanessa Da Mata, Seu Jorge & Almaz

Tasseomancy - Ulalume (Out of This Spark)

Something wicca this way comes.

Formerly known as Ghost Bees, Tasseomancy—the name refers to the art of reading tea leaves—are twin sisters from Halifax who currently tour the world as backup singers with Austra, though they sound like they ran away from a Renaissance Fair and wrote a few songs while boiling bats and casting spells. Sample chorus: “Who’s at my altar? For these beasts are not lambs for the slaughter…” You get the idea.

How out there is this duo? Their official bio compares them to Comus, a psychedelic British folk group from the ’60s—who are kind of an obscurists’ trump card, really—that sounded like your most terrifying hippie nightmare come true, chanting in the woods with hand drums, flutes and demonic lyrics. Tasseomancy do not, thankfully, sound like Comus (there can and should be only one Comus), but there is plenty of autoharp and arch vocals and an obvious influence from the darker corners of British folk.

To help them make their debut as Tasseomancy—the name Ulalume comes from an Edgar Allan Poe poem—they turned to Taylor Kirk of Timber Timbre, a guy who knows a thing or two about creeping ’round back stairs. He even takes lead vocals on a track called, of course, “The Darkness of Things.” Kirk doesn’t try to guide them into any sense of normalcy or pop tradition, like his own band. He’s happy to follow them down whatever rabbit hole they take him; his job is to make sure their dream world is as brightly lit and colourful as possible.

Hallowe’en is just around the corner, kids. Here’s your haunted house soundtrack. (Sept. 29)

Download: “Heavy Sleep,” “Diana,” “Up You Go Little Smoke”

Tinariwen – Tassili (Anti)

This band of blues musicians from the Sahara Desert formed in refugee camps 30 years ago, from which Moammar Gadhafi recruited mercenaries in exchange for promises of independence for the Tuareg tribe (needless to say, he didn’t deliver). Decades ago they put down their guns in exchange for guitars, and listening to their latest album in the wake of the overthrow of Gadhafi, it sounds like music for the morning after a revolution.

Their 2007 North American breakthrough, Aman Iman, was fiery and electric and full of call-and-response choruses and joyous ululating; it made an easy crossover to rock audiences. Its follow-up was recorded partially in the desert where the band was born, using generators to record their electric guitars around the campfire. This time out they tone things down, making a reflective and primarily acoustic album. After the gunfire—both hostile and celebratory—this sounds like a people pondering possibilities and next steps, as well as mourning the losses that brought them here.

Tassili is also the first Tinariwen album to feature Western guests, although in each case there’s no awkward culture collision; everyone fits seamlessly into the background. Wilco guitarist Nels Cline creates atmospheres behind the opening track “Imidiwan Ma Tennam,” while TV on the Radio vocalists Kyp Malone and Tunde Adebimpe weave themselves into “Tenere Taqhim Tossam” so effectively that you barely notice someone has started singing in English.

Though Tinariwen’s popularity has ushered in many other desert blues purveyors, Tassili displays plenty of intangible, magic moments that illustrate why this group was the first to make an international breakthrough. (Sept. 1)

Download: “Imidiwan Ma Tennam,” “Tenere Taqhim Tossam,” “Walla Illa”

The Weeknd - Thursday (independent)

It’s an axiom that you have your whole life to write your first album, and a few months to write your second. In the age of instant Internet availability, that time has been ostensibly been whittled down to a few weeks.

The Weeknd released their debut, House of Balloons, as a free download in March; word of mouth spread quickly, helped in part by mystique that kept any details about the dark, mysterious R&B project top secret, except for the name of the singer, 21-year-old Torontonian Abel Tesfaye. Fast forward mere months later, and that album has snuck on to the Polaris Prize shortlist and The Weeknd’s debut live show in Toronto was one of the biggest international music stories to come out of that city this year.

With good reason: House of Balloons sounded like a game-changer in modern R&B, a goth-y update on ’90s trip-hop like Tricky, filtered through production advances in hip-hop and electronic music of the last 10 years, both mainstream and underground, with Tesfaye’s smooth vocals and lurid, Lothario persona tying it all together.

Now comes Thursday, another free download album, and concerns about a sophomore slump are inevitable—and valid. The Weeknd sounds—weakened, you could say.

It’s not just that the mystique has been lifted somewhat and therefore the music sounds less opaque. Thursday is like an awkward second date with a guy that seemed so intriguing and charming, albeit a bit weird, the first time out. Now his flaws are magnified and his come-ons less alluring (especially the one—as always, delivered in a smooth, sensitive croon—about how he closes his eyes and imagines making love to someone else when he’s with you).

There is still that voice, an angelic, slippery instrument that can do almost anything—including the use of AutoTune for effect, not necessity, and bridging the natural and digital divide with uncanny ease. But, as with House of Balloons, he’s more often than not applying it to cringe-worth lyrics; in somehow keeping with the “theme” of the album title, the way he keeps rattling off the days of the week sounds like a certain SCTV soap opera parody sketch.

When Tesfaye made his live debut, he had a rock band behind him with electric guitars adding extra crunch; they appear here to pull his forward-thinking hip-hop back to forgettable rock/industrial acts of the ’90s, making much of Thursday sound dated rather than next level. He flirts with reggae on “Life of the Party” and “Heaven or Las Vegas” (not a Cocteau Twins cover—though I wouldn’t put that past him), although in each case it sounds like something Trent Reznor would do with reggae, rather than an Ethiopian-Canadian R&B singer from Toronto.

Tesfaye hasn’t entirely shit the bed, of course; high expectations shouldn’t diminish the gems that appear here. Individual tracks usually rotate around a single sound: the martial drums on “The Birds Part 1,” the acoustic guitar that provides the sole backdrop to "Rolling Stone," the rubbery dub and disembodied R&B of “The Zone.”

This is one of three Weeknd albums of 2011; the third is expected shortly. “Why you rushing me, baby? It’s only us alone,” he sings. But he’s the one who sounds in a hurry here; maybe if he slows down and takes his time, he’ll once again knock our socks off—and a few other items of clothing, by the sounds of it. (Sept. 8)

Download: the entire album is available for free at the-weeknd.com

Wilco – The Whole Love (dBpm/Anti)

If Wilco fans were wondering when relatively new guitarist Nels Cline was finally going to be allowed to shed, you get your answer five minutes into the title track that opens this album. There, the veteran guitar slinger—who joined Wilco just in time for the band to make two of their more subdued, conservative albums in years—lets loose a torrent of noodly pyrotechnics over a song that could otherwise be a Radiohead outtake.

That doesn’t mean the rest of the album follows suit, however. The only thing anyone can expect from Wilco is that they’re going to do whatever they want, and The Whole Love finds them touching on every stage of their career: concise pop songs, heartbreaking acoustic country ballads, weirdo art rock, and some glockenspiels and bird whistling just for the hell of it.

“The night’s so young,” sings Jeff Tweedy, “but I still say we’re too old for clichés.” Now that they’re finally putting out their own records, on their own label, there’s even less expectation for them to bend to anyone’s will. Listening to The Whole Love, you can almost hear them breathing sighs of relief.

Unfortunately, what you don’t hear is them breaking a sweat. While this is a good record by a great band—and better than, say, 2004’s A Ghost is Born or 2007’s Sky Blue Sky—it’s not a particularly satisfying one. Its charms are subtle—in both the uptempo rockers and the spacey, sparse ballads—but unlikely to engage anyone who isn’t already a big fan. Perhaps that’s all we should expect from such a well-oiled machine at this stage of their career.

But if the rest of the album is merely good enough, it’s the closing track, “One Sunday Morning,” that’s the most compelling track here. Tweedy starts it off singing, “This is how I tell him / oh, how it’s long,” and from there embarks on a 12-minute, intensely personal meditation about his deceased father and their torrid relationship, set to little more than three chords and a mid-tempo, subdued acoustic backing. That the band can provide ever-evolving shades and textures to sustain the minimal narrative over such a long period of time is a testament to their many strengths. (Sept. 29)

Download: “I Might,” “Open Mind,” “One Sunday Morning”

Wild Flag – s/t (Merge)

“I’m a race horse / you put your money on me,” sings Carrie Brownstein. With good reason: though Wild Flag are a new band and this their debut album, they have a pedigree that has already got the indie rock geek squad frothing at the mouth.

Brownstein and drummer Janet Weiss are reuniting for the first time since their band Sleater-Kinney—perhaps the most powerful and successful band to emerge from the riot grrrl scene of the early ’90s—announced a hiatus in 2006. (In the meantime, Brownstein became an NPR arts journalist and starred in the comedy series Portlandia; Weiss backed up Pavement’s Stephen Malkmus.) Here they’re joined by the always intriguing Mary Timony, who performed solo and fronted the band Helium, which means two of the finest guitarists of the ’90s American underground are now in the same band together. (Rebecca Cole of the Minders rounds out the lineup on bass and keyboards.)

Though they are all veterans, they play with the enthusiasm of a new band, combining huge classic rock riffs with arty twists and turns, and songs that break down to exuberant handclaps and chanted vocals. Like any young band, several songs are about the love of music itself; the joy of writing and performing is not something these ladies take for granted. “Sound is the blood between me and you,” they sing on opening track “Romance,” and that’s obvious not only in their years of experience, but in their years of friendship together. (Brownstein and Timony actually had a short-lived side project in the ’90s called the Spells, an underwhelming distraction that didn’t prepare their fans for the rock onslaught of Wild Flag.)

And yet though Brownstein and Timony clearly work well together, they don’t yet share the same intuitive and explosive chemistry Brownstein shared with Sleater-Kinney’s other singer/guitarist, Corin Tucker (who released her own low-key solo project earlier this year). And so while Wild Flag’s main selling point to Sleater-Kinney fans may be the return of Brownstein and Weiss, what this band really signals is a creative return for Timony, whose last couple of records dulled the edges off the unique sound she crafted in Helium and her first two solo albums; here, her recognizable guitar tone, particular scales and approach to melody contrast is coaxed into new territory by Brownstein.

All of that nitpicking is really only relevant to those who grew up worshipping these women; any and all newcomers are likely to wave the Wild Flag loud and proud right from the opening notes. They play Lee’s Palace in Toronto on October 11. (Sept. 15)

Download: “Romance,” “Glass Tambourine,” “Electric Band”

Polaris 2011 predictions, day five

2011-09-12T18:31:00.005-04:00

Polaris prize prognostications, day five.

Keep in mind that the only year I’ve successfully predicted the winner was the inaugural ceremony, when it went to Final Fantasy (which everyone else thought was a dark horse). Since then, however, the closest I’ve come to betting-pool success is thinking Caribou had a good shot for Andorra (he won), though even then I thought it would go to the Weakerthans. So make of all that what you will.

I’ve said it before: this year’s shortlist is the most satisfying to me, and I’ll be happy if anyone but Hey Rosetta takes home the prize. And among the substitutions I’ve been advocating for all week, there’s really only two or three that I think should be on the shortlist in place of something that’s already there.

Hats off to Steve Jordan, Liisa Ladouceur and everyone else who puts the prize together, and I’m very sad that I’m going to have to miss this year’s gala (though I have a pretty fun, once-in-a-lifetime excuse).

With that, here’s the final installment.

Timber Timbre – Creep On Creeping On (Arts and Crafts)

The album: Oh, Taylor Kirk of Timber Timbre is creepy, all right. But when you’re going for a certain mood and trying to create genuine tension, does it help to give your album such a campy title? Worse yet, write that phrase into the chorus of the title track? For some, Kirk is moving into schtick territory with this, his fourth album of David Lynch-ian, ’50s nightmare flashbacks and backwoods weirdness. For many more, however, Kirk continues to step up his game, to inherit his Elvis-in-hell persona, and to inject more cinematic terror into his tunes.

He did most of this better on his last album, 2009’s self-titled release, but that’s not the point here. This is his first record made after touring with a band, which makes the music sound considerably more confident and gives it a certain strut; in particular, violinist Mika Posen (Forest City Lovers) provides essential textures, what David Dacks calls “Nelson Riddle meets Stravinsky” in his excellent Exclaim piece on the band.

The album is split between actual songs and cinematic interludes; the latter are often more effective at creating bonafide creepiness. That’s in part because they’re so well-constructed, but it’s also because Kirk’s lyrics and delivery are at times too self-conscious.

Take, for example, his deadpan delivery in “Lonesome Hunter”: “What did that bad man put in you? Did those wrong kids cross a line? I’m afraid I’ll never understand, baby, and I’m so sorry you had such a bad time. Well, I’ve done some truly awful things. And you must be very terrified. You have every reason to be frightened, since you’ve been reading my mind.” It’s not like those lyrics are inherently awful, the way they’re delivered here, I’m not buying them.

Musically, it’s hard to fault anything on this album, other than the moment when the title track segues into "Black Water" using the same key and same tempo and featuring the same plinky-piano eighth notes. Opener “Bad Ritual” is perhaps Kirk’s finest recorded moment, setting his ghoulish atmosphere to a groove he admits he ripped off the RZA; before now, you’d never have guessed Timber Timbre could be funky.

The chances: Fair. Could be a compromise candidate. And Polaris owes Timber Timbre something, after the 2009 album failed to make that year’s shortlist and yet won Eye Weekly’s cross-Canada critics’ poll that year—making one wonder how it could top a national poll and yet not make the top 10 in a process featuring those same journalists. One has to assume they were all Johnny-come-latelies and didn’t hear the album until its rerelease on Arts and Crafts.

More importantly, as Aaron Brophy accurately argues in Maclean’s, Timber Timbre and Austra will split the goth-y witch/warlock vote, so maybe it doesn’t really have any chance at all.

The Weeknd – House of Balloons (independent)

The album: Unlike any other album ever shortlisted for the Polaris, House of Balloons takes place after a night in clubland, when the drugs come out in a room full of glass tables, you leave those pussy-ass niggas behind and the time for subtle come-ons is long over. Those girls over there, with the Louis V. bags, tats on their arms, and high-heeld shoes makin’ them six feet tall? They’re all hos, here to help fuck away the pain lying beneath ever lurid Lothario: “Bring your love, baby, I can bring my shame.”

“Trust me girl, you want to be high for this,” goes the opening track. By the time it’s over, you’ll feel like Tom Cruise at the end of Eyes Wide Shut—not because you’ve just been on an all-night bender at a sex party, but because you just saw a film that looked fantastic, but was patently ridiculous.

Picking out the stupidest lyrics on House of Balloons is a bit of a turkey shoot. But it sure is fun: “I’m on that shit you can’t smell, baby, so put down your perfume.” “Got the walls kicking like they’re six months pregnant.” Or, the one that makes me laugh out loud, a dead-serious lyric in the middle of a so-called seduction: “What you doing in the baffroom? I hear noises in the baffroom!”

Could an album that uses the word “baffroom” really win the Polaris? Absolutely. That’s because lyrics aside—and that’s a big aside—House of Balloons is more than intoxicating from a sonic standpoint: this is a modern, post-R. Kelly R&B record, complete with AutoTune and plenty of quivering falsetto, and yet it’s often set to unnerving, abstract beats, ghostly textures, the weirdest moments of Massive Attack or Prince’s Black Album, and electronic sounds usually only favoured by reclusive post-industrial sound artists from Finland.

Abel Tesfaye, the 21-year-old University of Toronto student who’s been playing hard to get with all media ever since he posted this album as a free download (don’t expect him to show up at the gala), manages to take all those influences and create something magical, mysterious and stunning. Those lyrics? You actually don’t notice them at all unless you’re listening closely, because Tesfaye has a strong soul voice—he doesn’t need that AutoTune, it’s employed as a disembodying effect—that could make just about anything sound sweet and seductive. Which means that “The Morning” is the most beautiful, tender song you’ve ever heard about a “house full of hoes that specialize in hoe-in’.”

The chances: Strong. By bridging pop music and avant-garde production with modern soul, there’s nothing else on the list that sounds like this, and it stands alone in modern R&B—for starters, its miles ahead of other supposed game-changers like Kanye West’s 808 and Heartbreak. And if all the indie rockers in the jury room start fighting each other, this could come straight up the middle.

Alternates:

Rural Alberta Advantage – Departing (Paper Bag)

The album: (poached from my March 2011 review) We’re told Alberta is all about the economy: it’s the province that doesn’t run deficits (or at least, until recently); it’s the province without a sales tax; it’s the province whose oil sands are the engine of the Canadian economy; it’s the province that sends politicians to Ottawa who are all about fiscal restraint.

The Rural Alberta Advantage is by no means a political band, but they are certainly an economical one. There is no dead weight in this trio, not a note out of place in these 10 songs delivered in 32 minutes, and there is plenty of space surrounding the succinct melodies of frontman Nils Edenloff. Departing delivers considerable improvements from the band’s promising debut, with drummer Paul Banwatt (also of Woodhands) punctuating every song with propulsive, syncopated beats that set the group far apart from its influences or peers; multi-instrumentalist Amy Cole not only softens Edenloff’s nasal tenor, but her additional percussion and keyboards add subtle but extremely effective texture. Edenloff plays guitar, but never as a crutch; for an indie-rock trio, it’s to their credit that the guitar is the least important instrument here.

If there’s a flaw here, it’s that Edenloff’s voice is a bit too thin to sell the songs, and he pushes it to its limits—but then again, a more proficient belter might make this too bombastic. It would be almost too easy to transform these songs into Arcade Fire anthems, but Rural Alberta Advantage are content to carve out their own niche. And you can take that to the bank.

Why it didn’t make the shortlist: That’s a total mystery, other than that the indie-rock vote is pretty widely split. I figured it would be a shoo-in, although the nasal vocals are a stumbling block for many.

Sloan – The Double Cross (Outside)

The album:
(poached from my May 2011 review. Apologies for the plagiarism, it’s a very busy week.)

When celebrating your 20^th anniversary, the last thing you want is people wondering: are they still around? Or worse: why are they still around? Sloan provide definitive answers to both by coming out swinging on their tenth album.

For a band that has always prided itself on being a four-way democracy, there have always been albums where someone isn’t pulling their weight. This is not one of them: every member brings their best game to the table, not just individually—they’ve had a tendency to retreat to their silos in the past—but together, as on the Chris Murphy/Andrew Scott song “She’s Slowing Down Again,” or the way some songs cross-pollinate, inserting a chorus of one into the coda of another. Jay Ferguson, the most consistent Sloan songwriter of the last decade, once again scores the album’s sweetest spots (notably “Green Gardens Cold Montreal,” an acoustic gem), and Patrick Pentland’s rockers sound much more inspired here than he has lately.

If anniversaries are a moment for self-examination, this band’s 20th proved to be a rallying point to give them a raison d’etre. There’s no point sitting around and waiting for radio royalties and festival paycheques to roll in, and so The Double Cross sounds like they’re proving something to themselves as much as their fairweather fans. There isn’t a wasted moment in any of these 12 songs: it’s the sound of a band that is still very much alive and fighting, not resting on a recorded legacy but continuing to make it.

Why it didn’t make the shortlist: The Double Cross came out in May, right before the June deadline, so jurors didn’t get to spend their summer beer bashes letting it soak in. But the more obvious reason is jurors taking geezers for granted (although, hello, Ron Sexsmith), and Sloan certainly played up said status by talking up their 20^th anniversary in all the press for the album. (The album title is a Roman numeral joke.) No matter how much our collective youth may have been informed by the likes of Sloan, The Tragically Hip, Blue Rodeo or other CanRock icons, it’s unlikely any of their new records will ever sneak onto a shortlist.

Polaris 2011 predictions, day four

2011-09-11T23:55:00.008-04:00

Predictions for the Polaris Prize, to be handed out Monday, September 19.

Ron Sexsmith – Long Player Late Bloomer (Warner)

The album: Ron Sexsmith has been underestimated his entire life, and so more than 15 years after his major label debut (which was almost dumped before it came out, were it not for the intervention of Elvis Costello), few expected him to come back swinging the way he does here, his fifth truly great record. (The others would be Grand Opera Lane, the self-titled album, Whereabouts and Cobblestone Runway.)

Whether it’s just chance that his songwriting stepped up from his last several lukewarm releases, or whether it was the intervention of producer Bob Rock (who also resurrected The Tragically Hip from a lazy period), Long Player Late Bloomer displays Sexsmith as a master melodicist, a songwriting student of the greats who knows how to use more than just major and minor chords and still sound beautifully simple, and a lyricist with a knack for rhyme schemes and turns of phrase.

He also manages to poke fun at his own underdog, sad-sack status on songs like the title track, "Believe It When I See It" and "Get In Line" (“If you’re bent on bringing me down/ take a number and get in line”), and he does so without ever being maudlin or overly self-referential; any specifics in Sexsmith’s songs are easily applied to the universal, like the hard-luck narrative "Michael and His Dad."

There are plenty of reasons why Sexsmith’s songwriting heroes sing his praises, and why young artists want to work with him: he knows his craft inside out, and here he’s largely on top of his game. I only say “largely” because the last five of these 13 tracks drag the momentum down to a crawl; among this album’s many strengths, sequencing is obviously one of them.

Trivia fact: Not only is Sexsmith the oldest artist on the list, he’s also the only one on a major label.

The chances: Slim. While this is undoubtedly Sexsmith’s finest work in almost 10 years, which is why it deserves to be on this list, the final third doesn’t hold up. Also, I’d be shocked if a Polaris jury went for something this conventional, conservative, straightforward and pretty.

Colin Stetson – Judges: New History of Warfare Vol. 2 (Constellation)

The album: Here it is, the weirdo whipping boy of this year’s Polaris prize. This is the album that people point to and start talking about what a “weird” shortlist we have this year, how Polaris can’t ever possibly be a populist prize (hello, Arcade Fire?), and how critics are obviously a snobby bunch who reward technical accomplishment and artistic adventure over music that anyone would actually want to listen to. On the flip side, you have critics patting themselves on the back ad nauseum for rewarding such obviously uncommercial music in a fit of self-congratulatory frenzy.

The best quip so far about this dilemma comes from Aaron Brophy of the late Chart Attack, saying the task for jurors was to “debate whether Colin Stetson's work constitutes sonic beauty, or the equivalent of punching a goose in the chest and then recording and looping its death wheezes.”

If you don’t know by now, Colin Stetson is an in-demand sideman (Arcade Fire, Bell Orchestre, Bon Iver, Tom Waits) who not only plays solo saxophone (the bass saxophone, mostly, a behemoth of an instrument), but he plays every single part of that saxophone: the clicks, the clucks, the thucks, the what-the-fucks, often while singing through it at the same time. He accomplishes all this through circular breathing, and there are no overdubs or loops on the album at all, other than vocals from Laurie Anderson (with whom Stetson has toured) and Shara Worden (My Brightest Diamond). Contrary to popular belief, his music is composed, not improvised—and therefore it is not “free jazz,” which it is often referred to as.

There’s no question that what Stetson does is unique, even though other people have used aspects of his technique before. And the production is astounding, the way the engineers (including Godspeed’s Efrim Menuck) capture every intimate sound emerging from Stetson’s body via the saxophone. (I’d argue that the reason other avant-garde records don’t reach a mass audience is not inherently the content, but because they don’t sound as fabulous as this record does.)

But is it any good? Of course it is. It’s alternately subtly evocative and overwhelming. It’s both meditative and assaultive. Its undulating arpeggios lull the listener any which way Stetson wants us to go, tiny melodies emerging from the waves and beckoning us to listen just a little closer. It’s an album that, unlike every single pop record that’s ever been on this list, doesn’t tell you what to think; your experience with it will change every single time, depending on your mood, your environment, and your sound system.

The only major drawback is that yes, it is repetitive and can sound like a one-trick pony. But what a beautiful pony! What an amazing ride!

And there, folks, is the cheesiest thing I’ve said about any record all year, perhaps any record ever.

For shits and giggles, read my in-depth interview with Stetson here, conducted before anyone thought this would be anything more than another weird Montreal record on Constellation.

The chances: Slim, for all the obvious reasons. But if for some reason he did win it, he’d be the first American artist to do so: Stetson was born and raised in Michigan, started his career in New York City and San Francisco, and moved to Montreal to live with Sarah Neufeld of Bell Orchestre and Arcade Fire.

The alternates:

Selina Martin – Disaster Fantasies (independent)

The album: (partially poached from my September 2010 review) Disaster Fantasies displays Martin as an ambitious singer/songwriter with a knockout voice and the ability to corral her artier tendencies into a commanding power pop band; it’s an album that works on an entirely visceral level, with no shortage of catchy earworms and bold rock guitars. And yet there are tonnes of tiny tasty bits in every corner, whether it’s Rheostatics guitarist Martin Tielli noodling noisily underneath “I Know Dullness,” Laura Barrett’s kalimba on “News of Her Death,” or Martin herself playing wine glasses or tapping the loose end of a plugged-in patch cord as part of a rhythm track. Producer Chris Stringer (the D’Urbervilles, Timber Timbre) helps Martin paint vivid sonic portraits and brings the entire project into clear focus, amplifying the rock elements and leaving space for acoustic intimacy (“Throw Me in the Water”).

Though she pulls of power pop with aplomb—the “Misty Mountain Hop” vibe of “No Form,” the Cheap Trick nod on “The Hottest Day,” the direct influence of the Rheostatics on “I Know Dullness” (Martin has collaborated with that band often, and this album features engineering and mixing from Michael Philip Wojewoda)—it’s the ballads where she shines the strongest: “Throw Me In the Water,” “Breathe In” and “Always On My Mind” all candidates for song of the year.

Why it didn’t make the shortlist (or long list): An independent release with mostly local publicity, it likely didn’t have enough national traction to make an impact, despite the best efforts of Robert Everett-Green of the Globe and Mail, who wrote this article and several other laudatory pieces. Or maybe writers weren’t intrigued by an album with a song called “Rape During Wartime”?

Doug Paisley – Constant Companion (No Quarter)

The album: There was no better album for taking to a Canadian cottage this year than Doug Paisley’s second release: the songs, all anchored by Paisley’s warm acoustic guitar, all sound like campfire singalongs and lullabies; Garth Hudson of The Band can be heard noodling tastefully underneath many of the tracks; the drums sound soft and gentle, like there are pillows over the snare and every tom; the harmonies between humble-voiced Paisley and Jennifer Castle sound like a veteran couple who grew up singing “Four Strong Winds” together.

So he has a late-night soft-rock vibe down to a T—so what? So do several dozen other Canucks plugging away. The difference with Paisley is all in the songwriting: every single song here sounds like a Gordon Lightfoot classic or a Townes Van Zant greatest (non-)hits package. The arrangements are impeccable: there’s never too much or too little going on; every note is just right.

When Paisley blows up large, expect thousands of people to claim they were on to him first.

Why it didn’t make the shortlist: While it’s great that Ron Sexsmith made it, it’s a shame there wasn’t room for more than one singer/songwriter, because Paisley’s album is nothing short of perfect. This came out on a tiny American label (not even one known for singer/songwriters; most of its acts are psychedelic rock) and caught traction slowly and by word of mouth. Its initial appeal was primarily a Toronto-only phenomenon; the album was re-released by Maple a few months back, and expect his next record to get a much bigger push.

Polaris 2011 predictions, day three

2011-09-10T09:20:00.006-04:00

Day three of Polaris Prize predictions, featuring two albums from the shortlist and two alternate suggestions.

Galaxie – Tigre et Diesel (C4)

The album: Only in Quebec would a band think to match ’70s blues rock with electro beats and shades of Krautrock. And only in Quebec could such a band make it work so brilliantly as Galaxie does. Every wonder what it would sound like if Quintron produced a collaboration between ZZ Top and Neu? No, I hadn’t either. But thank God it exists.

Though this is one of the more obscure albums on the list, it most certainly does not deserve to be. Anyone who thinks this was an oddball addition to the shortlist quite obviously hasn’t ever listened to it. Tigre et Diesel should be heard on classic rock stations across the country, be blasting out of cars at the beach, and soundtracking your next backyard BBQ. It’s sweaty, it’s sexy, and it’s built equally for fist-pumping, disco dancing and spacing out. Just another night on St. Denis, really.

This is one of only two francophone albums to ever make a Polaris list that I can completely get behind (the other was La Patere Rose, long listed two years ago, and I’m still disappointed that Pas Chic Chic was completely ignored by Polaris jurors several years back—and everyone else, it seems). Bandleader and singer Olivier Langevin makes you instantly forget that old adage that I heard a French actor repeat on stage at TIFF this week: “French rock’n’roll is like English wine.” Not anymore it’s not.

The chances: Slim. I’m going to assume there will be an unspoken, unconscious bias in the jury room against awarding the award to a francophone band two years in a row. But just being on the shortlist is a major coup for this band; hopefully they’ve been able to translate it into wider exposure and bring the rock to TROC. Watch them slay on gala night.

Hey Rosetta – Seeds (Sonic)

The album: Can someone explain to me the difference between Hey Rosetta and Hootie and the Blowfish?

I’m not being facetious here. I really don’t get it. There’s something patently offensive to me about a band being emo and intense about songs that really don’t deserve it. I like the music they aspire to make—there are nods to Arcade Fire’s more blustery moments here. Not that it works, though, nor do the artier moments that sound like a poor man’s Karkwa. You can’t build to a climax without any tension or road map to a big finish. The string section is a part of the core band, but they sound grafted on to everything and not employed particularly effectively. Don’t get me started on the track with the Inuit folk singers, which seems to have been concocted at some CBC Radio 2 programming meeting (not terrible in principle, but horribly executed).

The chances: In a year with so much heavyweight talent, I’m going to have to say slim. And if this wins, I’m going to start throwing tables.

The alternates:

Eternia & Moss – At Last (Urbnet)

The album: “They tell me that I’m too late / too wordy / too white.” Well, whoever “they are,” they’re dead wrong. Ottawa MC Eternia has been around for the better part of a decade, but this is as good an introduction to her work as any, and the title (apologies to Etta James) is more than apt—this is easily not only a personal best, but the most gripping hip-hop album released in Canada in the last year.

With stunning, raw backing beats from MoSS (Raekwon, Ghostface Killah), drawing from ’70s funk and film soundtracks—and bearing the obvious influence of his highest profile fan, Gang Starr’s DJ Premier—Eternia’s furious flow spins mostly autobiographical tales. And she has more than a few stories to tell: abusive father, restraining orders, shotguns, alcoholism, sexual assault, Catholic redemption … you name it, she’s lived it and come through stronger. This isn’t a confessional or just about one woman’s pain, however; Eternia is engaging and dynamic throughout, and earns every bit of her braggadocio by outshining high-profile guests like Rah Digga and Maestro Fresh Wes.

Why it didn’t make the shortlist: Eternia is pure, raw hip-hop, unlike the likes of Shad, K’naan and K-OS, who all balance their beats with acoustic guitars and pop songs. That puts her in a uphill battle for crossover appeal, yet anyone who’s ever loved hip-hop can appreciate the mastery at work here. Again, in a less competitive year, she’d likely have had a better shot.

It Kills – s/t (independent)

The album: This was the most pleasant surprise of the 2010/11 Polaris fiscal year, a Halifax trio who sound alternately like a string quartet, a chamber choir, and a small ensemble scoring a Hal Hartley film. Fans of early 4AD recordings (This Mortal Coil) will find plenty to appreciate here, as will people who appreciate the Constellation Records roster but don’t feel like slitting their wrists on a regular basis. While It Kills do have their somber, morning-after-the-apocalypse moments, they’re never dour or outright depressing; there’s a lot of sunlight breaking through that Halifax fog here. They’re incredibly evocative, and, being a trio, are capable of making a lot out of very little—which every decent film composer knows how to do. They’re not invited to the Polaris gala in Toronto at the end of the month, but if they’re smart they’ll be slumming around TIFF this week trying to get some gigs.

Why it didn’t make the shortlist (or long list): Because no one’s ever heard of them. And they’re from Halifax.