Bit Part___>

Minimalism is a four letter word

2008-03-18T20:01:00.000-07:00

I have an unfortunate habit regarding music and other people, in which I am frequently given over to giving friends and passers-by the impression that I am just phenomenally into certain genres or bands or stuff that I'm not actually into to such an unusual degree. This is a secondary effect of my tendency to foam at the mouth whenever anyone expresses even the slightest interest in hearing what I have to say about tunes in general. If you've not personally witnessed this phenomenon, ask me to recommend some bands some time. Bring a towel.

Case in point, I've accidentally given my friends the impression that I really, really like minimalist electronica, which sounds a lot like I'm really, really into obscure czechoslovakian art films. Unappetizing and pretentious as hell. I really must break myself of the indie kid impulse to constantly whip out the most obscure aspect of whatever I'm listening to as soon as I'm prompted to even think about music. It's unhealthy.

Of course, I bring up odd genres in these circumstances because I do discover the most unlikely gems from time to time.

I was pointed toward German artist Pantha Du Prince's This Bliss, as I often am, by CMG's year-end top 50 list. I respect the publication, and their placing of an electronica album so high on such a list seemed incredibly out of character: the genre is simply not one that's typically considered compelling, or really anything at all beyond beautiful vapor. It's most often the place where I go to lose track of time, in the dark, at strange hours of the day, when paying attention is not preferred nor desired.

I won't claim an understanding of what makes a work of music "minimalist", if anything the music sounds complex and lush enough to shame many an album I've heard deemed "lush" and also "complex". I'll just maintain what's been applied to it as a work of art, in the interest of preserving the vernacular and not angering whatever gods might be checking on me. This Bliss is absolutely arresting.

Album opener Asha is as unassuming and attention-grabbing a mission statement as he's-the-whole-band-man Henrik Weber could hope for, wedding a glittering synth melody to a deep and dark 4/4 drum beat that builds itself slowly without losing any momentum. Weber's preferred synth voices tend to fall somewhere between plucky 80's new wave faux-piano and utterly modern xyolophonic resonance. The result is hypnotically alien and gorgeous to hear, and it speaks volumes about the artist's confidence in and love for his chosen medium. This is electronica fulfilling its boundless promise without any creedance given to haters. And oh, there will be haters.

Saturn Strobe pushes the album further, sinking a melancholy string refrain beneath the pound-click-snap charisma of a club-viable drum line. The sound is about as close to organic as I've heard electronica come to, something undoubtedly artificial to the ear that yet manages to achieve a warmth and grandeur somewhere within its swells. Weber knows how to program a tambourine crash that sounds like it's being struck with a goddamn whip: it's a sound he returns to often and one which brings a scintillating, skittering violence to his songs such that the pace never sags. The man is out to make your blood pump without resorting to hackneyed tricks or soggy house stylings. It makes the difference between a beautiful idea and an execution that'll hook itself into your bloodstream without mercy.

And it's a good thing the artist can do this, because these are long tracks, two of them extending past the ten minute mark, which don't so much progress as oscillate. Weber explores a broad expanse of jet black themes on This Bliss, without benefitting from words or clear borders, save for the omnipresent sharpness of the drum program. Late album highlight Florac veers close to shiningly obsidian dance floor bombast as it processes a resonant synth ode to pizzicato over and over again, but reins itself in repeatedly before it can boil over. The restraint that can be felt when the drums' pounding woodblock and precision cymbal tirade are hushed is magnetic, it presses the listener against the beating synthesized heart of the song and exults in its power to do so.

Penultimate track Steiner Im Fug and closer Seeds of Sleep enunciate the dual obsessions Pantha Du Prince seems to build This Bliss around, the former welding the slow turbulence of a downtuned bass to the prickly sensation of ecsatic techno embellishments, the latter lifting ghostly, vaguely symphonic synth voices into deep space powered only by the mesmerizing measures of an impeccable kick drum. This last track is particularly astonishing, something that wouldn't sound out of place on a post-rock record or as the last track of an art rock band's album, the kind of music less capable musicians would tack on thoughtlessly as the means to assure themselves that they are just totally out there, in the ether man.

The trick is, This Bliss is utterly guiltless, it holds the sincerity and potential of the genre as conviction without apology and delivers upon such promise. It's the kind of thing that provokes young boys to lavish adverbs all over their attempts to encapsulate what it does, and defies expectations with staunchly reserved guile.

And in case you were curious, that Stars of the Lid album is about the goddamned prettiest minimalist thing I've ever heard, and it's also something I think they could put in space ships in lieu of those freezing chambers you see in umpteen sci-fi flicks. It puts you to sleep with a power that is not so much grand as it is unnerving.

So, does anyone even make post-rock anymore? Now throwing that fucking phrase around will earn you a proper ass-kicking!

Beep

2008-01-09T20:00:00.000-08:00

In the interest of rampant fanboyism, check me out.

The critical information I'm struggling vaguely to convey to you is that I'm not only an online friend to Subtle mastersmith and sincere musical hero Dax Pierson, I am also amongst the company of his top three closest musical neighbours.

Ipso facto, I am in essence the newest member of Subtle and I am to depart from this harsh locale for the sunny shores of Vancouver, there to weave hushed and terrible secrets into music with my new best friends and hangers-on.

The Ends

2007-09-28T13:48:00.000-07:00

It begins with all white, in a sound-proofed hallway,
your staring down the empty eye slits of a lowsocket,
waking on the floor at the foot of the bright light,
blocking and locked hundredth door of luck.

At the opposite end of the hall sits a pair of empty pay public binoculars,
slumped, facing your way.

In the dead of their stare you marvel about,
until you eye this one door that appears to be both half open and closed.
and are drawn moth to the bulb,
head down, as if reeled round a gear by the guts,
inching toward your intuit-picked portal of choice.

Now knelt, yet not without nerves in this moment of mostly glory,
you look for the knob, and see nothing but healed shut keyhole.

Dax-strong in this dream you begin to cut key,
in the furthest corner of a clearest skull,
when you feel your kneecaps being nursed by a white on white welcome mat.
you tilt your skull to read "WOE-BE-GONE"
only written wrong or in mirror.

Your hands and heart full of edge, you lift the mat gently,
and there beneath it's omen embroidered,
sits an intact wishingbone.

You carefully lift your instrument of certain luck to the door,
and it slowly unclenches the scar seem set where it's keyhole would be,
and so you snap bliss bone, cut wish and begin to lock pick.

Until you hear through the thick of the door the deadbolt caughing loose.

Suddenly the fear black above your skull,
beneath your skin goes wild,
as the door of your choice opens itself slowly,
sealing off your face with perfect stripes of rising bone and angst,
of alabaster and pit,
allowing the bright right light of luck
to completely believe
and eclipse you.

Now Get Back To Work

2007-08-06T16:12:00.000-07:00

Does anyone else remember those eight seconds back in 2002 when Interpol were going to revolutionize rock music and everyone was using the term "electroclash" like it actually meant something? Halcyon days were they.

I bring this up not to spite those fine young gentlemen out of NYC but as a sincere invocation of bafflement as Our Love To Admire spins before me: bafflement over scene, taste, and the great ambling amnesiac mob that the internet, may it live forever, has gifted unto our generation. Or made our generation into. Or something.

To wit, Interpol has for the second time - zing, motherfuckers - released a tight, gorgeously orchestrated record of honest to goodness rock music, and at the same time they've released something that is going to be ignored, chewed out, defecated on, and generally loathed by the people it was made for a priori, solely on the strength of its progenitors. It's not something any reasonably enabled Interpol fan didn't see coming miles off, the machinations of indie rock critics and fans, if that delineation means anything, very often possessing all the unpredictable grace of zeppelins locked in their elephantine maneuvers, but it's still a genuine shame.

I won't pretend I wasn't right in that bristling phalanx of smarm myself, awaiting Paul Banks and Company's inevitable crash upon our invulnerable wall of sharp taste and pious scoffing, but I'm beat and perfectly willing to admit being taken at an unexpected angle.

Our Love To Admire is a great album, a cohesive and attractive amalgamation of good songs which confidently tread the uncomfortable gap between 2002's infallible gothic Turn on the Bright Lights and 2004's awkwardly upbeat Antics. The production, which utterly failed to capture Interpol's myriad strengths through virtually all of Antics, represents a triumphant resurrection of Turn on the Bright Lights's gotham city poem sensibilities. The tones are resonant, deep, and dark - precisely the aesthetic Interpol needed to perfect. Banks's songwriting retains much of the ineffable cheese it did since he fumbled through "I submit my incentive is romance", but herein his trademark baritone, the whole vibrant sound of it, succeeds gorgeously on its undeniable instrumental quality. Delivered without a hint of self-consciousness or ego, Banks is hypnotic at his weakest and indie rock's magna cumme laude at his best. Even better, the frontman has found a comfortable niche serving as instrument, his greatest strength, and less of a persona, Interpol's greatest distraction, and instead leaving room for the band's always scintillating guitar tones to paint the real textures on these eleven songs. It's refreshing and immediately powerful to hear Banks and Daniel Kessler's signature guitar downstrokes let loose to meander and glow like they did on Bright Lights, notes too often crowded out or hurried in hopeless search for dance rock poignancy last time around.

The downside is we receive no haunting lyricism to match "I'm going to hold your face / and toast the snow that fell", the tradeoff being that we can take this band seriously again. Fair enough, I say.

The rhythm section of Carlos Denglar and Sam Fogarino, for the most part, embrace Banks's instrumentalized voice as a vital rhythmic device, raising songs like Wrecking Ball from enjoyable tonal romps to truly visceral rock gems. This beautiful interplay of musicians, this real sincerity and fusion of endlessly talented individuals, combined with the band's never ending noodling with synthetic effects and a newfound love of more earthly orchestration - the band finally discovered the piano for god's sake - come together incredibly well, very clearly the result of carefully focused skill but producing a record affording listeners so much more than Just Another Album.

The author is far too cool and surprised to dissect individual tracks. He's working on something else, but he can't remember where he left it.

They're fighting for what?

2007-07-27T16:03:00.000-07:00

Trying to explain the Beastie Boys to my father was the hardest thing I have ever tried to do. This conversation did not so much teeter on as plunge headfirst into the unkind maw of the generation gap, and neither of us made it out with any sort of sensical conclusion. What do I tell him?

It's like trying to explain what a clown is. Yes, they do know they look like that, and it's.. it is meant to be funny, but no it's not really that funny and... goddamnit they're the Beastie Boys. Fuck!

If I ever saw one of those for real I'd immediately die as a self-defense mechanism

2007-06-08T19:51:00.000-07:00

I found this and immediately started laughing and crying simultaneously.

Josh
JESUS DAMN WTF
Jess
OMGWTFWTF
Jess
WTF
Josh
LOL
Josh
IT'S USED TO KILL DINOSAURS

String theory is both easier and less geeky

2007-06-05T19:46:00.000-07:00

In a vain bid at stemming the apparently unending tide of loneliness and, and I'm trying to find a nicer word for pointlessness but I long ago swore I was better than using a thesaurus, I've taken to reading about Warhammer 40,000. Partly because it's repugnantly fascinating, and mostly because I hate myself.

So I swear to God you guys, I will become that guy, the guy who spends eight thousand dollars on tiny action figures and smells like hot dogs in the back of some decrepit hobby shop named something vaguley sinister like "The Black Dungeon" and never come out of there, ever.

Send help.

Rhyming here with fear makes Robert Smith cry

2007-06-05T17:49:00.000-07:00

The other night I was privy to a dream which included a hyper violent rendition of pokemon gang warfare. I can't remember too many details of the event, but I do recall a finale which included squirtles holding their guns sideways. I've been having some very strange dreams of late.

Lyricism has got to be the touchiest subject amidst a veritable touchy ocean of touchy things in the wild canon of music. Discerning the merits of one bit of poetry against another is either, depending on your viewpoint, damn near impossible or the kind of thing English-majors do in impolite grasps at relevance. I certainly fancy that one can prove with mathematical accuracy just how much more sophisticated and creative any Explosions In The Sky record has over, say, that one song Nickelback keep releasing over and over again; but if a lyricist's words resonate with someone, what is there to say? I can recall with nigh-on-creepy detail the pop girls of my high school heyday absolutely overwhelmed with human feeling in the midst of a dance because goddamnit they played that vaguely-countryish ballad Three Doors Down wrote that one time. Good for them, right?

All the same, I violated my self-anointed crusade against ever listening to the radio again just long enough to find out that Linkin Park wrote another goddamn song. I don't care who you are or where your tastes lie, this crap is finely processed drivel which has actually cost me the use of my right arm (not a complete lie):

What you thought of me
Well I cleaned this slate
With the hands
Of uncertainty
So let mercy come
And wash away
What I’ve done

I have actually heard more potent verse from an eight year old - neat story, ask me some time - and know full well that this disingenuous garbage is being sopped out by a thirty-one year old millionaire. I'm going to skip right over asking for the emos to give us a collective break and request of them a forthright and self-inflicted right hook to their own crotches for this. Even those gratuitous lawling popophiles who are sure kids like myself only ever like anything for its kitsch value can't possibly call lyrical turdwork like this anything but lazy, cliché, and dishonest.

I try not to be that indie guy, spouting the virtues of esoteric music, but goddamnit people at least the indie scene gives its listeners some credit!

Come to think of it, I'm pretty sure those girls are still giving emotive performances over to whatever ballad is popular nowadays. Credit might not in fact be due to all cases. Intellectual hookers.

Also, stop bigotted indie-hating now before it gets out of control:

Josh
*sends Dan a song*
Dan
let me guess, you love them now, but once they have a modicum of success, you'll hate them
Dan
unless you continue to lke them, but only ironically
Josh
gorillaz? they're a platinum selling band you dick and they have been for years
Dan
it was the Gorillaz?

Actually really disturbing

2007-05-31T18:21:00.000-07:00

The idea that a person could abuse their own relationship with cooking shows is ridiculous, but here I am writing in the wake of an uncomfortable realization that I've been yelling "Get to the goddamn action!" when television's chefs get too chatty.

You know, some of them try to have a plot. It's a total waste of time, am I right?

A moth gives freely of itself unto the bulb

2007-05-27T20:04:00.001-07:00

Today marks the first time in three years that my last.fm (audioscrobbler, if you're nasty) has beeped, whirred, clicked, and spat out a Weekly Top Artists list completely dominated by hip hop acts. It wasn't so much as a year ago that I'd casually whip out that most frequent of colloquial wankisms that so dominate the self-styled Indie culture, "I like everything; except hip hop, rap and country. You know, good music." Depending on the flair with which you popped out that "good", your audience would know just how hip you are.

Lame.

To be fair, it's really not hard to understand this cadre of skittish youngsters' cynicism toward all things hip hoppy: take a peek at what's busting platinum in the genre and ask yourself if you'd give it even half of one chance to please your ear. The seemingly endless army of store-bought gang-stahs parading around the virtues of mysogyny, crass materialism and dropping things like they are various uncomfortable temperatures aren't exactly stopping their indulgences in favour of anything artistic or progressive. It isn't a stretch to call these false paragons of hip hop things like "rephrensible" and "multiple felons", and brand the rest of the genre likewise and believe me, I was right in there doing so.

Too bad for me. I'm not eager to jump on the bandwagons I'm seeing crop up here and there proclaiming "hip hop is the new indie", because I feel like a tool making any proclamation of the sort and could tell you a few stories you'd like me less for. But with full view of the huge influx of cookie-cutter acts since Modest Mouse smashed their way into the public eye 'round ought-four, I must admit a steady standardization of indie rock and pop.

And you all know what the OC has done to us. Yeah, it keeps me up at night too.

Hip hop, on the other hand, has laboured fantastically under the heavy burden and resulting oversight its overpaid pop culture liasons have reaped. Startlingly unique acts have blessed my ears with seemingly endless poise and experimentation for months. Every conceivable genre has been hijacked into poignant, musically powerful hybrids by any number of artists for years, from metal in Dalek to electronica in Prefuse 73 to glitchy singer-songwritery indie pop in Why?.

You can trust me on this, you'd like the stuff if you gave it that one half chance. Let me point you in the right direction:

Top five hip hop albums to convert indie kids with

5. Why? - Elephant Eyelash

Just talking about this week, this is just this-week-Josh talking here, Why? statistically blew away all comers in the ever-heated battle for my listening time. The solo project of Yoni Wolf, an Anticonian beatmaster making up one third of personal favourite cLOUDDEAD, Elephant Eyelash conjures all manners of psychadelic and pop influences and channels it throught the unbelievably tight confines of Yoni's synthesized beats. Finding his closest mirror in indie-pop favourite Emperor X, absolutely every note on this ecclectic masterstroke finds itself synthesized and tossed together with any number of unlikely mates: acoustic guitars weave in and out of turntable quips, gorgeously selected samples gallop wide-eyed past exulting strings, and Yoni's own half-sung rhymes tell beautiful pop tales that'd make the The Piper at the Gates of Dawn look sober.

4. J Dilla - Donuts

Instrumental, sample-driven, defiantly theatric and sadly posthumous, Jay Dee's late and great celebration of glistening organic production packs the emotive and intellectual impact of any art-film you'd care to name. Drawing his samples from generations of soul and blues and working them over with the skill of a true craftsman, Donuts is a boundless canvas of glittering tableaus, the sleek deliverance of literally dozens of succinct, beautiful feelings so ineffably personal, so obviously real that they shrug off any need for identification. A producer's producer album, Donuts is as sweaty and visceral as hip hop gets, and twice as classy. I can turn this on any day and get lost in it.

3. Dalek - Absence

I've spoken on these two men more than any other artist thus far, and I'll do it again. Signed to Ipecac Recordings, who carry such monster acts as Isis, Hella, and the goddamn Melvins, Dalek are the metalhead's hip hop act. Their latest LP notwithstanding, Dalek bring the noise: whole canyons of it, stretching and gouging sampled instruments, vividly industrial synthesizers, and some of the best scratching in the field, care of turntablist DJ Still. These men literally produce the heaviest drum mix I've ever encountered, bar none, and throw down intelligence and social conciousness with sincerity and vigor. What's best, while the wall of sound that Absence hits you with certainly overwhelms, surrendering to the storm of it yields breathtakingly detailed music, unstoppable layers of sound harnessed into powerful songs as affecting and potent as any of their rock brethren.

2. Prefuse 73 & The Books - Prefuse 73 Reads The Books

This is completely shameless indie baiting, what with the Books' status as indie/electronica darlings, but herein lies the heart and soul of this ridiculous list. Instrumental and sample driven like Donuts, Prefuse 73 Reads The Books opts out of the organic and slaloms gracefully into the electronic, the spiritual and the futuristic. Seamlessly merging the Books glitchy acoustic guitar noodling with Prefuse 73's flawless production and beats, the album soars close to Post Rock, Boards of Canada level ambition but settles comfortably for a celebration of beautiful sounds.

1. Subtle - For Hero: For Fool

Most of the men and women, including my own family, have found me quite honestly frothing at the mouth in praise of Subtle's utter perfection of form and content, and yet I've hardly put any space aside for the angelic For Hero: For Fool herein. I could and probably soon will devote pages upon pages to each and every track, something which so consumed my idols at CMG that they could barely contain their review of even one track in the confines of the mere internet.

Trying to describe the genre-bending Subtle accomplish through this, their second proper album is pointless: the sextet leave such petty considerations far, far behind. The amalgamation of electric cello, Jeffrey Logan's impeccably sharp beats, all manners of woodwind and synthetic flourishes, and Doseone's jaw-dropping impressionist liturgy come together with such grace and gut-level power that I've repeatedly failed to do the men justice - hence the frothing. No single album has ever proffered such crossover appeal, so gorgeously combined mind razing dance aesthetics with such heavenly orchestral dynamics, with such progressive lyricism as could startle any modern poetic scene and render all lesser emcees obsolete. I've made the journey through FH:FF's weightless body numberless times by now, and every trip never fails to leave me overwhelmed.

An-a-log

2007-05-21T20:07:00.000-07:00

I find it almost impossible to type the word "casino" with any measure of speed. The reason? I always, always type the word "casio" instead. Ugh. If ever there was a music geek in need of a life, well, um, I'm probably a real star candidate.

I mean, I noticed this phenomenon at the tail end of a day where my chief activity was giving my computer a tune up whilst memorizing all the interconnections to be found in the anticon collective. I also may or may not have restarted my sojourn through the fifth HP novel: do shut up.

I'm going to buy some even thicker-framed glasses and spend my evenings with a Moog, excuse me.

Dumb? Ugly? Rhythm section

2007-05-15T21:40:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow I am going in for a job interview. When I say "going in" I mean much like Luke went in to the Dagobah system: confused, stupid, and piloting stolen rebel equipment he would later submerge into a swamp. This interview will determine whether or not I am fit to join something called "Pro Security", a possibility I find both financially appealing and personally nauseating. Although I am certain I could kill a man if I were needed to.

I wonder if that'll come up in the interview. Hm.

About three years ago I picked up the four-stringed variety of guitar known as "bass" and foreswore all other loves. Three years later, I've learned how to use it, and it only took the whole of the in-between time to get me there. It's not so much that I'm good now, but I have dedicated a large enough chunk of my listening life to picking out the low end from songs and judging it as harshly as my frail white body could manage: an exercise which has led me to muster pretension enough to present the following list. In addition to spiking a concentrated globe of my own hate out of the interwub and - hopefully - into your neural network, I'll suggest two tracks as listening material, one supporting my claim (i.e. this bassline sucks!) and the other refuting it (this bassline pwns in spite of Josh's efforts!). I know most of you can't be bothered to track down such things and think, "Hey! Josh has a point!" But then I don't believe any of you exist anyway.

Top five reasons your band's bassist sucks

5. They're using a pick

It's a widely held joke in the music world that all the good bassists are ugly, much in the same way that all decent drummers are dumb as a post. Rifle through your favourite bands with talented four-stringers: would you bang any of those folks? Chances are overwhelmingly against an affirmative, and even freakier are the odds that should you find the odd exception to this rule, and Carlos Denglar and Paul Simonon do jump immediately to mind, you almost always have discovered an accomplished bassist who plays with the condom of the rhythm world: a pick. I have investigated this phenomenon with exceptional acuity and discovered my hypothesis to be accurate in one thousand percent of cases.

Look at a bass, then a guitar. The strings on the former are considerably thicker, more spread out, and fewer than on the latter. The use of a pick on a bass screams, in nearly any corner of the world, that the artist in question wanted to play guitar but thought bass would be easier, or some other pejorative those solo-getting fellows like to lather onto an instrument which has been preposterously lumped in with the guitar because of its overt similarity. Worse, reliance on a pick almost always leads to over-sharp and soulless basslines that lose the rhythmic detail the bass needs to shine. Guys, the whole spectrum of tone, cadence, and technical complexity possible with a bass can be wrought with two or three fingers. Stop picking at it.

The case for: Red Hot Chili Peppers - Parallel Universe
The case against: Interpol - The New

4. They're playing all of three different notes

This is an almost universal problem in popular music, ever since a generation of young people misinterpreted Nirvana's intense minimalist approach to punk rock, eschewed the less easy stylings of classic rock, and became idiots. But even bands with great technical merit succumb to this rejection of the bass's qualities, leaving it to hold down one or two points of a low end as a glorified drum kit. Sure, songs (plenty out of Refused's canon for example) can be provocative by relying on heavy rhythms instead of melodic nuances, but it's a shortchange. The kids that look at the bass as lesser than a guitar like to point out how admittedly gorgeous a handful of chords can sound with six strings, while the bass's capacity for even the simplest chord is limited and Smoke On The Water, when you get right down to it, is about as interesting as it is complicated.

A bassist is ruined by idleness. The instrument has a startling capacity for beauty, vibrance, and acrobatics that begs for full scales, alternation between multiple octaves, and use of the highest and lowest frets for dramatic changes in flavour. And yes, the low-end crunch loosed by a bass can and will crush those tiny guitar's fickle bodies any day of the week, but they can do so much more than just that.

The case for: Deep Purple - Smoke On The Water
The case against: Refused - New Noise

3. They're playing a heap with the tone of warmed over elastic bands

Growing out of the abusive mentality pickers and guitarists pour onto the bass is the belief that the hardware doesn't make much of a difference, that a bassline is a bassline and technical matters which are critical to guitarists, drummers, and any synth op out there are unimportant for the b-tar. The very real difference can be immediately found in even a cursory comparison of the gorgeous punk strains found in any (old) Dan Adriano line to the shambling piles of parts the Beatles inexplicably stuck Paul with for most of his career.

Oh snap. Josh is debating the technical merits of the Beatles' rhythm section. Let's hurry away from this.

The case for: The Beatles - A Hard Day's Night
The case against: The Clash - Rock The Casbah

2. They're playing whole notes

Don't get me wrong, every single piece of rhythmic possibility open to a bassist finds a critical place in the instrument's oeuvre. It's the songs that resign only enough faith in the bass's appeal as to restrict it to clunky full-bar plunks that utterly fail it. Any number of pop-rock numbers try to pull this shit off, or instead resort to its mathematical equivalent, the nothing-but-quarter-notes-boogie, and it is uniformly awful. Yes, the bass is a rhythm instrument. It is not, however, a metronome. Giving in to this sorry strategy not only sounds terrible and requires positively zero-skill with a difficult instrument, it rips out fully one-half of most such band's whole rhythm section.

The case for: The Arcade Fire - Neighborhood #3 (Power Out)
The case against: Red Hot Chili Peppers - Porcelain

1. They're playing like it's just another guitar

This is the damned philosophy that runs through every other ridiculous idiocy inflicted upon my fair instrument. I'm not so well-schooled in music theory to argue the merits of counter-point and polyrhythms and whatever, but in listening to any number of radio jams over the years it continually sickens me, and it doesn't take an aficionado to perceive this, that when a bassist is playing precisely the same freaking rhythms and melodies as their more popular brothers the instrument actually disappears. You might be able to hear it, maybe, but its presence in a song is completely invalidated and pointless. Not one song has ever been made richer by the inclusion of a redundant bassline allowed only to ape what's already there, so much so that I can't find a single example to pose as a case against me.

Seriously, fucking pop-radio. Amirite?

Y: The Last Man is the best thing I have ever read and I spent a good portion of the past few years doing nothing but reading. If you ask me nicely I will give it to you for free, but unspeakable rituals of the flesh may or may not be involved.

Until the monsters chase you home

2007-05-08T00:22:00.000-07:00

Menomena is pop. Menomena is quirky and eclectic and far-reaching in melody and instrumentation. Menomena is pronounced "mah-nah-meh-na" and is supposed to be tied to Muppets, of all things.

Menomena's oh-seven album Friend and Foe takes the more-subtle experimentation of 2003's (wonderfully titled) I Am The Fun Blame Monster! (It's an anagram, bitches.) and incorporates even more piano and a whole whack of different vocals, and somehow an even higher level of energy.

I must say, when writing this I felt repeatedly as though I'd chosen a ridiculously complex project for my entrance into the terrifying world of musical criticism, mainly because as I listen to these songs, new layers and facets are constantly being revealed. No song is consistent in sound and instrumentation in their roughly three to five minute time span. This is what makes this band, on the one hand, a challenge to dissect but on the other, an absolutely exhilarating listen. What's more, the myriad sounds and melodies and the shifts between them are completely seamless. Oh yeah, and don't get me started on the lyrics. Artistry is rife here.

Exhibit A: Foe sees the trio departing somewhat from the ridiculously resonating echoes so present in Monster's songs such as "The Late Great Libido", which is a build-up of reverberating vocals which'll shake your soul but, um, in a playful way. There's a distinct sing-songy quality to his voice (whose I'm not sure, it seems the members share the mic), which manages to stay playful despite the entrance of what can only be described as thrillingly melancholy piano. Then the drums and Justin Harris's (much revered) baritone sax charge in and the three instruments settle into a pleasant, pretty harmony of sorts.

There's a raucous, dirty sound to Danny Seim's percussion, a tone accentuated deliciously by the squelching sax. Here the often smooth singing, as in "Twenty Cell Revolt", finds its contrast and a certain liveliness. These elements make "Boyscout'n", in fact, the perfect soundtrack for a boisterous, comical romp through an untamed wilderness. Wow, if only the word "romp" weren't so damn appropriate…

Menomena's lyrics drift through various phases of philosophical self-reflection and displacement. Foe's "My My" is a song comprised solely of what-if's, "What if I sold everything I know / And ran away from everyone I know / could I make another place my home?". Menomena's lyrics are generally simply put, and thus do not overcrowd the music in the least. They are instead charged with emotion that may be difficult to pick up at first listen with all the other elements grabbing for your attention.

The point I may be not-so-subtly trying to get across is that this band merits a veritable multiplicity of listens, for your sake as a listener and for Menomena's sake as really effing crafty musicians. And I haven't even grazed Under an Hour, which is a whole different animal consisting of three near-twenty minute songs which I really can't even begin to describe and, I feel I must sidestep in order to keep some vestige of sanity.

Grasping at a clear musical direction for Menomena seems an almost completely improbable endeavour, and what’s more, a useless one… there’s enough delight and grunge and melancholy and sparkling beauty to make anyone happy, and that’s just terrific.

Parentheses are lazy writing (bitch)

2007-05-06T18:21:00.000-07:00

If you want a laugh, try clicking the "next blog" button up over yonder. The blog constituting "next" seems to change with every individual click, but the last time I checked it was a particularly frank log of dissertations concerning dog sex. How this winds up being my neighbour, I'm sincerely not sure - if I were to have a real neighbour whose entire being consisted of nothing but discussing dog sex, I'm not sure I'd stick around.

I just checked and as of right now we're adjacent to a blog providing nothing but screencaps of arabic porn.

You will note the proximity of the "flag blog" button to the one providing the "next blog" function: I believe I have discovered why.

One time, a long time ago, I said I'd review a certain album for you. What I meant to say was, I'd love to review a particularly pretty album for you sometime in late Spring.

If you know me then you've probably heard me going gang busters about the band Califone the odd time, especially in recent weeks when something clicked inside of me and the ultra-hip americana band pulled a dragonforce directly into third place on my audioscrobbler, up from their previous position of, like, seventieth. I did put 2006's Roots & Crowns somewhere up in the top ten best albums I heard all year, back when I was into that sort of thing, but the thing you have to understand is that sometimes I even know more than my self. That is, I knew this was a fantastic album even though I had yet to really figure out why.

This is a band so mired in sheer talent, so immediately creative in their exploration of a well-worn canvas that the only band I can reasonably liken them to with any hope of getting my meaning across is feckin' Radiohead. I am thinking this is high enough praise to gain your attention, yes?

So, if the phrase "ultra-hip americana" has soiled your mood, please endeavour to make it to the end of my article.

Roots & Crowns is about the prettiest gust of music you're likely to hear in a good long while, it is an album which finds itself hunkering down at the mathematical convergence between beauty and its less popular uncle, substance, and setting up a rustic, dilapidated cabin therein. While the extent of my own knowledge vis a vis the genre of Americana prior to diving into Califone's ridiculously prolific output consisted of all the Johnny Cash I've ever heard, which is embarassingly little, I can safely relate to you that this music is the aural manifestation of a sunset. Frontman Tim Rutili and his merry, allegedly huge cast of conspirators are not so much informed by man's nature and nature's man - if you take my meaning - as they are the gleaming avatars of these most provocative ideals. It sounds grandiose, and it is. Roots & Crowns glides over and embraces topics as smart and provocative as martyrdom, familial loss, loving imperfection, and some vicariously unnameable things with both strength and real sweetness and it could be, in short, country music. But it's far from being so simple, which is what has got me so hot and bothered, if you've noticed. What's set Califone apart, at least for the indie set, is spectacular and gorgeously realized execution and a delicate skirting of cliche. The expression of such common, albeit importantly common themes is so effortlessly performed and beautifully produced on this, their ninth studio release, that the music is pure joy of sound before the surfeit of genuine intellect that is each song's content becomes apparent.

This not just some guys with acoustic instruments in a barn somewhere, this is an extraordinarily modern piece of music. I mean, they have their acoustic guitars most of the time, sure. But they've also brought a suite of electronic and studio-borne tricks at the ready and they use them as artists should.

Now I do in fact have one caveat about the record, and it is its insufferably slow beginning. The four ditties that eat up Roots & Crowns' first fifteen minutes, while pretty in their own right, are easily the most lackluster on the album. They drag, and offer the least by way of the creativity and emotive impact the band is capable of. Opener Pink & Sour is dark and inexplicably electronic, a drawn-out moody affair that's intriguing as a first track, but scarier than most of the rest of the songs without much impact. Spider's House and Sunday Noises are very nearly by-the-numbers country pieces which slink by with a fair bit of simple charm but little presence. If there were little more to the album than what this first act suggest, it wouldn't be worth half the praise that's been heaped upon it.

But things pick up with the inscrutably muscular folk of A Chinese Actor and don't fail to extract the breath from your chest for the next seven tracks.

Our Kitten Sees Ghosts maps out the real tense of the record, a breezey mess of acoustic guitar and rustic soul that absolutely worships the clarity and beauty of sound possible with such classic tools. Feedback and a perfectly produced atmosphere of resonance glimmer across most every bar, a sound that's simultaneously all Califone's own and yet immediately and endlessly attractive. The vibrant marriage of simple, clunky percussion, powerful acoustic radiance, and veritable chasms of productive nuance and electronic noise shimmer and glide across the whole of this record's remainder, not a single note out of place nor a mood imperfectly delivered. Tim Rutili's voice has the consistency of warm syrup and is applied as such. His isn't exactly an American drawl, but the man sings good and slow with a purpose. Better than this, and to do no insult to the man's thick and golden voice, the production of tracks like The Orchids and Burned By The Christians and half a dozen other benefit enormously from the utterly perfect layering of his diligent vocal tracks. There couldn't be more than two or three adorning each song, but the effect is uniformly spectacular, compounding and detailing a simple voice's stark emotion and weary intelligence with sincere elegance.

This is pretty music. But sugary it ain't.

Latterday tracks Black Metal Valentine and Rose Petal Ear - especially Rose Petal Ear - revel in the sort of deep country gothicism which'll raise the hair on the back of your neck in any stretch of unkempt woods. The seamlessly brilliant pairing of tinny, high strung acoustic guitar with sudden swaths of distorted, down-tuned electric bass positively creep me out, in the loveliest sense of the phrase, and realize the potency of the field of music this band's mining without succumbing even the least bit to repetition. Black Metal Valentine leans even more heavily on bare electronics, and seems to grow out of a place between the haunted house of Climbing Up The Walls and the woods around it. It slinks along under foggy vocals and eerily tapping percussion to create some of the most stunning moments on the album, the whole spectrum of dissonant effects coming together in absurdly moving collisions of sound. When Mister Rutili deigns to put falsetto into his songs, as with these ones, he does so with the precision of a surgeon and with the style of the mad variety.

Penultimate track 3 Legged Animal packs all the melancholy, impossible hope, and talent this band possesses into four minutes of flawless pop-folk, the kind of sleepy, sun-on-your-face gem that should woo literally every human being on the planet. Every band has that song which any fan will instantly recommend to anyone halfway interested: this is that song. Easily the most upbeat song to be found on Roots & Crowns, this beauty barely affects a canter its whole length and when Tim Rutili croons, he's completely sincere and masterfully powerful without so much as raising his voice - it doesn't need more. While album closer If You Would breaks out a strident, ethereal piano for the ultimate in swarthy bring-downs, very much the country brethren of Pyramid Song, it's not so much noteworthy for its own pretty, somewhat plain effects, as for the finality of its hazy fade away. The all instrumental outro which constitutes the last handful of minutes of it and the album movingly affect a summary, a microcosm of everything that's just been heard. Strings pick up strains of hope, perversity, and ineffable sparks of fear. It's a breath from the unknown, built on the simply beautiful altar of the earth.

It's very much like a rickety Yellow House you might know, left wide open, abandoned, and wrought with unspeakable meaning. It's the soundtrack to the imagery built out of the countryside we all know, rarely visit, and immediately identify with both as an endless ghost of spindly trees and monstrous shanties, and as the cradel of each of our lives.

Like I said, it sounds grandiose, and it is.

And then there was something like two

2007-05-04T21:14:00.000-07:00

Joshwa, it seems, has grown weary of blogging solo and has thus made this space into a collective of sorts. Whether this is a good idea, or a bad idea... well, I'll try my hardest not to kill it - with uninspired music reviews or y'know, accidental annihilation.

Additionally, I'll attempt to quell desires for excessive self deprecation now, and in posts Of The Future. 'Cause you can only take that for so long until you really wonder if it IS that "inadequate of a review/blurb/whathaveyou" and I do sort of want some respect.

Hooray! A real, goddamn reason to write. Words will flow all comfy-like soon enough, I would hope.

I recently reset my darling last.fm page in light of the nagging demonic voices that told me my top charts were dated and frankly, dull as can be. That'd generally be the direction I'd point someone in if they were to want, for whatever reason, a glimpse of my musical pallette. Oh, man I could've made a witty Owen Pallett joke there... Not that the request-for-an-extensive-overview-of -listening-habits-complete-with-graphs ever happens, but damn, that would make us (yes, I speak for Josh now) really fucking giddy. Music geekery, hooray. But, I digress (hardly a rare occurence for me... editing will be an asset in the Future) and what I wanted to say was that it's currently in shambles but will grow into a beautiful flower representing all that I love and cherish.

Next time: content.

Internet search: hime lick manover

2007-05-03T23:25:00.000-07:00

I've been trying to figure out why Google Reader is necessary for the past two hours.

Essentially you use it to plug websites in as subscriptions, and then it compiles any new posts for you to read in customizable and streamlined format. So basically it is an extremely limited web browser. As in, that thing which you use to use it. You know the channel guide you get to peruse satellite television? It's exactly like that, and yet I feel like I am wasting precious kilowatts without it.

I subscribed to Krista's blog and it feels as though I have parked a Google agent outside of her house in a black Cadillac, clad in a trenchcoat and watching.

Josh actually thinks these topics are related to each other

2007-05-03T21:49:00.000-07:00

I like Google, perhaps you've heard of it.

I'm mostly sure I'd wielded the mighty search engine for a good half-decade before I finally made the jump into that tantalizingly vague little piece of text hinting at "More >>". Since then the company has achieved something like Illuminati-scale dominance of virtually every piece of information reaching my and, if my guess is correct, every single other human being's mind.

I can, right now, use Google Earth to find an aerial photograph of my own home then open up Google Picasa to post this picture onto my Google Blog which will be recorded in my Google Reader and thereby into my Google Email account. There are programs from Google on my computer which I have actually forgotten about but I am certain are still there, adorning the deepest dungeons of my digital kingdom smiling happily and sporting stylish interfaces. Every time I so much as look at these sleek paragons of computerized efficiency I feel the whole vista of human possibilty lurch before me, vast fields of potency held open by the nigh endless power of Google.

This would all be very exceptional if I really had anything to do. I am sure very important people are using it right now to actually take over the world.

Now: I like how, even amidst the notoriously violent sprawl of total anguish which is final exams, Spring's managed to drag its cheap ass out of retirement for a swing at legendarily stubborn Kingstonian Winter. This has had two immediately recognizable effects. First, the lot of us students get to ruin ourselves on textbooks and ink fumes with full view and knowledge of the saccharinely beautiful weather outside our crypt-like windows, a land of beauty which seems to relish its opportunity to prod and taunt us whilst remaining just beyond our reach, and flitting into actual goddamn blizzards the moment we step outside. Second, holy jesus spring hormones are ready to get some business done.

In honour of this, as something of a burnt wicker effigy style offering aimed at the placation of our lusty and effervescent god, I'd like to put forth the following list of names, corresponding to what I am sure you will discover to be the eight prettiest folks in indie music.

My list will be complete with pictures. I am sure I do not need to explain the importance of such decadence within the context of my sinful list-making. The pictures, I don't need to tell you, are brought to you by Google. Heee.

Sufjan Stevens

Get it out of your system right now: Gay, Josh, super gay. Okay. Sufjan is a pretty boy, he plays bluegrass instruments with flair and penetrating blue eyes and has somehow made the former sexy. Guys are now going to parties and picking up girls using the humble banjo instead of the classic acoustic guitar, and I blame this man. He has ruined forty years worth of accepted sexual politicking and made me feel inadequate. You also could slice diamonds on those cheekbones.

Owen Pallet

I've recently had to good fortune to see young Owen live, and I can tell you all from experience that he is a good looking boy. The kind that make me curse my mortal body and deliberate over the pros and cons of expensive and dangerous surgery, but I digress. His appeal is astoundingly compounded by his simultaneous invocation of old-school geek culture with ridiculously advanced playing of the violin, and the fact that he both describes his feather-soft singing as complete shit and also on par with the Thin White Duke.

Emily Haines

I admit, sometimes she looks like she's subsisted on wine and cheap gin for a good couple of months: all hungover and partially skeletal. I haven't seen her in person: I'm seventy five percent sure this phenomenon has photography to blame. Emily is, at least under certain light, spectacularily sexy. Her consistently hot-and-bothered lyricism has the uncanny ability to hook directly into my libido and stick there, and when she sings in french I feel like that horny guy from the Adams Family. I can't help it. I don't need to mention that she's an All Canadian superstar, which at this point in time I conjecture does qualify as Supremely Hot, and that she moshes in miniskirts. And did you see that video with the bondage themes? Jeeeeezus.

Karen O

So she's half Korean, and half Polish? Something like that. I relate to Karen as New Yawk's version of Miss Haines: the same, only louder and crazier. Her sense of style very frequently scares the living hell out of me, but when the act's off she's absolutely magnetic. Lithe and allegedly batshit crazy, I can't pinpoint how much of her sex appeal is the direct result of her erotic punk rock persona, but neither do I spend much time deconstructing such things. Her lips are almost as beautiful as Regina's, I like her bangs, and I'm always a sucker for the deep dark hair.

Sarah Balliet

She plays a cello in a rock n' roll band which is inlayed with Iron Maiden album covers. No, not that one, but if you want to come over I'll show you since I plan on making Sarah my girlfriend. I honestly just don't know that much about this beautiful Murder By Deather, except what I have just told you, but her tough-as-nails attitude and conjoined gorgeous cello playing and pretty face is enough justification for the crush I like to assume she reciprocates. One time Jess saw MBD live and she couldn't see Sarah: goddamnit.

Sarah Slean

Being a twin has some funny side-effects which non-twins don't really get. Case in point, I couldn't allow myself to like Sarah Slean all through high school because my twin sister loved her to the point of idolatry and I just didn't like music that Alyssa likes. That's a bad Josh: first year out of high school I got to see Sarah perform in the same church I'd later see Final Fantasy at, and upon seeing my twin sister again the first words out of my mouth were something along the lines of "I saw an angel and she sang to me." I've since scoured the hoary pores of the internet searching for any picture which might accurately convey the overwhelmingly beautiful presence that the songwriter carries like a bracelet, to no avail. The first person to buy my sister a drink at a bar ever was Sarah Slean, and I am really totally jealous.

Valérie Jodoin-Keaton

All of you readers just went, "Who?" Let me tell you: the first time I saw the Dears perform I spent the entire time trying to physically adjust myself to the torrent of absolutely flawless Canadian rock which had flowed into and over me for a good half hour. The second time, I spent almost all of the concert fixated like a crazy man on the equally flawless visage of Valérie. She plays flute and second synthesizer, and is in general a heart-stoppingly beautiful woman. I recently discovered that frontman Murray Lightburn is in fact not married to her, but the other girl in the band, and I actually exulted because I thought I had a chance. Jess immediately laughed at me.

Regina Spektor

I know you're not surprised. Also, you're wondering if my blog has had enough frivolous pictures of Regina tossed in for candy. The answer is NO. I don't believe I need to again expunge my deep-seated adoration of Miss Spektor, nor do I think I could reasonably stop talking if I were to begin. She's the prettiest woman in music, you know? Her lips and eyes could start a war, her figure can and does regularily induce aneurisms in yours truly, and her shy and earthly personality and ceaselessly quixotic songwriting taps into the warmest feelings and memories I humbly tote around with me. I have a crush on her, and if this list isn't in any sort of numbered order she still takes first place on principle. I often wonder if I could meet and speak to the lady without melting like a cheap candle: in most scenarios it doesn't turn out well.

Miss Leslie Feist gets an honourable mention for consistently writing and recording the sexiest Canadian pop-folk I have the singular pleasure of listening to. The Reminder recently dropped and it delivers on the breath-taking potential which the Albertan-cum-Maritimes songstress has been working on expressing for years and two moderately fantastic albums. I think she's pretty too, but something deep inside of me registers her as some sort of second grade teacher archetype. I can't really deal with it, you understand.

I wonder if Google's noticed me today. I'm sure there's some way that I can check that, excuse me.

Gulag division, storm the burning registrar

2007-04-12T15:58:00.000-07:00

Mister Pallet puts on a pretty show. Loops and bright lights and little asian hippy women and all. Y'know, you really have to wonder how he gets his hair like that, don't you?

Math for the month of April is the following, in brief:

5(exams) = N(study time)

N
- 24X(hours worked/wk)
- 50Y(girlish weeping)
- 100Z(hysterical existentialism)
- 46R(pirate) = A(actual study time)

A <<<<<<<<< N = FUCK

Yes, you and ten other tough guys

2007-03-28T12:33:00.001-07:00

Every day, a Jams has to subsist in conditions far less wholesome than her loved ones would ever wish upon her. Your contributions can help, so please, give generously to housemates. Because the Jams you save could be your own.

(j is for jess) says:
so i really feel like drinking copious amounts of liquid donut ale..
and just fucking everything
Joshua says:
O_o
(j is for jess) says:
that came out wrong ..

Good lord, insomnia is a bitch.

We'll always have your absence

2007-03-28T00:58:00.000-07:00

Ugh.

Alright, so Dälek's shiny new album Abandoned Language has been out for just over a month now. I'd like to, if I may, quote some lyrics from this - erm - difficult piece of music in comparison to its predecessor, the masterpiece of industrial meta-hip-hop that was Absence:

Broke stride as last of men realized their deep deceit.
This troubling advance of half-assed crews crowd these streets.
Never mind of who I am, son, just listen when I speak.
Broken paragraphs hold wrath of a hundred million deep.

Brilliant. Humble. Fierce. And now this:

Ranks of MC's infested with fakeness
Dispel your bitch rumors, tune the block with hangers
Wires givin' tumors, never write my songs for consumers
Ironic, cuz' I write my songs for heads with phat laces
on their Pumas.

Yeah. Ugh.

With little exception, my favourite hip hop duo of all freaking time aren't actually doing anything different with this 11 song turd. The elements that made Absence, From Filthy Tongues of Gods and Griots, and even the mildly amateurish Negro Necro Nekros great are all present. There's heavy beats, there's socially-oriented angry man lyrics, there's industrial noisescapes. Really, that's all Dälek ever was. But Abandoned Language? It sucks. It's a nigh unlistenable yawn of an album completely devoid of any passion or depth, and I hate that I have to admit this.

Forget emcee Dälek's daftly inane lyrics this time around, they could be salvaged if his delivery lent them any meaning at all. From the overdrawn titular first track to the hilariously thin complete-with-parentheses closer, (Subversive Script), the man called Dälek just sounds tired. I could get past his needless invocation of mainstream rap protocol - from constant masturbatory self identification to dropping the N-bomb all over the goddamn place - but his limp tone and empty styling of this garbage is unforgivable. His rhythm sucks. His flow carries no impact whatsoever. He doesn't so much rap as he mutters and coughs just barely enough to keep his head above the instrumentation, so underwhelming in the wake of his fierce success on previous albums that I can't reconcile this performance with him being the same man. I don't care who you are or what your profession is, I've heard more impressive speech about social perversity from my mother on any number of occasions.

Now, here's the kicker. I've explained before how Dälek's emceeing constitute less than half of what made Dälek the group great. I was apparently mistaken in initially assigning so much praise to Dälek's partner the Oktopus, since the former actually handles the production and sampling aspects of this music where the latter seems to be chiefly in it for the beats. But nonetheless.

The music that is inflicted on you when you listen to Abandoned Language is less than paper thin. It's flat, lacks any depth or layering, and is boring.

There, I said it.

For some reason these men decided that metallic bagpipes, played off-kilter and off-key, were the future of industrial music and rubbed this godawful effect all over a half a dozen songs with no thought to its effectiveness as a sound nor its synergy with the overall album. Where before we fans were treated with incredibly multi-faceted swaths of gorgeously envisioned, viciously executed seas of noise - both intense and, y'know - featuring rhythm and melody - we now have the five and a half minute all instrumental "scary" track Lynch dropped right in the middle of a fucking hip hop album. Not only does it make no sense for this group to be aping Krzysztok fucking Penderecki of all goddamn people when they used to go on tour with goddamn Isis - this track absolutely ruins what is already a wan, barely interesting album.

Forgive the segue, but I've heard a lot of praise for this piece of music. Those people can go to hell as soon as they get off their avant-garde fellating high horse. The title track off of Absence is ten times as affecting as Lynch, clocks in at four minutes shorter than it, and actually strengthens the album as a whole without running away with its own sense of assinine artistic license. No album is stronger for being interrupted by a piece of music that jarringly reports of its makers saying, "Hey, I've got an idea: let's torture some violins with a belt sander, record it to MIDI, and call it art."

Back to the point: Abandoned Language's production and instrumentation are the very definition of anemic. Now, I realize I'm blugeoning Dälek under the sheer weight of my favouritism here, but Absence had such dense layering and virtually endless chasms of fascinating, genuinely powerful sound that I am still discovering new facets within it. The duo managed to put together the single most gargantuan drum mix in the entire world, conjured massive blows of utterly indescribable music out of the gutters of Hades, and lashed it all together with pure dripping acid out of Dälek's mouth. It was impossible, and they managed it with grace and power. Hell, From Filthy Tongues didn't even reach to such great heights, but pulled off a direct assault of simpler industrial prowess and tighter dynamics without needing to.

Now? Now look at what they're producing: every track has the same goddamn tinny one-two drum beat; by-the-numbers industrial vapours flit listlessly from one end of the song to another without accomplishing anything; the mix is not so much dark as it is maddeningly foggy, to the point where one can hardly understand a word of what Dälek is saying (penultimate track Tarnished, for example, features half of his rhymes delivered whilst his face is behind what I assume is a thick leather baseball glove); uselessly out of place gang vocals repeatedly confuse the proceedings and there is no intensity offered by either camp of this duo and finally my god it just plain sucks.

Fuck.

I waited up for you, you guys. This was just cruel, you understand?

Excuse me while I go carve a gigantic all-caps WTF into my right arm. Good night.

Don't go into that barn

2007-03-21T22:13:00.000-07:00

Someday I'm going to be arrested and it's going to be over an utterly insane, ridiculously dramatic misunderstanding.

The dryyyy cracker

2007-03-12T13:13:00.000-07:00

I've presently no time for chit chat, except chit chat insofar as expresses my total inability to engage in chit chat. Please except my humblest apologies and most guttural harrumphing.

Just to tickle your interest, however, and because I'd hate to lose you to some other fancy publication hereabouts, here's a sample of the stuff I'm waist-deep in vis a vis school at the moment:

"The UNDP played a crucial agenda-setting role at an early stage with it focus on human security. It was noted earlier that development and human security are receiving more attention now from key global governance institutions such as the IMF and World Bank, partly b ecause poverty and inequality are increasingly considered to be national, regional, and global security threats.

Indeed, there seems to be a correlation between the level of entitlement to human security and propensity for conflict, defined not in orthodox inter-state arms terms but in the wider sense to include the most frequent form of warfare, instra-state. Over the period of 1990-95, 57% of countries experiencing war were ranked low on the UNDP’s Human Development Index, while only 14% were ranked high, and 34% were ranked medium. There may be a causal relationship between lack of material entitlement, health and education, and war.” Link.

Hmm?

Did you make it through all that? What did you think, was it boring or what?

Here's the really freaky part: I couldn't be more off my ass with unadulterated glee whilst reading this junk. A politics major is I.

No, The Dandy Warhols, I will not listen to your infectious blend of indie rock and sparkles.

You are the sole member of tonight's studio audience

2007-03-10T21:48:00.000-08:00

I don't make these, I just like them. Even better, they fit my format snugly.

On a wholeheartedly separate note, I most definitely look for meaning in the most trivial of places. What is it about the peculiar manner in which different people arrange their digital effects that so invigorates my imagination? I'd say it's a long shot, but wager it is the pixels.

Right now, my desktop is smattered with the following immaculately ordered clusters of icons: five pdf's, three on global security and international political economy, two for containing university particulars; my computer; shortcuts to the cheapest geekiest MMORPG in existence and a feverishly minimalist simulation of barroom brawling; a folder containing films on the ethical ramification of corporate law on human life; a sixth pdf which is an entire book on the subject of corporate media's legal and technical control of human culture; a comedy monster film from Korea.

I am sure that this will affect my career someday.

Sigh.

The intergalactic presses have been halted accordingly

2007-03-05T18:50:00.000-08:00

Message History
03.05.07 9:37pm Josh: Exactly how much Dragon constitutes a Force?
03.05.07 9:39pm Dan: Infinite.

You know, I think he's right.

So,

Subtle single-handedly ruined every other concert I've ever been to by putting them all to unrequited shame. The electric cello rendered impotent the work of any mere guitarist, soaring and transmogrifying with deft insanity to produce an absolutely un-goddamn-limited palette of sound. A man I could swear was television's Gregory House played sax, oboe, flute, and synth whilst wear an enormous, body-enshrouding cape. Their drums were almost entirely provided via synth and for the first ten minutes I had no idea why that man was hitting his synthezier so wildly. Their canonical drummer also played guitar and looked exactly like Goddamn Kurt Cobaine, and from the moment the first howitzer volley of drums made my pants nearly fall off to Adam Drucker's closing litany of sun-eating machine gun nonsense scraped off of my very human soul, I knew what love was.

I am serious when I say these things.

Unbelievably personal, endlessly artistic, immaculately executed, and Doseone telling stories about New Jersian eggplant and how he got into Rapper Heaven early. He was dressed like a nineteenth century English Lord after a mugging by voodoo priests and threw plastic forks at us. I managed to rescue a filth encrusted, possibly Hep-A toting remnant of this barrage off of the floor afterward and I'm positively never going to let it go.

Perfect.

TV On The Radio's follow up performance couldn't hope to hold my attention with the same exquisite carnality, excellent as it was. Young Liars couldn't have been a better opener, and those coy bastards left Staring At The Sun to the very end of their tripartite encore, but something did feel amiss. It was too heavy, the production-laced nuances of their legendary albums were either impossible to pick out or else abandoned entirely - but then, it was still TVotR. I won't go so far as to say that the anticonian hip-hoppers upstaged the crowned indie lords of New York, but then, they did.

I'm at least three steps out of synch in school, and the ride back afterward felt like a long swim through some sort of gothic, evil cereal, but as my ride-getting, trunk-sleeping-in friends have enthusiastically drilled into my head, it was so totally worth it.

I'm going to have to write a review of the previously mentioned Abandoned Language and so help me God it is not going to be positive.

Don't go there, just don't

2007-02-25T23:17:00.000-08:00

Mother fucker.

Dälek is releasing a new album, Abandoned Language, and it comes out tomorrow.

Dälek!
New album!

And I didn't know about this until just now holy tap-dancing Moses. This is like Christmas and my birthday rolled into one. Yes, a gargantuan, chain-encrusted, fire-breathing Christmas.

Ehm.

So, you'd think that a combination of math metal, Jams's omnipresent white noise, a website consisting of nothing but thousands of pictures of food, and shouting at your computer to locate a copy, any copy, of the album you totally didn't fucking know existed would result in a soothing night's sleep. Wouldn't you?

Alas, some things just don't add up.

I just found a torrent for Abandoned Language. I hyperventilated as my trembling hand carefully manipulated the correct sequence of options that would hopefully, god-willing, deliver this unproven jewel to my ears. I blessed the wanton network of piracy that is the internet and may have developed tumescence.

I wonder if I'm the only person in the world who's losing sleep over industrial noise rap.

I always pronounce it "thee-ate-err" in my head

2007-02-25T22:36:00.000-08:00

It's not that I'm a hater, far from it, but neither am I in there watching that red carpet with emphatic enthusiasm, flailing limbs, and a heaping pile of pseudo-voyeurism. You know what I'm talking about. That shit can get out of hand. I did, in fact, take in the middle third of the proceedings, and it certainly invigorated my extraordinarly limp interest in movies in general. I have seen exactly three '06 movies at this point, you see. I can't place a precise cause on my aversion to the theatre, but when friends and lovers come knockin' on my door about this or that hip new big screen number, I shrivel up inside.

I mean, she wore what? Get out of town.

I like that upon finally - finally - completing my critically acclaimed year-end list in the timely season of seven freaking weeks into the new year I actually gave Blood Mountain by Mastadon a third listen and sincerely understood the hype. We clicked, it was hot. I don't know that it'd penetrate that deeply into my graces the way my other two or three metal picks did, but the stripped down, rock n' roll flavour is compelling. It's simpler, more straight forward, more about the rock and less about, say, smashing in your buttocks or whipping one's wang out whilst combatting aliens on a far away inferno-choked world.

Which is not to say that Mastodon couldn't happily do both of those things at once.

I don't really have much to say this week.

I am deeply pleased that Happy Feet won a fucking Oscar.

He's finally come stumbling home

2007-02-18T13:40:00.000-08:00

I feel bad about neglecting you, blog.

But real life staged an intervention. That and, after downloading some Limp Bizkit for an ecstatic blast of sheer nostalgia, I discovered that someone had quite seriously tagged it as "post grunge" and I threw up all over my keyboard and lost about a week of my life.

That and, y'know, work and exams.

Sometimes I worry whether my quality in one pursuit or another is indicative of any actual talent, an unequivocably personal expression of skill, or just mimicy with varying degrees of accuracy. Other times I wish my mind had an RSS feeder that put into print all of the disparate tidbits of the absurd that make me question my own wholesomeness. There'd be something in it for everyone. The hilariously mundane (why did that person look at me just now oh god I hope they like me) to the outright offensive (I wonder what faces that person makes during orgasm) would all be presented in impersonally glorious monotype and the internet would be scarier for it. The thing is, I don't even really will these thoughts to percolate through my admittedly thick skull the way they do, they're just sort of there - mechanical responses to stimuli I have little control over. I'm like Pavlov's dogs blessed with the cornucopia of human experience that is wikipedia, eight AM classes, and a libido - shit like this is bound to happen.

I think that, when you get down to it, we're all like Pavlov's dogs.

I'm just throwing these out here because it's mid February and I just don't want to write about them anymore. Don't look at me like that Jams, I wrote like thirty other reviews you can read. After this embarassing little hiccough fades from memory (and my hackles cease to raise at the thought of picking up writing again after a five, six, seven week absence), I can finally get back to what's really important: unstructured mediocrity.

Best of '06, ten to one:

10 Inhuman Rampage - Dragonforce
9 Orphans - Tom Waits
8 Beast Moans - Swan Lake
7 Ships - Danielson
6 Roots & Crowns - Califone
5 Return to Cookie Mountain - TV On The Radio
4 He Poos Clouds - Final Fantasy
3 For Hero: For Fool - Subtle
2 Gulag Orkestar - Beirut
1 Six Demon Bag - Man Man

I really tried to give each of these albums a solid dissection, but it proved too much a task for even one such as myself. Of course I did express my exhaustive, semi-erotic love of nearly half these albums already, so what's the harm in a little cop out? It was agonizingly difficult to put these ten little albums in any semblance of just order, which - among the many other parts of my excuses - can explain my long absence, at least a little bit. Indeed, upon finally placing Beirut ahead of Subtle, and marking my most excrutiating decision down in words, I did suffer a stroke and very nearly swallowed my own tongue.

Mustering up the cajones to once and for all proclaim that Six Demon Bag was the uncontested best album of two thousand and six cost me the use of the right half of my body for nearly a fortnight.

I don't know how to explain what this terminal stretch of my latest, oddest project means, and I'll be damned if my meagre praise can accurately express the quality of workmanship, the veracity of art that each of my choices represent.

Just listen to the freaking things. I'm tired.

Penultimate in the ultimate sense

2007-01-23T13:19:00.000-08:00

Goddamn do I look good in a suit.

That being said, I think I've got an ingrown hair making my life miserable out of the absolute right-hand termination of my jawline. And here I was, thinking that the Gilette turbo I appropriated from Krista - who inexplicably received one in the mail or something - would make my face and neck a marvelous work of modern ingenuity, an alabaster construct to rival that of the Parthenon and yea, even yon Pyramids of deepest Egypte.

But no - I get in-grown hairs. What gives?

Now, fangirlism doesn't go over well with or on anyone, and I personally try to abstain from any such indulgence as much as my constitution will permit. However, TV On The Radio is playing a show at the Kool Haus in Toronto in March and motherfucking Subtle is opening.

Neeeeeegurgleeee!

Where before my persistent, if half-petrified quest for a job in the sunny tropics of Kingston was driven by a powerful need to, y'know, pay for my living quarters, it is certainly now pointed directly at getting my pasty jowels in front of that stage at that preordained date, where they might gape in appropriate levels of awe.

I am, to be honest, a little apprehensive about seeing Subtle live, since it'll be - simplifying mister Doseone and company's grandiose ambitions a bit - the first hip-hop act I see perform. Now, I love Subtle, but as a kid who's attended exclusively rock and punk type shows in the past, what in the hell am I supposed to do when I'm sandwiched in a pit of gangly hipsters and wide-eyed tag alongs, almost certainly unenthused and immobile, to show my appreciation? I'm used to singing along, I really am. Trying to sing along with Doseone would not simply render me the stupidest-looking-kid-alive, I can honestly barely understand that man on record where studio production renders his rapid fire, deeply surreal lyrics almost intelligible. I'm going to be paralyzed, paralyzed with fear and arousal!

Furthermore, if I were to attempt an emulation of Doseone's peculiar tone, I would certainly be mistaken for an epileptic or worse.

Finding the time and energy to write out the remaining sections of my 2006 list is becoming increasingly daunting, particularly as this chunk contains fewer personal favourites and more honest to God deserving albums than any other. So while I certainly respect these albums with the near-unbounded love of someone who'd put them between the twentieth and eleventh best things he's heard in a year, my passion for them isn't such that I've got every note etched into one aspect of my self or another. And without unadulterated favouritism, how am I to proceed in the execution of my ridiculous and absolutely futile self imposed vocation? Woe!

Still, I promised you guys. You guys deserve my lists, don't you, you guys?

I can't believe how long this is taking me.

Best of '06, twenty to eleven:

20 Pink - Boris
19 Return to the Sea - Islands
18 Through the Windowpane - Guillemots
17 Samme Stof Som Stof - Under Byen
16 All This Time - Heartless Bastards
15 Ashes Against the Grain - Agalloch
14 Game Theory - The Roots
13 After Winter Must Come Spring - My Dad Vs Yours
12 Ys - Joanna Newsom
11 Skelliconnection - Chad Vangaalen



Boris is a hell of a tough case to crack. They're drone, they're metal, they sing a little, they're Japanese. I'll be honest: I thought they were singing in English before I actually sat down and paid attention to the vocals properly, to which all three members contribute. The thing of it is, these qualifiers are virtually useless in getting a sense of Pink's enormous, unbelievably dense sound. Their sound is big, it's really big: but it doesn't succumb to rudeness or idiocy the way metal bands with similar ambitions might. To say that aggressive guitar thrashing dominates the tracks is rank understatement. Guitarists Wata and Takeshi's tones are uncomplicated, thick, and dirty, and they absolutely subjugate any and all things in their path. This is metal that remember its roots in rhythm and blues, and takes its shit seriously without pretension. Pink's riffs are a goddamn tidal wave, a wild, bucking mass of distortion only punctuated by treble-drenched squeals for flavour and kept under control by an extremely simple, fantastically straightforward drum kit seemingly dwarfed by the immensity of the two - count 'em, two - other instruments. Songs are long, spartan, and majestic in the way you might think gale force winds chucking an apartment building through a city skyline is majestic. Add in a handful of slowed down, sludgy blues jams like opener (Parting) and (Painted with flame), apparently played with the same overdriven production of behemoths like the title track, and a virtually non-existent visual aesthetic, and I've got almost no hope of accurately describing this gem. It's a masterpiece of sheer ferocity. And yes, it did first debut in 2005, but not in North America, where I give a damn!

I love that Islands didn't sell themselves short and just turn into Yet More The Unicorns. I would chastise them for glorifying the kitsch value of their most unusual core feature - an electric oboe - but that may've been entirely the fans fault. And besides, it's an electric fucking oboe! Hot damn! Showing a bit of maturity and a wonderful lack of ghost and pirate references, Return to the Sea is a hell of a full bodied indie pop record, still at home with simple, lovely dynamics but much more willing to stretch out and experiment than its infinitely listenable spiritual predecessor, Who Will Cut Our Hair When We're Gone? The instrumentation is absolutely gorgeous, and vividly natural. While inklings of The Unicorns' trademark synthetic veneer still tickle some tracks, this is old time, gloriously orchestral music squeezed through a pop music filter. The result is a little like Danielson's less flowery, more sensical little brother. Nick Thorburn and Jamie Thompson's endlessly light-hearted lilting lyrics and delivery never cease to amuse, to be sure, but their spindly performances are far from the meat of the album. Return to the Sea is an organic wonder. It floats, possibly on a breeze of its own imagining, and pull in whatever exotic fancy catches it attention in the pursuit of the perfect, easy-going pop song. Marimba, steel drum, xylophone, the aforementioned notorious oboe all find disparate and fantastically suited places on this album. These songs undulate with the constantly evolving cast of musicians they contain, never restricting themselves in their workmanlike dedication to whimsy. Yes, whimsy - give it a listen and try to suggest a more accurate term. I dare you.



Under Byen are a monolithic anomaly of post-rock music. Taking the obscure genre's predilection for guitar-as-fabric and classical orchestration as the pinnacle of musical achievement into heretofore unthinkable directions, Samme Stof Som Stof sounds bizarre on paper and record, comfortably hijacking post-rock's established conventions and asserting that yes, vocals and drums belong in there with the rest of the band. Dark, pretty, and inscrutable as all fuck (they're Danish for god's sake), the octet craft fine, exacting, glittering songs dominated by cello, violin, piano, and the Bjorkian alto of Henriette Sennenvaldt and the deep, strong blows of drummer Morten Larsen. What guitar crops up is purely secondary to the cascading, extraordinarily moody orchestral leads. It's a long, opaque record of claustrophobic tones and beautiful snatches of alien optimism, one that shows what the future of post-rock will be much better than the GY!BE axis's increasingly pointless output.

Guillemots don't craft complicated music, though its certainly meant to sound that way. Through The Windowpane isn't anything terrifically new, much less innovative, but what these four men and their instruments do they do well. They make symphonic, movie score aping indie/folk, in the vein of a much more histrionic Sufjan Stevens. The arrangements aren't revolutionary, the setup is tried and true, but the way Guillemots pull it off is absolutely mesmerizing. Through The Windowpane reaches directly for its listeners hearts with the opening flourishes of Little Bear, and doesn't let go on its wishy washy, deeply impressive journey till the very end. Soaring choral backbones, an endlessly appealing baritone frontman, and vivid melody after vivid goddamn melody positively enchant. Sure it's one-note and over dramatic, and it positively gropes My Morning Jacket in all but their most private places, but Guillemots sure as hell know what they're doing - and they do it with surgical precision.



Jams and I absolutely adore the Heartless Bastards, and they're sincerely the most unassuming act on my list. The setup is sheer simplicity: three people, a bass, a guitar, a four-bit drumkit, and the iron-clad baritone of frontwoman Erika Wennerstrom weaving fantastic rock songs of the timeless, exclusively mid-tempo, possibly classic variety. My comrade and I have tried and tried to discern just why the songs on All This Time work as well as they do, but the secret eludes us. These three are musicians of fucking esteem, or at least they deserve to be. The music they produce is so tightly knit, easy going, and unmistakably rock, you'll swear you've heard them somewhere before and loved it. The hooks shimmer and glide effortlessly over meaty, sleepy-eyed bass and beautifully understated tom-heavy drumming. The tone is chunky without grating, the rhythms are uniformly slow while still exciting. It's a contradiction, and it sounds gorgeous. And then there's Miss Erika with that voice. I don't think I'm familiar with a female vocalist who packs a deeper set of pipes - her vocals are epic, breathtakingly smooth, and inestimably powerful.

Agalloch produced what is easily the best serious metal album of any persuasion this year, and I think it's telling of the album's broad appeal that Jeph Jacques of all people was the one to turn me on to them. No other act summons so much genuine, doomy metal and accomplishes it all with such modest, unfettered class. Ashes Against The Grain is unbelievably fucking epic, eight songs adding up to a sixty minutes of mind boggling, earth shattering, folk-infused black metal executed with stunning clarity and incredible restraint. Though you'd never mistake Agalloch's style as anything but earnestly, if unconventionally metal, particularly whilst being buffeted by John Haughm's severely traditional Scary Demon Vocals, the flavour of AATG's tracks is intensely sophisticated. Guitar tones are carefully varied, the production is slick and multi-faceted in a way you'd expect from an art-house rock act like Wolf Parade, and the pace is astonishingly slow, allowing an outright graceful rhythm to the proceedings. It's smooth as well as crushing, and the experimentation these men do with roiling feedback and heavenly synthetic effects is absolutely amazing. The weirdest part? All this experimentation and Scandinavian tinged metal comes from a band out of Portland fucking Oregon.



Second best hip hop album of the year, without a doubt. That's incredibly high praise for an act who only find real competition in the form of the almighty Subtle, still to appear on my list. The Roots have got a hell of a pedigree and a gilded history in urban music, but Game Theory succeeds entirely on its own strengths. It's a cogent, wildly varied, extremely well produced mess of wide awake politicism and critical thought. Every conceivably avenue of musical expression is expertly accessed, from melody-drenched casios to gut-wrenching drumwork to sampling goddamn Radiohead so perfectly I actually got chills. I don't even get chills from Radiohead! It's brilliantly eclectic, the selection of samples and tones uniformly disparate and affecting, favouring jazzy, soulful numbers strapped to a meaty backbone of ?uestlove's aggressive, jazz-tinged drumming and Hub's gorgeously deep, thick bass lines. Black Thought takes every track as a chance to prove that he is one of the sharpest emcees in the genre, and his lyrical dedication against apathy and compliance in the modern industrial world is inspiring and ceaselessly eloquent. Striding piano makes strong occasional cameos, as do funky swaths of guitar, and the rhythm section is always, always tight and visceral. Capped off with an incredibly real dedication to the late Jay Dee, it's an emotional explosion of funk, soul, and, really, a bit of everything else.

The moment I read that My Dad Vs Yours were in some way affiliated with Effrim of Godspeed You Black Emperor and A Silver Mount Zion notoriety, I got After Winter Must Come Spring without any further questions. Now, I'll admit two things: one, I definitely do think the GY!BE folks have suffered a massive decline since their earlier days, but they're still men and women of enormous esteem in my heart and two, yes, My Dad Vs Yours is the best band name ever. Silly reasons aside, holy shit does this Effrim-engineered, straight-outta-Ottawa album impress. A guitar art band of the absolute highest calibre, a sort of Canadian mini-Explosions In The Sky, these men treat their jangly, perfectly toned instruments with the kind of adoration you'd expect from a concertmaster in a high end symphony. The only non-guitar sounds on the record are the occasional swath of synth and the omnipresent drums, which are serviceable in their dutifully rhythmic role, but both are peanuts to the virtuous, treble-loving, gorgeously interlaced work of the rest of the band. The infinitely brilliant tones and sharp, needling melodies that are coaxed out of bass and six-stringer for every one of AWMCS's eight instantly beautiful tracks must be heard to be believed. Favouring a shoe-gazing, stratospheric meander but not afraid to knuckle down and rock, these men make art without any of the traditional trappings of symphony or post-noun anything. It's a stunning, glittering gem of a record, an utter delight to hear without a hint of superficiality.



Okay, I used to hate Joanna Newsom. It's great that since Ys was released, every indie kid in the world has tried to prove that he/she was and always has been a fan practically since the elfin Miss Newsom plucked her first harp, but prior to her 2006 masterstroke I just really, truly thought she was all gimmick and no substance. She sounds weird, she sounds like a six year old on ether, and Ys doesn't so much tone this down as it focuses it into a lean, beautiful instrument of baroque art and puts it to good use. So, all due apologies to Joanna. The album is a pastoral vista of the neo-classical, a sparsely produced, dreamily arranged panorama of harp, strings, and precious little else. Gone are the flowery hippy freakouts of yesteryear, replaced instead with an invigoratingly simple, breathlessly epic, gorgeously deep medieval sound that tends to stretch very, very long. Its fifty five minute length, in fact, is built on a mean five tracks, of which the shortest is over seven minutes long, and all of which are carried by Joanna's indescribably dynamic voice and truly vivid boondock poetry. It's a stunning achievement of impossibly unique music, benefited enormously by Steve Albini's legendarily stoic engineering and Van Dyke Parks's inestimably virtuous orchestral arrangements and production. That's not to sell Joanna short - though we are talking about Steve freaking Albini and the composer chiefly responsible for the creation of Smile for god's sake - because this is her album, one hundred percent. To say that she's come into her own would be a horrific injustice to an artist whose talent has clearly just begun to reveal itself.

The idea that an album like Skelliconnection could be the work of just one man, Albertan Chad VanGaalen, is ridiculous. It's too much: it's fifteen tracks of incredibly complicated folk/pop/rock songs featuring just way too many instruments played way, way to goddamn well for a single human being to actually be responsible for the whole of it. And yet, that's apparently the case. Skelliconnection is a lonesome, touching, enervating little record that puts sheer, understated musical virtuosity behind only one thing - crafting beautiful songs. VanGaalen's range as an artist is seemingly limitless, producing Beck-like fuzzed out rock songs at one moment, melancholiac old west numbers another, and paranoia inducing freakouts the next. Come to think of it, he might really be Beck Two or something; that's a scary thought. The great thing is, in all these pursuits, VanGaalen is a goddamn prodigy. He exorcizes only the best notes and tones out of seriously downtuned bass guitar, weightless acoustic and electric six stringers, rollicking drums, new-wave synth numbers, and pretty well anything else he can get his hands on. His voice, a thin, ghostly falsetto, is inexplicably beautiful where it could easily succumb to its own weakness. And the songs, the songs are fantastically appealing pop numbers that hijack disparate influences with the deft coyness indicative of artists many years Chad's senior. That I'm putting him (and Joanna, for that matter) up here just shy of my top ten isn't so much a snub as an indication of just how goddamn amazing the competition was in 2006, and I'm going to have a hell of a time explaining myself for my final, fatal go around of this madness when the penultimate issue nearly killed me.

And, before I forget, I love that the definitive sound of Canadian singing has become a high pitched, prepubescent wail. What has Spencer Krug done?

Now, I'm disturbed by how deeply reading nothing but wine reviews has impacted my diction lately. Did I actually use the term "full bodied"?

I don't even think I know what that means!

Shifting of eyes, shuffling of cards

2007-01-15T15:44:00.000-08:00

I've just realized, after another of my nearly endless reviews of my established list in search of any metaphysical crack or sign of weakness, that all but one of my female-fronted picks have been placed in the middle two quarters of rank. That aberrant one not in the middle took away the number thirty nine spot.

I don't know if that's somehow reprehensible on my part, or whether it constitutes a woman-hating act, but to my own credit you'll note that I'm not spouting anything like, "Karen O receives top marks for her boobies!!", or anything of the sort. Give me some credit.

I might say that about Regina though. Karen's more leggy.

Ahem. I think I've had enough of the agonized modesty shtick for this year. This chunk was by far the most difficult to order, much less decide upon its constituents. I mean, it's an eclectic bunch, and there really is no valid reason except favouritism for putting, oh say, Regina Spektor ahead of J Dilla. I mean, Regina has assets; J Dilla wrote his final album while dying in a hospital bed.

I'm a bad person.

Best of '06, thirty to twenty one:

30 Show Your Bones - Yeah Yeah Yeahs
29 The Way the Wind Blows - A Hawk and a Hacksaw
28 We Are the Pipettes - The Pipettes
27 Orchestra Of Bubbles - Ellen Allien & Apparat
26 Young Machetes - The Blood Brothers
25 Destroyer's Rubies - Destroyer
24 Donuts - J Dilla
23 s/t - Working For A Nuclear Free City
22 Yellow House - Grizzly Bear
21 Begin to Hope - Regina Spektor



Fever To Tell. There, I said it, everybody can fucking get over it right now. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs got a bad rap this year for no valid reason, other than the excellent, if straightforward Show Your Bones not being FTT2: Fever Harder. SYB isn't garage rock, it's a pop rock album put together by three musicians who've lamentably been crammed way, way too far up the indie-scene's backside. Zinner's guitarwork is crisp and unrelentingly cathartic, the rhythms are hard and buoyant, and Karen O is a creative and extremely powerful frontwoman not afraid of her own fantastic range. Not only do they have the balls to cover Phenomena better than anyone could ever have thought possible, they wrote a ballad to the tune of Gonna Buy You A Mockingbird, or whatever that goddamn tune is called, that turned out catchy and tear-jerking at the same time. It's good, now leave the scene behind.

A Hawk And A Hacksaw, in somewhat the same vein, weren't so much obscured as buried under a veritable avalanche of scenic wankery in the wake of Beirut's madly successful reception, an album partly shaped by AHAAH's own Jeremy Barnes and Heather Trost. The Way The Wind Blows, while certainly enamoured of same Balkan persuasions Zach Condon's debut is, succeeds in an entirely different endeavour, much more of an explanation than an extrapolation. The instrumentation is incredible: a wheedling, cavorting dance of the indescribably exotic and deeply affecting. The feelings conveyed in Barnes and Trost's playing, particularly when dashed on Barnes's workmanlike melancholy vocals, are impossibly vivid, and genuinely, unpretentiously moving. A tricky feat for such left-field work by indie rock royalty.



I love that Jams can't reconcile my enjoying The Pipettes (that's pee-pettes, they're English) with, well, my being me. It's a tough case to sell: an outfit fronted by three pretty ladies who do little but sing and offer a carefully constructed image to sell. But if you can get past the kitsch and the - ahem - bracingly poppy exterior, there's a hell of a lot more to this debut. The vocals are, as can be expected, spot-on, and instantly recall any number of old school girl-pop hits no one really actively listens to but everybody somehow knows. The rest of the story is a sheer surprise: the lyrics feature possibly the wittiest writing in an album all year, self-deprecating, funny, and aggressive. Best of all, the instrumentation, provided by principle song-writers and everything-elsers the Cassettes, is enormously creative as well as delivering - with sparkling confidence and unexpected grit - the requisite hooks for each and every song.

I won't pretend I'm an electronica music major, like most indie kids would've liked to consider themselves this past year. What makes Orchestra Of Bubbles great, though, is anything but its rich techno pedigree: it's a glittering, weightless, cohesive album of incredibly pretty sounds, and that's more than enough. Again, I'm not in the business, so I can't offer up much in the way of context or analysis - one pretty blip sounds pretty much like another pretty blip, I don't think they're meant to mean much more. Ellen Allien (Ay-leen, no fooling) and Apparat are, obviously, masters of their chosen craft, and the music herein is startling, powerful, and uncomplicated; evocative without being specific, if you take my meaning. The synths are shiny, the beats are hearty, what singing and sampling goes on is incorporeal and sharp: it's a pretty, many-sided gem, and it succeeds gloriously in that role. And as an aside, I'll take OOB over the hideously over-hyped Silent Shout any fucking day.



The Blood Brothers hold a special, bias ridden place in my heart, but the fantastically executed explosion that is Young Machetes absolutely deserves its place on this list, if only for the fact that everyone was sure they'd choke this time around. YM (hah!) is the best punk album of the year. Sure, it was a lean year, but based on the vitality of the Brothers' performance on this cacophonic slab of an album, you wouldn't know it. "Peak shape" doesn't even begin to describe how these men have progressed over the years, nor the poignancy and ferocity of every single song. The confidence apparent in every note is stunning, and the dual-vocalist shtick that is the Brothers' calling card is, finally, devoid of any shtick at all. Both Johnny Whitney and Jordan Blilie are extraordinarily strong, wildly unique frontmen, and the cohesion that permeates YM's songs could not be tighter, nor put to greater effect. Plus, Spit Shine Your Black Clouds is completely ghetto fabulous (listen before you laugh, assholes!).

Rubies is an album I feel funny about praising, being that I am a Canadian boy and we're expected to do just that. Still, while Destroyer main man Dan Bejar gets everything but oral sex from the critics of my homeland, he's rightly deserving of such adoration. Rubies is epic, jangly, and beautiful, Bejar's writing invigorating and vocals... vocal. This is music much bigger than the man, appealing in an impossible to pinpoint kind of way and with depth I've only had the opportunity to scratch. It's bouncy, mournful, and poetic - it's a troubadour with a symphony playing on a small town's back roads. Something like that.



J Dilla must have had the strongest work ethic of any musician ever. I'd like to disentangle thoughts on his final-ish album from the truth of his death from lupus three days after its release, but it's difficult. Donuts is a jagged, incredibly well put-together little album showcasing a man's indescribable talent as a producer. The mix of sounds is beyond eclectic, favouring strong blasts of brass and bass-lead rhythms instead of the infinitely overused cellphone synths and one-two drum beats of the genre. The hodgepodge is amazing, the sampled vocals alternately compelling and sly, the end result superb, witty, and darkened and silver-hued by the loss it'll forever be linked to.

Working For A Nuclear Free City's self-titled debut could be the best debut of the year, if not for Beirut's insurmountable perfection. Fortunately for WFANFC, the two bands are not and could not be in any conceivably sort of competition with one another. The album can't rightly be called electronica or rock, but it's certainly a beautiful, explosive union of the two. Possessed of an extremely broad dynamic and an apparent ambition to cover it all in one album, these boys pack a terrific mass of raw talent into a tight space, and feature a ready and able motherfucking bassist not at all shy about leading these songs with an intense sense of honest groove. The epic synths and needling guitars that swirl about this bass-heavy core don't ever touch the ground, and I'll be damned if any other 2006 release that can make you dance and rock out at the same time with such efficiency.



Grizzly Bear did a whole bunch of contradictory things with Yellow House. It's difficult, it's easy on the ears; it's apparently complicated, intuitively simple in orchestration; it's pretty, it's creepy. Like a tidy graveyard in the greenest summer field, the tone and execution of this already-legendary orthodox indie release for grown ups is lush, inviting, warm, and filled out around the edges with a hint of delicious menace. These men are good, they're very good. Trilling, sweeping violin sections, gothic piano rumbles, an effects-laden funereal alto, perfectly tinkly bluegrass strings, a stark intimacy with the melancholic - no one does indie-folk like this so well anymore.

Okay, I love Regina Spektor. Physically, if I could. I wasn't sure if Begin to Hope deserved any praise at all on my first listen last June, and to this day I challenge any fan of the lovely lady to call the second through sixth tracks of the album anything but duds (yes, I include the entirely pointless and half-baked new edition of Samson in this, zealots!). The title is awful, the single is suspiciously radio-ready, and the cover makes her look like a myspace-born wannabe starlet. But, and I mean but, get past all of those things and make it to the second half of the album, and any and all doubts about Miss Spektor's credibility and virtuosity as an artist must disappear. Regina's talent is boundless, and if she made some insufferably vacuous songs on this album I trust it is because that is what she meant to do. Her voice is matchless, her skill behind the ivories is phenomenal, and her songwriting ability can and will make her a figure of mythic proportions for decades to come. Après Moi is both powerful and deft, 20 Years Of Snow dazzling, Lady indescribably sultry without camp, and Summer in the City the most gorgeous realization of Regina's peculiar style and strengths to date. I couldn't stay mad at her, could you?

And on second thought, I think Dan Bejar probably has got oral sex from at least a few Canadian critics.

At least a few, wouldn't you think?

Mind your hat, she gets windy

2007-01-15T09:17:00.000-08:00

Haha, penis.

I'd convinced myself that today yielding the first proper snowfall of the season warranted a bit of truancy from ye olde classroome. It is January after all: I'd consider it time well spent, giving thanks to whatever's handy that we as a species have yet to reach the environmental cataclysm we're all so sure we are hurtling toward - though not so sure that we'll stop building the things we need so far away from each other that we can't reach them with our goddamn legs.

Then I reminded myself that it's probably impossible for an object floating in void to stay the same temperature forever, and am hobbling off to Cognitive Psychology to delve further into how much like a computer I am. Maybe there's something to that. Eh.

The second act of my year-end extravaganza of bathos goes up tonight, unless I'm distracted by some jangling apparatus and bound away after it. It's been known to occur - I was once lost for three weeks as a child, chasing after a bee.

Finally, what the fuck, Dan?

Dan- "Zeno's shameful paradox: he can never reach orgasm!" says:
I'm making a blog

Josh says:
oh yeah?

Dan- "Zeno's shameful paradox: he can never reach orgasm!" says:
cause I'm lazy

This is not the way for people to use logic!

This is going to hurt me a lot more than it's going to hurt you, Mister Keely

2007-01-14T12:59:00.000-08:00

I don't know what I'm doing.

Sincerely? I don't know how people do this sort of thing, the very notion of ranking disparate musical albums against one another is a veritable exercise in madness. What, really, separates my number one from my number forty? They're nothing at all alike! More poignantly, what makes an album worthy of number fourteen and another worthy of twenty six? These artists represent radically different genres and wholly incompatible perspectives! This entire endeavour is intellectually bankrupt! Stop me before I do this again!

Caveats aside, I've always really, really wanted to do this. No, let's not go into why - that way lies madness. The nerdish, utterly vacuous dissection of music is, obviously, a passion for one such as myself. And really, what better expression of nerdy vacuousness is there than an arbitrarily determined list rife with bias?

I'm making it sound as though I don't love every bit of this - I do.

But, and yes I will wax philosophic from time to time, sifting through a year's worth of favourites, some of which I'd genuinely forgotten about (The Grates, Islands, Ultra Dolphins) and others I'd literally discovered the day of my idiotic list-making (Guillemots!), percolated a year's worth of tumult and rage - and the occasional positive feeling - in a most unexpectedly vivid manner. A year's a pretty long time, nyah? If my self-appointed quest to sketch something like this out is devoid of any valid significance, it's at least worthy in its verification of the deep, deep power these albums have had over me.

I think I know why we do this, Jams.

Maybe, maybe not. I look back on two thousand and six and realize, with some moderately sharp pangs of guilt, what massive, collective agnosia we who sing the praises of the alleged anti-mainstream possess. Picking out my top choices for the past twelve months, how often was I confronted by a half-forgotten, viciously neglected album from the previous year that I'd sworn the same type of praises on when it was newish as well? Two thousand four? Much worse, and two thousand three? Forget about it.

It was awkward, somewhere up there with meeting an ex at a party and not remembering the finer points of, oh, say, their name.

Not that such an event has ever, ever happened to me.

Nurr. But making lists like these? A desperate grasp at immortalization of fleeting ideals? A half-panicked, ill-conceived chance at resisting inexorable change? A genuine fear that if we don't proclaim our love for these songs they might be swallowed whole and destroyed by the irresistable maw of history? Something like that. I think, with as much modesty as one who's about to submit that he thinks he knows what the best albums of an entire year are can muster, that such predilictions might drive our entire fascination with identifying and praising only those underdogs and perverse finds we come across in our travels. It's paternal, innit? Songs and artists that no one pays attention to can hardly be said to exist, and that's a pretty affecting idea when you're as soft-skinned and weepy as I certainly can be.

Shut up, I am dreaming. (But that didn't make the list, sorry.)

Thus, for those few who'll read this, and especially for those extremely few who'll read this compulsion-free, behold this, the first act:

Best of '06, forty to thirty one:

40 Me, Myself and Rye - The Russian Futurists
39 Melody Mountain - Susanna & The Magical Orchestra
38 Mar - Ultra Dolphins
37 Drum's Not Dead - Liars
36 Gravity Won't Get You High - The Grates
35 Altar - Sunn 0))) & Boris
34 In Bocca al Lupo - Murder By Death
33 Brightblack Morning Light - Brightblack Morning Light
32 The Horror The Horror - The Horror The Horror
31 Fear is On Our Side - I Love You But I've Chosen Darkness



The lowest echelon of a best-of-the-year list always reeks of nonsense to me. If you've dubbed an album worthy of being on such a list at all, how do you turn around and boot it to the furthest position from gold you can give it? I made it easy on myself. My, Myself And Rye, while a superb album providing a sweeping and beautiful panorama of one-man Torontonian Russian Futurists' style, is, as a matter of fact, an honest to God compilation album. TRF's far-future symphony might deserve better than this, but I needed a patsy. Same deal for Susanna & The Magical Orchestra's cover album Melody Mountain, but this non-album benefits not just from Susanna's silver pipes and a gloriously understated instrumentation from her one-man eponymous Orchestra, it features a motherfucking Prince cover.



Mar was one of maybe two or three true-to-form punk albums to catch and hold my attention all year, one that I didn't even realize I respected as much as I did till it came time to make this list. While the Ultra Dolphins certainly don't make a case for themselves based on range of tone or dynamics, they more than make up for it in genuine goddamn vitriol and a fearlessness to incorporate absolutely random, fantastically inexplicable piano breaks and flourishes in a manner akin to pre-Relationship Of Command At The Drive-In's younger, more pissed off sibling. Liars fell on and off this list and occupied more locations during its contruction than any other single album could possibly hope to. Every pass I've taken through Drum's Not Dead has been difficult to the point of frustration, provocative in that it strays dangerously close to discomfort, absolutely bizarre, and finally capped off with the perfect The Other Side Of Mount Heart Attack to remind me that this is not, in fact, a joke, and these men really are musicians.



The Grates surfaced in my library during an all-too brief foray into the jarringly lovely world of Twee, and I'd honestly forgotten about them entirely till this week. Gravity Won't Get You High is a superbly simple, completley straightforward blast of sunshine meant to accomplish nothing other than bringing a smile to your face, and it does that without modesty or shame. At the absolute other end of the spectrum, scary drone god-monsters Sunn 0)))'s collaboration with big metal oddity Boris confounds and depresses with the deft hand of artists doing exactly what they want to do - scare, confound, and depress. Altar defies any and all critical expectations heaped on either band with a ferociously understated melange of music. I've heard it picked apart as never delivering on its promise, and hated on for just not being Metal, and that's bunk. Centrepiece track The Sinking Belle, featuring vocals of all goddamn heathen things, creeps me out more than any dodecahedron of noise either excellent band has delivered beforehand. It's a horror movie with a constant, brilliantly overdrawn hush of suspense, and it deserves its accolades.



I don't think anyone noticed that Murder By Death released a new album, and I'm ashamed that I nearly succumbed to that's-so-last-year thinking in my slow digestion of In Bocca Al Lupo. Given a chance, the album reveals a band at their musical and stylistic prime, producing exactly the kind of songs they want to produce and alternately pouring on and stripping away the gorgeous instrumentation they're capable of to achieve unceasingly fantastic results. Plus, I'd put it up here even if the entire album was only two-minute long third track Dead Men And Sinners repeated over and over again. Brightblack Morning Light accomplish the same effortless expression of style, but to such perfection and in a hazy, hippy morass of psychadelia that I can honestly say I can't objectively differentiate one track from the other. I've lost hours listening to their self-titled release, and I think that speaks more to its power than anything else.



Swedes The Horror The Horror released, without a doubt, the best guitar album of the goddamn year, and it's only unfortunate that it didn't have more competition in a year where such outfits were ignored as blasé, if not openly disparaged for not being with it. They're hooky, they're dancey, they feature vaguely british vocals and lovely sharp tones, and they're fully capable of showcasing why the six-stringer has been the it instrument for most of a century. Lastly, for this installment, I Love You But I've Chosen Darkness, forever hereafter referred to as the mildly more wieldly ILYBICD for my sanity's sake, crept into my psyche with their synth swaddled update of Interpol's grim update of Joy Division. I outright refused to give these guys a try based unfairly on their admittedly ridiculous name, and was genuinely impoverished for it. Fear Is On Our Side is monumental, dense, and absolutely glittering with obsidian slyness. Alternately furious, visceral, instantly appealing, and mind-numbingly creepy, it is mood music for destroying minds. Repetitive, distorted hooks draw attention away from barely heard voeyeur snatches of synthetic wiles, simplistic drums tap out irresistable rythms over a vocalist's vivid alto, and unexpected bass and synths fill in all the cracks. It's a science fiction film noire soundtrack, and I get lost in it.

This constitutes a suitably large chunk to break off on. Smoke if you got 'em.

Caroline, I am looking in your direction.

+2 Helmet of shut the fuck up

2007-01-06T11:46:00.000-08:00

I furthermore submit that I am the centre of the universe and that this world exists only to provide me with women and chocolate donuts.

Now, I wonder which is more likely, Caroline accepting that my previous post has some merit to it, or the lot of you going along with my above stated insanity.

Who knows! But if I make this post long enough then the picture I posted of Dragonforce will sink below the text it is currently enmeshing itself in and I can stop twitching nervously.

My New Year's resolution is to tell more lies and lose weight. Try and guess which one is real.

Many Lives -> 49 MP

2007-01-06T11:29:00.000-08:00

Those months do slip away, don't they?

Oh shit, and we lost a year in there too. Fuckcock and so on.

This blog isn't intended to be about my personal life - oh well. Writing one's midyear exams while sufferring from the flu's equivalent of Leviathan (fuck you Hobbes, I mean the other kind) is sincerely just not good times. Breaking the bank to provide your family members with suitably expensive baubles meant to convey my honest to God affection for them leaves a bitter taste in one's mouth, much like (as you'll recall from earlier this paragraph) the gallons upon gallons of vomit I had to force out of my body in the days and hours leading up to the most important exams of my life thus far.

But I digress.

Jams and I lack the spiritual grit to produce a coherent, properly ordered best-of-the-year list of any kind just yet. Much as we adore such things, and are vehement in our desire to (finally) complete one, we've both been approaching the endeavour sidelong, without much verve or committment, under the assumption that a more direct attempt would degenerate into bile-encrusted trench warfare punctuated only by mirthless laughter and painful bitchslapping. We don't always agree, you understand.

More to the point, I (and most of my friends and acquaintances, for that matter) am not of the nature to arbitrarily assign number values to one album or another. We're lovers, etc., and to be perfectly honest, how am I supposed to accurately rank a thing like TV On The Radio's Return To Cookie Mountain against a thing like Man Man's Six Demon Bag?

They're incompatible!

Hence, while we merry jesters put off our sworn duty yet another few days, allow me to assert this contoversial thesis:

Power metal is awesome and so is Dragonforce's Inhuman Rampage. Discuss.

I think I mentioned my predeliction for the hairier arts in an earlier post, I can't recall, or find the post. In what is apparent to me now as a grossly non-intuitive exploration of the greater genre of Metal, I discovered the Power subgenre after years of tepid spelunking through the infinitely less listenable Death/Doom/Black/Sludge varietals. A few things captured my interest, but being in high school I was much more inclined toward the Metalcore cross-breed than anything purer. Grind has its diversions, with An Albatross and the Locust being some of my permanent favourites in any extreme genre, but absolutely none of these avenues pack the viscerally exciting kick in the chest offerred by Power metal.

And yes, this is that kind of metal, the one obsessed with dragons and zombies and the cartoony, medieval slaying thereof. Common lyrical themes include epic battles against a great, possibly ancient evil through unspecified intense combat. This is only part of the style's beauty. Don't hate.

Bands like Hammerfall, Rhapsody, Symphony X, and some with much stupider names (Power Quest, Demons & Wizards, rawk) all have their respective great works, but last January's release by Dragonforce is a veritable paragon of the genre. Yes, I described it as a paragon. This international act based out of the UK (guitarist Herman Li hails from Hong Kong, bassist Frédéric LeClercq from France, keyboardist Vadim Pruzhanov from the Ukraine, rythm guitarist Sam Totman from New Zealand, drummer Dave Mackintosh from England, vocalist ZP Theart from South Africa, shit I shouldn't have put this in parentheses) are well and fully aware of their chosen oeuvre's silly repuration. Their third album perfectly takes this in stride, focussing squarely on Power metal's penchant for content over form and dropping the whole thing through the best of Black Metal's technical aspects. Since I suspect most of my friends, and therfore most of my three readers, have no goddamn idea what I just said (I forgive you - this isn't important stuff), I'll elaborate.

Ye Mighty Commandements of Black/Power Metal:

The dual guitar lead is the Lord thy God.

Melody is thy God's one and only cardinal virtue.

An instrument's tone is more important than any other consideration in music.

The blast beat is the absolute pinnacle of drumming. Time not spent pounding out a good tight blast beat is only useful as it lends poignancy to the blast beat which will follow it.

Synthesizers ought to be as epic as possible but ought never to supersede the guitars until a song's obligatory breakdown.

Playing fewer than nine hundred beats a minute makes you a bitch.

Unconventional song structures and not repeating yourself are overrated.

Things like dragons and swords and shit kick ass and anyone who doesn't think so is a pussy or a liar.

Lyrics are only a way of getting sound out of a human being.

No one actually enjoys deathvox.

No one genuinely gives a shit about bass.

I kind of mixed them around in there, but you get the general idea. Inhuman Rampage is the ultimate product of a band realizing they can produce a handful of ass-kickingly breathtaking sounds and desiring only to produce those sounds as long and as intensely as possible. Songs don't differ very much from one another at all, not even lyric-wise, and if you really wanted to you could probably codify about three or four basic building blocks of all eight tracks on the album, different from each other only in key/scale/arrangement, maybe.

But that shit genuinely doesn't matter - when all you want to hear is a face-meltingly, mind-shockingly amazing guitar solo, or the crunchiest verse possibly created by man, when you want exciting music, this album fucking provides to the literal max.

The lyrics are amusingly dramatic at best, and honest to God tripe at worst, depending on your stance on such gems as "Rise over shadow mountains, blazing with power / Crossing valleys endless tears, in unity we stand / Far and wide across the land, the victory is ours / On towards the gates of reason, Fight for the truth and the freedom Gloria!!" found in the chorus of Revolution Deathsquad, but ZP Theart's singing is genuinely fantastic, in a style probably only recognizable to the uninitiated as being in the same vein as Justin Hawkins's of The Darkness fame, only much, much stronger and focussed on the mid-range than the falsetto.

Before I forget, how about these freaking song titles? Fathers, lock up your daughters and so on, this album's packed with literary jewels like Operation Ground and Pound (???), the aforementioned Revolution Deathsquad, and the straightforward Storming of the Burning Fields. All are evocative of the corniest, nun-angeringest vestiges of 1980's silliness one would assume died out when KISS stopped being relevant.

You can understand the flavour of these fellows' love for the epicly histrionic, can't you?

Drummer Dave Mackintosh is your run of the mill octopus-armed demigod, whom I sincerely cannot describe with much gusto beyond the fact that he can sustain eight different, invigoratingly creative blastbeats for an average of seven minutes at a time. That man must be in shape.

Bassist Adrian Lambert (who's since been replaced by the earlier mentioned LeClerq) has the unfortunate predicament of being a bassist in a metal band, receiving approximately eight cumulative seconds of solo time on centrepiece track Body Breakdown. What's truly a bit regrettable is that Lambert makes it apparent in these seconds that he is really, really goddamn skilled. The rest of the time? You cannot fucking hear him over the other instruments. While his wall of bass is certainly felt, the definition of it is so low in the mix and so engulfed by louder, faster, treble-drenched sounds that it simply lacks presence. He allegedly provides backup deathvox-style vocals on most tracks in addition to his six-string, three finger bassing duties, but I can't hear those either. I don't think he and the album's producer got along, or something.

Vadim Pruzhanov's keyboard work gets much, much more time in the sun, frequently playing on equal ground with the band's guitarists and setting the, ahem, epic tone of most tracks. His tones and style are much in the same spirit of the guitars, and he's apparently replaced a standup synth set with a custom made keytar simply because the stationary unit couldn't handle his intense movements. Tell me that isn't one of the most hardcore things you've ever heard.

Tell me this isn't the most hardcore thing you've ever seen.

I'm sure a book could (and probably has) been written on the virtues of metal guitarists, and I'm not going to attempt to fully dissect Hermal Li and Sam Totman's playing herein. What I love most about the duo, something I can't honestly say about many similarly talented guitarists, is that they use their virtually limitless skills to actually craft beautifully provocative melodies. I mean, no one would doubt the best free-jazz artist's skill, but how many would actually want to sit down and listen to it at any given moment? The chord progressions and licks that compose the bulk of Inhuman Rampage's mass are gorgeous, exhilarating, and mind-fuckingly technical without being obnoxious. This is metal as fuck. It's loud, it's fast, and it's intense as five men with girl hair can be, but goddamnit, it's also incredibly listenable, easy to digest, and if you can tap into the side of you ,and every asshole with a functional heart has it, that finds sustenence in the fantasy drama of any Lord of the Rings battle or shit like that, you can bloody well enjoy this.

What's more, these guys have a readily apparent sense of humour. Their videos are rife with subtle self deprecation and classy shots at their own ridiculous subject matter. That's worthy of respect. And so is capping off fifty or so minutes of sheer verticality with a piano driven, new-age synth laden monster ballad called Trail of Broken Hearts that'd send Kenny G into fits of vomitting and crush every emo band in existence to death.

Do I sound defensive? Fuck you guys.

I'm going to go play D&D.

Another satisfied customer

2006-12-12T23:49:00.000-08:00

Patrick- Kids Pushing Kids says:
shit danielson is driving me insane

Josh says:
the band?

Josh says:
they'll do that

Patrick- Kids Pushing Kids says:
ye

Patrick- Kids Pushing Kids says:
two sitting ducks two sitting ducks two sitting ducks two sitting ducks two sitting ducks two sitting ducks two sitting ducks two sitting ducks two sitting ducks two sitting ducks two sitting ducks two sitting duck

Sometimes I forget that conversation quality increases as a time approaches 3AM.

The scientific community agrees that towel is in fact a verb

2006-12-12T22:12:00.000-08:00

I can remember with some precision, or at least what I assume is precision because according to cognitive psychology such a quality is impossible, a day in my early childhood when I realized I could read. Except to my young brain, whose primary purpose at that point was to discern where food goes and the finer points of pooping, I interpreted this fearsome new skill as not something progressive, but the apparent crippling of my ability to look upon pretty shapes - "letters" to the terrorists of education - with nuanced impartiality.

I remember being absolutely goddamn enraged by this.

We'd be driving 'round the Masonville proper, and I'd close my eyes real hard and try to surprise myself with this fast food special or that gas station name. But to no avail - ghostling meaning would always come forth, cackling and unbidden. I demanded that they bring back the meaningless shapes which used to fill my world like thousands of towering butterflies, for this intrustion of "2 medium sized pies for twenty dollars" or "Unleaded now ten cents cheaper" was tyrrany and I could not emancipate myself.

Looking back though? Shut the fuck up Josh, of course.

But here's the rub. I'm in something of a similar situation lately. Except, more troublesomely, I've been studying Ethics and Political theory instead of the measly alphabet. The works of classical philosophers have, stunningly, cross-referenced and enshrined themselves within my psyche in a manner much like what I am sure scientists call knowledge. Now, every time I do anything at all in my mundane, commonplace sort of life, I've got Kant or Hobbes or Mill pissing down my neck about what it all means. This is a bit more stressful than the machinations of advertising executives. Sure, you can choose to not buy that shiny in the window, but do you really think you can get away with violating the Categorical Imperative or rendering your existence as a rational moral agent logically absurd?

Eating a burger is now done in the metaphysical audience of a billion sensual cavemen holding knives to each others' throats and demanding whether that shit is for business or pleasure and don't even think about lying because then everyone's getting fucked. It is bothersome.

Combine this with a solid six hours of cramming Cognitive theories of psychology into your noggin and you've got yourself a sleepless night on the blogosphere. I don't think Plato knew that I am actually just a computer. Sigh.

"Percussive maintenance" sounds dirty.

You don't say

2006-12-05T19:41:00.000-08:00

Apparently my Gorillaz (yes, I know how it's spelled) comment about Absence's flavour was in fact not how I first described Dalek to Jams.

The correct description was, "It's music made by monsters! Scary scary monsters who rap!"

Jams then giggled, span round three times, and giggled again.

Yelling at movie characters is neither pleasant nor productive

2006-12-05T19:17:00.000-08:00

Exams are leering over the horizon. It's offensive, really. Just as bad is the Lake Ontario climate, which decided to mark the beginning of the brief vacation afforded to me between papers and mid-years by dumping snow all over my goddamn campus.

I manage to keep busy in spite of this.

New one for you today, O gentle and largely imaginary reader. I'm still picking through the massive endeavour which is Califone's Roots and Crowns for proper service within the blogosphere, but the new dusting of snow's pushed pushed up shimmering memories an album I fell in love with in winter.

Dälek are hip hop to me. That's die-ah-lek, for some reason; I'm no linguistics major and am not down, per se, with the umlauts. Prior to being exposed to the tidal wave of sound these two men produce, I was in the comfortable position of spouting epithets like, "I love all kinds of music. Except for rap and shit like that." The genre gets a - just wait for it - bad rap (BAM. Yes I did) at the hands of far too many self-described aficionados. People like their music just so, and it's a knee jerk response to heap scorn on any song sporting a rapping emcee. I was like that, but I was fortunate enough to download the duo's third album, Absence, and have my face, arms, and legs melted off.

I mean that in the best possible sense.

Dälek sport a rapping lyricist, he goes by Dälek (but doesn't constitute Dälek the band) and he is phenomenal. His delivery is absurdly sharp and filled with more genuine passion and, what I really love, anger (!!!) than most any punk or metal vocalist out there. I don't have the stones, much less the experience to try to place him in any sort of context within the greater hip hop genre, but his performance is unbelievably sharp and consistently, jaw-droppingly impressive. I've never, ever heard anyone on record with such flawless rythm and gymnasticly powerful cadence. Dre-era Benjamin Andre might surpass on some points, but his rubber band excellence has been a little overshadowed by his senseless prediliction for mediocre singing of late.

What's even better, and genuinely inspiring, Dälek's subject matter is deliciously dark and astonishingly, viscerally strong. His gruff, meaty delivery of political diatribes is never, ever boring, and thought provoking in a way very very few musicians can really accomplish. He weaves near-future film noir soundscapes, glittering with revolutions and uprisings of passion. Listen to his verses on tracks like Culture For Dollars or Distorted Prose, give him a real shot, and tell me it isn't extremely affecting. His repeated invocation of griot heroes is telling. Griots are traditional African story tellers, troubadours of ancient black tribes respected for their preservation and eternal defence of a culture.

I learned that from Absence and yes I did have to look it up.

Now, here's the rub. Skilled as Mister Dälek is, his presence on Absence is much less than half the story. Much much less. Let's discuss the Oktopus.

I can probably identify one or two of the sounds that show up in a given Dälek track. The rest are sheer goddamn mysteries, and it is absolutely fantastic in that right. The man known as the Oktopus handles the instrumental and production and of Dälek's existence (apparently a fellow named Still contributed on the turntable end, but not as a principle component of the troupe), backing his emcee with unfathomably gigantic beats and mountains of noise that sound like My Bloody Valentine routed their guitars through a reverb effect in Hell. To dub the result as A) Stunning and B) A tad difficult would be more than understatement, it'd be injustice.

I think, as I remember it, the first time I sat through Absence I raved to Jams about it as being something like "If you stripped Gorrilaz of their humanity, tortured them for years and then set them up in a studio with the ability to sample field recordings from Hades, you'd have this record."

Of course, this was gross hyperbole and the Gorrilaz comparison didn't make any kind of sense, but it's a rough approximation of Absence's ability to fuck you up most gloriously.

The Oktopus is a genius. A verifiable candidate for Mensa, entirely on the basis of what he does here. From the skyscraping jaws of Distorted Prose, which bends and scrapes a sampled guitar lick to ridiculous heights, to the jarringly brilliant saw blade and heart-stoppingly technical (and properly beautiful) scratching of Culture for Dollars, the barely contained gargantuan assault of A Beast Caged and the cold clarity in the steam-driven symphony of Ever Sombre, this man is limitless. The music to be found in this album can hardly be catalogued in words, given over much more to severely intense and provocative ambience than simpler musicianship. The Oktopus destroys what anyone might conceive ambient music to be: he's DJ Shadow with rabies and a persecution complex, he's The Books with chainsaw arms. Hell, he's Sigur Ros possessed by the devil, and he does unthinkably creative, utterly unstoppable work.

And it sucks that they've got such little support in the world. They're too noisy for the hip hop crowd and too hip hop for the noise crowd. I don't know if it's my place to call any artist ahead of their time, but I'll be damned if these two never get the respect that's so keenly owed to them.

The Descent was a terrible movie. I have never slept so well after taking in an alleged horror movie. They could've called it Gollum: The Big Hungry Musical with Stupid Scottish Women in a Cave for some Reason.

It may've gotten more attention that way, I'm just sayin'.

Every thug needs a lady

2006-12-02T16:43:00.000-08:00

I don't think I ever actually spelled out my adoration for Regina. To further aggravate Krista - who haaates Antony btw lolz - I think she's super purty. So do most people; Krista doesn't. Them's the breaks!

Well. Sitting down and extolling Regina's work would take me hours, which I don't have. I'll gloss over this by saying everything, and I mean absolutely goddamn everything, prior to her recent Begin To Hope is perfect. Perfect. She's the best singer-songwriter ever. Except maybe she's second to Tom Waits. I don't have time to get into why. If you want to know, everything is perfect. Everything, so don't ask. I gave you your answer.

Begin To Hope had some bad points. And by bad, I mostly mean insufferably poppy and inconceivably shallow. I heart Fidelity, as anyone with a working soul does, but Better and Hotel Song and Field Below aren't good. Not... not terrible. Just not good. That Time is iffy, but gets by on unshakeable pluck. The rest is perfect like the rest of her seemingly limitless repertoire.

Apres Moi is amazing. Lady is better. Summer In The City is fantastic. Every track on the extra special-edition disc is wonderful, and I will fight any one who says otherwise. By hitting them.

And she's purty. Ahee, etc.

Deontological moral frameworks and why you should get out of bed in the morning

2006-12-02T16:12:00.000-08:00

As it turns out, one's second year of university is tougher than one's first year. Part of me hadn't anticipated this.

I've been more than a little despondent of late. No single album has grabbed my attention in the same way Danielson and Beirut and so on have managed to in months past, and it's not been for lack of new material coming my way. Clue To Kalo's One Way It's Every Way is an ethereal, jangly little album with lots of pretty sounds. Think Sufjan Stevens fronting the Books with the express purpose of crafting easy-going pop songs. Lovely as they are, the songs have precious little meat on them. Not a lot to write home about, not something I can really sink my teeth into as an imitation imitation critic, you see.

I guess I could gush about Antony and the Johnsons, couldn't I?

I first stumbled onto Mister Antony about a year ago. I remember still being up to my eyeballs in generic rock and roll and punk bands, though I really had made significant progress since high school. The very first chord of Hope There's Someone felt, and I sincerely mean this, like a goddamn breath of fresh air. About all I'd heard about him prior to his sophomore album, I Am A Bird Now, was that he is A) Mind numbingly beautiful and B) Warbly as all get out.

And that was pretty well accurate.

The album is stunning from start to finish. Heart-breakingly honest and absolutely gorgeous. Antony needs little more than a piano and his own, yes it is warbly, voice to carry this album. His song craft is spotless, so much so that trying to quote him out of context invariably sounds ridiculous. He exemplifies, among so many of his excellences, that lyrical work gains its power much more from its delivery than its content. Again, fuck you Decemberists.

Songs run a relatively limited gamut, but in such a way that I Am A Bird Now emits a cohesive, beautifully film noir atmosphere. Like a cozy little restaurant in winter, or a hillside drowned in that sound of rain that everyone thinks of when they think of rain. The sensitive swing of Fistful of Love pops and swaggers ever so slightly, swelling with a perfect little brass section. Hope There's Someone is gothic balladry without the goth, easily the song best encapsulating Antony's gentle, sweeping style. The monumentally powerful outro, with pounding grand piano engulfed in an veritable typhoon of overdubbed wailing, is knock-you-flat-on-your-ass magnificent, and still puts me on pins and needles. Spiralling and Bird Gerhl head down a similar path, but with fantastically different effect. Both can and will break your heart with its plaintive, ineffable honesty and gloriously uncomplicated instrumentation. The latter showed up toward the end of V for Vendetta, and I may have wept.

There's not much else to explain, really, and the album doesn't need anything more. Uniformly stark and mournful, simultaneously triumphant and vibrant, and all tied together by that indescribable golden voice.

That I Am A Bird Now ensconced itself into the pantheon of my favourite albums so quickly is a testament to its beauty, and fuels my continuing bafflement in how divisive the album is. People hate this music. Not just dislike it, hate it. They ridicule it as childish and stupid, and miss its point entirely.

Now, I try to reign in my opinions on other people as much as possible. I do maintain a strict doctrine of some-things-are-art-and-some-are-entertainment-only, but I can observe a modicum of niceness. But some things get to me, and none more so than a story Jams related to me concerning some residence floor mates. Being connected via hub, and being nosey, she discovered that one had, amongst many many pop standards and mass-produced hip-hoppers, I Am A Bird Now.

That's feckin' weird, innit?

Turns out that the gal in question kept it around specifically to play for her friends and deride as being absolutely ridiculous and awful. Apparently they'd get a good laugh out of the stupid transsexual man playing at making music.

That fucking burns me, it really sincerely does. Not liking something is one thing, and more power to you if you can respect it without enjoying the music, but that girl's reaction to Antony was tantamount to dragging him into the street, stripping him naked, and spitting on him with a grin on her goddamn face.

I'm oversensitive in matters of antagonism like this, but you get what I'm saying.

Kant, Hobbes, and Morgenthau are running together in a manner much like knowledge. I fear I may be learning.

Purchased experiences don't count and how Generation X ruined my constitution

2006-11-16T19:57:00.000-08:00

There's something certifiably wrong with The Dears' recording output.

Their music sounds so much better when played live its as if the two formats contain completely separate bands. Songs which absolutely floor one with magnificience in life sound on compact disc or empeethree as pleasant as an open mouth kiss from an extraordinarily attractive member of the opposite sex, only they've got horrible dragon mouth rot. You know you should be enjoying it, on some level, and yet your senses are telling you to just fucking stop because that is gross.

On record, their guitars sound limp, their drums irritate, and Murray Lighburn's unspeakably golden vocal chords leave, to pound this metaphor into the ground, a bad taste in my mouth.

But Jesus tap dancing Moses, you wouldn't think so from their live work.

I can't understand where the disconnect is. The Dears' sound isn't too far afield of any number of bands who succeed on record. Okkervil River, TV on the Radio, My Morning Jacket, Murder By Death (of whom I was distinctly reminded of at the show), Cursive, Broken Social Scene, all of them pack similar ambitions to Lightburn and Co.'s into a solid format and sound great. No Cities Left and Gang of Losers are good albums; unlike these others, they're not great. Why does this happen?

I can't make heads or tales of it and I'm not going to try. Needless to say the show last night floored me, and was much more than good enough to make me forget the death's doorstep feeling of being awake for thirty four hours with a bad case of the flu. Every note was glorious, the band was class right down to their fingernails, and Murray was one of the most genuinely gracious and obviously serious-about-his-art frontmen ever. The set was a perfect mash of No Cities Left and Gang Of Losers material. I was infinitely more familiar with the former, but I enjoyed both despite being in that peculiar show-state of really liking a band and yet not being able to affect the fluidity of motion/appreciation that other patrons do.

I'm like, I love this band! But no, I don't know this song! Please don't judge me harshly!

I'm so enamoured of Opera that if I don't have at least four tabs open
I feel like a poser.

I'd rather be watching Firefly

2006-11-13T15:42:00.000-08:00

I'm always curious about which way music's going to progress to next.

Shh, I'm trying hard to avoid pretension here.

Back in the tenth grade, when punk was beginning its super saturation of everything everywhere and we'd yet to see the machinations of dance-punk sweep over, again, everything, I was telling my friends that synthesizers were going to dominate music, popular or no, before long. Sure, affixing "core" to the end of everything was awesome, and it was great how every flippant chearleader and pot-smoking jock in my high school insisted that they loved punk and emo (Dashboard Confessional/My Chem/FOB and Bright Eyes singles respectively) to death, but it wasn't going to last. A few years down the road, I asserted, punk's going to be a joke and all the bands we listened to wouldn't have made the least bit of impact on music's real history.

Of course, I still wore my Sparta shirt and listened to Taking Back Sunday every single day. The point is I at least knew better. I put my TheSTART on and committed to memory the synthesized noodlings of The Cinema Eye and Thunderbirds Are Now! and the Stiletto Formal and I believed.

And now what've we got? Samples and synthesizers are standard issue building blocks of music, attached to every genre under the sun. Artists featuring neither aren't taken seriously unless they're doing the country or folk thing, and in that case a band's expected to at least feature myriad traditional and orcehstral instruments to even in out. I'm seeing the term "guitar band" used more and more as a pejorative. "Dance punk" seems to function like ipecac on anyone with ears, punk's going to be recovering from an overexposure hangover for the next several decades, and even mentioning emo is liable to get you shot dead.

I was right, motherfuckers.

I like it, really. The somewhat unpalatable glitch-folk of Grandaddy and A Sun Came/Enjoy Your Rabbit era Sufjan have given way to the absolutely gorgeous likes of Akron/Family, Chad Vangaalen, Grizzly Bear, and Califone. Synth and chamber-pop laden rock, born, I think, principally out of Canadian acts like the Unicorns and Broken Social Scene have flourished through too many artists to name. Electronica, more than any other, has absolutely exploded in popularity and sheer creativity. This has been a renassaince deliciously devoid of posturing and icon-dependence, and possesses a fantastically down to earth sensibility and warmth that I hope has got years left in it.

But my curiosity's piqued again. Where's music headed to now? Everyone I've talked to seems to have been astonished and pleased by the country and folk revivals of the past few years, but I don't think these fixations have much further to go. I don't see a reversion to guitar rock or punk as feasibly possible for at least another generation, so what else is there?

Metal's started to enjoy some more widespread and creative exposure, with bands like Sunn 0))), Agalloch, and Boris incorporating radically new approaches to a stereotypically burnt out genre, along with being increasingly well received amongst different audiences. But metal is extraordinarly tough to predict, and any branch of extreme music is going to have to overcome an absolutely staggering stigma amonst non-believers to go critical in the way punk and electronica have in the new millenium.

Is it going to be world music? I genuinely can't think of where else things could head. It plays directly into the current prediliction for folk and country, doesn't it?

I've got hints of this direction through Man Man and Gogol Bordello, but mostly I've been thinking this because I love Beirut's debut album, Gulag Orkestar, way too damn much.

Beirut has a population of one, officially. Zach Condon plays, and I quote: "Horns, violins, celli, ukuleles, mandolins, glockenspiels, drums, tambourines, congas, organs, pianos, clarinets and accordions (no guitars)." Holy shit, celli? I don't think that's a word. What pushes the arrangement into indie-kid wet dream territory is the contribution of two bonafide Neutral Milk Hoteliers in the mix. Jeremy Barnes and Heather Tros, presently of A Hawk And A Hacksaw, lend percussion and violin with the same poignancy and understated grace they brought to Mister Mangum's seminal masterpieces, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea.

It sounds like a mess on paper, and the unorthodox instrumentation can indeed sound a bit sloppy, but this is by and large a terrificly focussed, richly colourful swath of music. Sparklingly exotic balkan melodies are hijacked into beautiful pop songs of the Western persuasion. The tone is overwhelmingly depressed, but sad music has never, ever felt so organic and toe-tappingly alive. It's far, far removed from dance music, but I find it impossible to sit still through the album's indescribably lovely movements.

I tend to sway.

Zach's robust yet ineffably pubescent warble sets down an entirely new path of melancholia, and his miniature orchestra of vibrantly mournful brass and woodwind - and whatever category the accordian falls under - blends unbelievably well. There are lyrics here, but the most brilliantly poetic verses on the album feature Zach giving himself over entirely to worldless wailing, as in the excellent closer After the Curtain and album's heart Mount Wroclai (Idle Days).

Jeremy Barnes's simplistic but rich drumming, favouring a steady bass thump covered in various exulting cymbals, does a superb job of grounding the precocious Condon and his symphony. It's easy to recall NMH throughout, especially flavours of Holland, 1945, The Fool, and Ghost. Barnes is a truly excellent percussionist, and his work here showcases the drums as a viably beautiful sound, not simply a timepiece.

The album is remarkably consistent, and I'm sure the greatest criticism which will be levelled against is its tendency toward sameness. I can forgive it for that, personally. In fact, the greatest departure from Gulag Orkestar's magnificient sound, the near-electronica blips of Scenic World, turn out to be the album's weakest moment. The fantastically realized old-country sound that pervades most all the rest of the album is too good to let go of.

I'm tired and Douglas Coupland isn't helping one bit.

Gubbish

2006-11-09T23:55:00.000-08:00

I will not preface any article herein with any variation of the phrase, "So, it's been a while."

I think anyone who's ever tried to keep a steady journal or diary or blog has had moments where they realize they've neglected their self-imposed charge and, stricken with guilt and returning to the pen or keyboard, they declare that this time will be different. They insist, I will not lose this one!

Nooo.

I think everyone's experienced the odd moment in their life where some subsurface ideas or notions, present but not fully realized or discussed, are suddenly brought into sharp relief by some revelation or another, and then you feel stupid.

Know what I thought? I thought that the wondrously smart and complex hip-hop found in 13 & God, Subtle, and cLOUDDEAD was so good. I just couldn't get over how the emcees from each had picked up the exact same nasal delivery style. I went so far as to encapsulate my unending praise for Subtle (which, to be fair, adequately answers the question of what jamming every genre ever together sounds like: awesome) by explaining to Jams that they were like a much deeper, more listenable 13 & God.

These outfits have the same freaking emcee. Bam.

It's too late an hour to write more. I feel silly.

Cast it at the setting sail

2006-10-29T12:59:00.000-08:00

Ever since adopting Opera as a replacement for my trusty, but, let's face it, out-dated Internet Explorah, I've been creeped out by how deeply this tabbing thing affects my psyche.

Yes Jams, I know Firefox has that too. Opera is still better. I researched this.

The thing is, what do my tabs say about me? I've been thinking on this. Opera saves my tabs when I close them, y'know. I open up my browser in the morning and find my previous night's surfing waiting for me, like a young puppy eager to go for yet another walk. Today, I find that I have:

Scary Go Round
Cokemachineglow, open to their archive of reviews of artists beginning with the letter P.
A recipe for curried pumpkin soup that both intrigues and appalls.
My Google homepage, which is an escherian landscape of newsfeeds and wine advisories.
My last.fm, which I refresh feverishly ever time a song finishes to
bask in the permanent record of how awesome I am.

Also, I want to know what my weekly artists are, last.fm. Hurry up with it. My ego requires its peculiar nourishment.

Danielson is ridiculous.

I assumed from the deep blue abstractness of their album's cover, and this album's bleak, monosyllabic moniker, Ships, that the sound would be something like a post-rock Bright Eyes. I could imagine how it would proceed, all glacial instrumentation featuring some plucky, bearded troubadour wailing overtop about how he misses his shanty and rubber dingy. These things would've met destruction at the hands of a particularly stiff Atlantic gale, or some other nautical villain. Perhaps a whale.

Wrong, Josh.

Though it took me a while, and several intarwub sites, to figure it out, Danielson is not a man but a family. Their last name is Smith, and they are exceedingly far removed from any kind of dreary Newfoundlandian weather. As near as I can figure, they in fact come from a land containing nothing but sunny days and kittens. They wind up sounding like Sufjan Stevens if he were seven people and had never hit puberty, or the Decemberists if they focussed on making listenable music instead of altars to their own fictitious superiority. They most assuredly sound like The Fiery Furnaces if they were happy instead of insane.

The instrumentation is dense, rich, and inspired baroque-loving pop. There are flutes, and banjos, and fiddles, and more old-timey sounding instruments I can't confidently identify. Acoustic guitar and Daniel Smith's astonishing squeak form the spine of these songs, an intensely charming pairing of completely honest camp. His siblings' noodling with their attic of antique sounds fill things out nicely, an airy mass of sincerely catchy twee that would be sugary if it weren't so gleefully bizarre. Song structures wheel and jump in whatever format these people wish, verses giving way to sudden shouts and chorusses as one member or another feels the need to express how great they think life is.

It's tempting to call this family band silly, but that'd be unfair. Danielson sing songs about trumpets, ducks, girls and boys, lions, movies, and, yes, ships with such simple cheer and uncomplicated enthusiasm that one shouldn't sell them short in such a way. They're free-spirited and energetic, but they'll make you skip and clap, not send your breath racing. They're weird. Holy crap are they weird, and they're genuinely fine with that.

Did I Step On Your Trumpet is one of the catchiest, most listenable songs I've ever heard come out of this particular corner of indie-pop. In a subgenre bloated by monuments to songwriters' egoes, an unjaded romp like this is an absolute gem. A rollicking, old-West acoustic guitar rythm frames the Smiths' simplistic, bouncy bass, bare tap-and-plink percussion, and what I am positive is an exuberant xylophone. This all joyously underpins a call and response singalong about totally unrelated and barely comprehensible events. It's impossibly entertaining, and the smart, perfectly orchestrated music here betrays a massively talented band.

My Lion Sleeps Tonight is the closest approximation to a slow song on the album, but its beautifully mournful melody does not afford a moment's complacency. Daniel jerks and starts in his role as vocalist, his prepubescent throat not content to sing at any one tempo or rythm for more than a few bars. The lady-Smiths inject a lovely, wordless sigh into the background, a perfect counterpoint to Daniel's insanity, and a pretty method of tying his loose-brained wigging into a cohesive, gorgeous song. I do believe the low-end is held down by a single, grinning oboe.

Kids Pushing Kids carries this tactic further, into an upbeat, piano-laden number which I'm certain was recorded while Daniel was gesticulating wildly at the microphone. Small groups of strings, which appear on most tracks, never fully supercede vocals in the mix, but frolic with bass and piano to complete a frenetically colourful backdrop to the more overt bombast of the vocals. It's something akin to a country marching band following a lunatic hobo around town. Of course, they're an extremely creative marching band, and it's a hobo with uncanny musical sensibility.

Each song is a wholly unique expression of smiling nonsense, a cogent, unfettered ode to the sunnier feelings of being alive, and I could never rightly remark on the album as a whole without doing injustice to any number of songs. He Who Flattened Your Flame Is Getting Torched sounds exactly like The Arcade Fire playing an impromptu number about cowboys and pillbox hats at a country fair. Ships The Majestic Suffix punctuates a children's symphony on a caffeine high with heartbreakingly beautiful, medieval balladry, then it throws the two together and makes them sort out their differences.

Main bullet points? It's pretty, it's happy, and it's the best realization of orchestral twee I think is possible. It's not ironic or self-conscious, a welcome breath of fresh air in the indie world where both traits breed like rabbits.

Tonight I am going to eat bison and read Machiavelli. How deliciously evil.

Locks and doors with locks in them

2006-10-28T13:51:00.000-07:00

Jams insists that my perseverence in locking my bedroom door is both aggravating and offensive to our house-mate relationship. I have countered this complaint by doing the knock-knock-barge routine to her, the routine which prompted me to utilize the friendly little lock of mine in the first place. You all know the scenario. Someone knocks just long enough for you to let out an unintelligible syllable and then comes on in.

It is perilous.

I'm hoping my campaign of braggarty awkwardness will bring about an age of security, but then I am a bit of a romantic.

I like to cook. I treat marinading chicken as though I am the midwife of deliciousness into the physical realm, and tend to my lovely creations with an affection that utilizes a scrumptious branch of science. Food science. I am, as a matter of fact, only writing as a means of distracting my self from the fact that it is not yet six o'clock and thus presently unseemly to be laying about with pans and produce.

Do you find yourself adopting the mannerisms and speech of whatever author or television series you're currently immersed in? I've been pressing through the archives of Scary Go Round for the past few days and now my brain thinks it's English. I unthinkingly called my (genuinely) English friend Pat "boyo" the other day and he threatened to bring a violent end to my existence.

I can't help it!

On an unrelated point: fuck Scientific American.

Who do those guys think they are? They sling heart-stoppingly amazing headlines around like nobody's business, when nothing interesting (or comprehensible) has actually happened in the world. Seeing "Invisibility Cloak Sees Light of Day" and "First Teleportation Between Light and Matter" floating around their RSS feeds sent me, an openly nerdy man, into immediate fits of apoplexy. Then I read the articles. Let me assure you of this: their headlines are lies!

An invisibility cloak, eh? This, to a poor little pleib like myself, implies a device that might shroud something and, in doing so, render it invisible. Invisible - not visible to, you know, vision. What the SA in fact mean by this is that some scientists somewhere have constructed an unwieldly array of concentric metal circles that can make whatever's in its centre a little bit less easy to see when one is looking at it through the microwave spectrum of light. You can still tell something's there, but it's fudged a bit. Oooo... invisible.

Yuh huh. Handy! I'll be sure to slap one of those on my person to avoid detection by my enemies' many microwave-based viewing systems. I'll leave it to faith that they won't notice the enormous fiberglass ring orbitting my body.

Teleportation between light and matter sounds like Star Trek teleporters are on their way to production, right? Turns out what happened was scientists shot a laser at another laser, which changed the way a cloud of cesium atoms was vibrating.

...

I am imagining a slovenly Scientific American editor, his haggard skeleton of a body wrapped in a dress shirt and brown clip-on tie, his day old stubble giving way to gravy stains and unnoticed bits of chip. He fancies he is better than the unwashed masses whom lack prestigious posts in important magazines, those people who maybe picked on him when he was a schoolboy. He imagines these lower forms of life as sifting through the internets late at night, clinging to the light of his great publication for word of the greatness of their betters. And this disgusts him. He wants to make anyone who dares enter his supreme corner of the internetverse suffer, and he deftly tempts them into soul-crushing tedium with his shiny, shiny titles. With his left hand he clutches a can of soda, and with his dorito-cheese encrusted right, delivers misery.

Fuck off, Scientific American!

Tonight's menu includes garlic potatoes and garlic chicken. And widdle grape tomatoes which I'm sure I can work garlic into somehow.

Mmm.

Sloppy make outs with bands no one likes

2006-10-24T13:18:00.000-07:00

Liisa finds me the nicest things. She introduced me to Thrice years ago, and today to the comic I stole up thurr.

I wouldn't call Thrice a guilty pleasure, but I do have some. I have a 30 Seconds to Mars tshirt in regular rotation, despite their new album being nowhere near as good as the first (:P) . I listen to Millencollin, Rob Dougan, and Feeder when the mood strikes me. Lacuna Coil is delicious Italian femme-death-pop, and the entire genre of power-metal makes me giddy.

Honestly, with bands like Goblin Cock and Demons & Wizards, who couldn't love it?

Brass tacks and other serious metaphors

2006-10-24T11:04:00.000-07:00

Last night I used the word exacerbate in casual dialogue.

I felt like a golden god.

My mom dropped by the university yesterday, it reminded me keenly of what an alien landscape this place can be. Family living is unbelievably different from school-livin', innit? I miss my momma.

Words cannot express my glee over the early birthday present I received today from my most excellent fish, Krista. Marylin Manson covered This Is Halloween. I'm not overly enamoured of
Mister Manson, but hearing a metal cover of that song was an actual, written down goal of mine. Something to do by the age of thirty, you see. The thrill I felt upon listening was
religious, and honestly? I cried a little.

Okay. I'm having trouble writing about the hip bands that a hip boy like myself actually listens to on a regular basis, and seem to keep coming back to my unusual mainstream fixations. I'll try to fix that, but I simply can't shut up about Thrice's Vheissu. Jams hasn't heard the end of it, and I don't intend to stop until I've convinced at least one freaking member of the indie community that this album is worth a damn.

It's easy to see the problem with the album. No one could be expected to listen to it, and in the liner notes the band reports that they couldn't even find a producer willing to touch their new direction. Screamo was waning rapidly, and their seminal The Artist In The Ambulance had unjustly been touted as one of the premiere results of that movement. Very few had paid attention to the bands insistence that they didn't care for the screamo fad one bit, and strove to be more of an Isis or Pelican than a My Chemical Romance. With a long break between albums, apparently full of reflection and musical experimentation, the band tried to convince the musical community of their larger-than-genre ambitions and hard-earned maturity, but who was going to listen?

Anyone willing to listen to the refinement and grandiosity of Vheissu has to overcome the appallingly negative emo-stigma that's so unpopular nowadays (some would say finally). Likewise, such a huge component of the band's fanbase was composed of skinny, fad-beholden emo kids now either moving on to "better bands like teh awesome Panic! at the Disco!" or hitting puberty and diving headlong into faux-esoteric college rock standards like Sufjan or the Decemberists (Which no one knows about and you wouldn't understand because they are sooo way artistic you pleibs), that these poor men couldn't hope not to make martyrs of themselves.

Vheissu is smart, literate, brilliantly aggressive, and beautiful. It reminds me intensely of the White Stripes' Get Behind Me Satan in execution. Both outfits released a blistering, album-opening single too reminiscient of their established style, then proceeded to craft albums unlike anything they'd ever produced.

Every man in Thrice's solid quartet is a master of their respective instrument. Riley Breckenridge is one of punk's best drummers, and his work on Vheissu far outshines my standard favourite's (Mark Gajadhar of the Blood Brothers) latest work. Listen to any track Vheissu has to offer and tell me you aren't impressed, from his subdued electronica-inspired beats on Atlantic - an unbelievably fine accent to a chillingly perfect ballad - to his fiercly technical runaway train assaults on the album's heavier tracks, like Image of the Invisible and Hold Fast Hope. There's something unidentifiable about this drummer. Every track he lays down seems heart-wrenchingly weightless.

Teppei Teranishi is an absolutely outstanding guitar prodigy, a brilliant, consistently creative guitarist not receivingn half the praise he deserves. His reverb-drenched solo on Of Dust And Nations serves as my computer's bootup sound, and will for a long time to come. This man is unwilling to allow a single basic chord dirty his instrument, content instead to send astonishing firework melodies and gleaming siren leads skipping across frontman Dustin Kensrue's denser noise.

I feel woefully inadequate in describing the performance of any guitarist, any where, and Teppei defies my abilities to the extreme.

I don't have time to discuss the bassist. He's atmospheric and dreamy.

I've long thought that the band's output was somewhat less than the sum of its parts, but Vheissu is a beautifully coherent effort not tied down by its base components. The album enchants me. Its equisitely elaborated theme and imagery is that of a near-future, 1984-copping political apocalypse. Some critics have tried to reduce the band's message to a reaction against the emo scene they've tried to escape - they're mistaken. Herein is a celebration of human value, an everyman's revolt against assimilation, an endlessly poignant lament and plot against the machinations of military and politician and corporation. It is the music of refugees, prisoners, wounded, and slaves, and of their unity, and their rising up.

It evokes the frustration of down-trodden youth, the manipulation of intellect and emotion, the beauty of immaterial belief, the lost-meaning of freedom and safety, the obscured value of a human life.

Vheissu is an incredibly articulate voicing of our generation's fear and oppression under the ever-swelling poltical malfeasance and corporate cheapness that envelops us. This record is vital to me for this reason - I know of no one untouched by such feelings, but few can give release to them in the way Thrice does.

And people would acknowledge this if they, you know, listened to the damn thing.

Tickets to call my last few paragraphs stupidly romantic and overly gushy must be bought through listening to Vheissu all the way through, jerks.

I think it sounds better when there's snow falling.

He's a clarinetist by trade

2006-10-19T03:53:00.000-07:00

William Basinksi is probably the coolest experimental composer ever. Not that there's terribly stiff competition for that title.

I'll explain the concept behind his Disintegration Loops later, but needless to say it is the most creative thing I have ever heard. Also, I took a bit of a nap whilst listening to a few of his Loops, and I swear it entered my body, slowed my heart rate to well below a healthy bpm, and took me on an intergalactic journey.

It is the music that planets would make had they the tools to do so.

Disintegration Loops

2006-10-19T03:31:00.000-07:00

Paper writing is weird. I didn't so much stay up all night writing as I just got up hours before the sun did. More editting to be done, as well as effective sowing of quotations, but I've plenty of time and a surplus of words. Being immersed in scholarly activity again is invigorating.

I've also amassed a veritable army of cd's to review, some of which will be appearing 'round these parts shortly. I don't know if I'll ever get to all of them, but I will say that Grizzly Bear, Ellen Allien & Apparat, William Basinski, The Horror The Horror, Malajube, Mr. Lif, the Heartless Bastards, Delta 5, Danielson, Herbert, The Fucking Champs, Tiger Trap, The Softies, Talulah Gosh, Susanna And The Magical Orchestra, and My Dad Vs Yours are all... very good.

That's not even all that I could talk about, it's just the ones I've really liked.

I also got my mitts on the Sunn 0)))/Boris collaboration I was so excited about earlier. I feel bad about not waiting for Halloween, but the album is more than effective at obliterating all vestiages of happiness from my soul anyway.

It's totally wicked you guys.

Blitzkrieg!

2006-10-18T18:11:00.000-07:00

The first significant wash of assignments and exams has arrived, and I'm courageously plucking away at a particularly troublesome english paper. It's a 1000 word snooze for contemporary lit, which I'm being a bit of a cock about because, as the record will show, I recently turned out 1400 words without even batting an eye. And I'm assuming my output on the matter of And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead will be identical to that of the treatment of women by poet Larkin and novelist Amis. Because, y'know, they're both interesting.

See if you can spot the holes in my assumptions.

I'm banishing myself from the blogosphere for my own good, until such time as the present rush is over with. I need to treat my school work with a modicum more respect than I did last year, if I'm to pierce the covetted 80% average barrier. Although, and the record will show this as well, I was just 2.5% shy of this last year without actually trying or paying attention.

Someday I'll herein recount the tale of the philosophy final and the Whole Bottle of Cointreau.

One thing before I go. Am I the only one who harbours deep, nearly religious suspicions over their mp3 player's random-play feature? WMP played +/-'s All I Do SO MUCH since I acquired that album that I deleted it minutes ago out of sheer alarm. It was just unseemly for one song to come up so often amidst a library that exceeds nine thousand tracks.

+/-'s All I Have To Do Is Make You just came on.
My computer is doing this on purpose and it is terrifying me.

In which our hero abandons his aspirations for journalistic legitimacy

2006-10-12T00:40:00.000-07:00

I've changed my mind and want her for my birthday.
I Want To Sing is the single sexiest song of all time. Fuck Barry White, I'm talkin' Regina.

Shut up you guys. I just wrote a fourteen hundred word essay ripping on one of my favourite bands. Give me a break.

I want to take a fuckin' bath.

PS Send Regina.

Uncontrollable falling down syndrome

2006-10-11T18:31:00.000-07:00

I'm devastated that Indie Rock fans 'round the globe must now be engaged in a discussion very similar to the one I've just been having with my music chum, Jams.

Josh, "What the fuck is with this new ToD album? It's like they forgot what they were doing, or how to use their instruments or some shit."
Jess, "I just... it's just not good."
Josh, "Okay. This last track is pretty good. In a not-interesting-even-a-little-tiny-bit kind of way."
Jess, "Have you listened to the whole thing?"
Josh, "No... no, I got through the first two tracks and got pissed off. Okay, okay I haven't listened to the title track here. It's the title track, it has to be good, right?"
Jess, "Well... usually."

The title track from ToD's new album So Divided plays.

Josh, "..."
Jess, "..."
Josh, "Okay, so this is like a big joke where ToD... they, they must have released a fake album to piss off every body who ever liked them because they hate their fans."
Jess, "Yeah..."
Josh, "This is shit."
Jess, "It's Shit."
Josh, "For fuck's sake, this sounds like Wings."

That's pretty well exactly how our intake of So Divided has proceeded.

While all of the tracks are certainly listenable, they occupy an entirely new realm of music to my ear. The kind that is able to make you forget that you are in fact hearing music and is better processed by that part of your mind accustomed to ignoring CNN and CMT while you flip around for cartoons to watch. I may've actually listened to the album in its entirety already, I don't know. I can barely muster a solid memory or words to describe any of it except, "It bored the hell out of me and I forgot where I was for a forty five minutes

That's a little harsh, but this is coming from a jilted fan. Trail of Dead will always be among the canon of My Favourite Bands Evarr, but it's looking as though I'm going to have to excise the memories I have of everything post-Source Tags & Codes to keep them there. Hold on, Secret of Elena's Tomb came out after ST&C, so everything after that. I don't know what happened to these men after 2003, whether they suffered from the overreaching nature of their endless ambition, or any such wankery as Pitchfork and co. would have you believe, but any listener of sense must agree that it's been a decidedly downhill journey for the Trail ever since the last few seconds of the flawless Intelligence ticked away.

Jess, "Noo!"

Okay, let's talk Worlds Apart. I loved that album fiercely for the first track and a half. Big opener, I love it. Still gets big reactions at parties. Nothing beyond that is genuinely worth a damn. Oh, there's that one track where Conrad wheezes about rock and roll and the twin towers or something. And he swears at schoolchildren. Rock and rollll.

Get your own blog, Jams.

There are, admittedly some drops of old-school ToD pizazz to be found, I think. The album is generally a blur of half baked annoyances, which confusingly underemploy every single piece of talent ToD have in their arsenal. For example: why, WHY does this band have two drummers when every track proceeds at a stately 4/4 high hat tappin' beat? It's like -

I'm sorry, the song Eight Day Hell just came on and I am now weeping uncontrollably. The band has finished raping Wings and, not being sated of its appetite for godawful blandness, is now violating the Polyphonic Spree in all of its four hundred members worth of orificii.

Agh. As I was saying. We all know this band has talent. Technical ability, sharp songwriting, and Conrad's unique bad-but-good singing - all this skill couldn't have just sauntered away in the off-season. Worlds Apart was blaise, but brought the chops. Said chops simply weren't put to the same effect they had been on previous outings. So Divided, even with such talent at the ready, is confoundingly devoid of any massively hooky guitars, prog rock dynamics, creatively utilized strings, or savage drum beat downs which once made the band great. Kevin Allen and Conrad's legendary guitars are so horrificly underused, and on many tracks actually, unthinkably absent, that these men ought to be slapped with a heavy fine. Conrad's voice, unfortunately thrust into the spotlight as it is, is nowhere near strong enough to carry the album, and makes one beg to have it once again clothed in a thick wall of noise. The man is whiny.

These new songs are so hopelessly toned down it's comparable to building a spaceship out of cardboard boxes and tin cans. You are supposed to be doing something amazing, and you will never do it in this way.

I think I was trying to talk about the album's good parts.

They are there, but only briefly. I've been listening to Gold Heart Mountain Top Queen Directory on repeat, trying to imagine that the band can still produce compelling vocal strains and polyrythmic harmonies like they once did. It is, like all other tracks, extremely underdone, but succeeds in a minimalist way that recalls Counting Off the Days. A little bit. It even reminded me, for a moment, of David Bowie's Five Years, as Conrad pipes his imitation-British wail over a meandering rock piano. Then again, unlike all the other tracks on So Divided, this is a freaking Guided by Voices cover, which would be a delightfully ridiculous premise if they hadn't dropped it smack in the middle of the rest of this album.

Life, in a similar manner, is a foot-stomping singalong that reaches achingly toward busting out ST&C calibre guitar crashes, but never does. The drums thump along with acceptable oomph, but I still cannot fathom the two drummers who brought us Baudelaire, or Relative Ways, or even Will You Smile Again? could plod along at such a lacklust pace. What's worse, this is typical of all the songs on So Divided. The band positively teeters on the brink of cranking it to eleven, but inexplicably reel themselves in to fart out another lounge-pop song not worthy to be an Oasis b-side.

It sounds like the band is being held hostage, they and their skills tied up and forced to play gaunt musical tributes to other, lesser bands under threat of immediate and painful execution. They try to break free, they do, but are restrained by pistol-whipping and broom-sodomy.

I'd forgive them if this were true. This album really is bad.

Naked Sun is a terrible faux-blues rock number that attempts to channel Led Zeppelin but simply sounds amateurish. I have never heard such a poor incorporation of woodwind into rock, and I once listened to a Dream Theatre record all the way through.

Wasted State of Mind packs what must be the most ridiculously poor imitation of tribal drumming ever put to tape, accompanied by jarringly out of place piano. I don't know what ToD drummer #2 was smacking around, but it sounds like a small wooden bongo. This track, ironically enough, eventually stumbles into what is arguably the album's most memorable moment, a soaring vocal chant that is at least as good as anything on Worlds Apart. But, again, the band simply does not rock. They do not even kind of rock. This is a rockless album, inoffensive and impotent. I wanted to love it, but there is sincerely nothing to love about a limp-wristed voyage through wankery.

In fact, Wasted State of Mind is capped off by an accordian solo. Case in point.

So, now the band that was once the definition of tightness, heaviness, and melody in the indie genre has made a record suitable for the "Adult Contemporary" pile, and that saddens me beyond words. It's difficult to believe that musicians who used to be renowned for their insatiable ferocity, a band that would destroy their equipment, their bodies, and any worldy stage simply as an expression of their unrelenting intensity, could be reduced to this.

But we'll always have Source Tags & Codes.

Come on Josh, check your fucking facts

2006-10-08T00:12:00.000-07:00

I just looked and saw that Tom Waits is, in fact, only fifty six years old. I had mistakenly assumed that he was in his mid to late sixties, and, as such, likely to die of old age relatively soon. I apologize, Mister Waits, you mean the world to me. But, in all fairness, I can't begin to hypothesize the sheer volume of drinking and smoking you've done in your lifetime, but you look like you could be a centuries-old wizard.

Seriously. I love that man to death, but look at that mug.

Now I've insulted Tom Waits. That is total bullshit Josh! I'm sorry, Mister Waits. I'm going to go listen to Sixteen Shells from a Thirty-Ought-Six right now. Please keep making records, I need them.

Hell you guys, he's younger than my dad.

six-teeenshellsfrum-athurteeougghtsix! cough.

Combining astrological signs for fun and profit

2006-10-07T22:44:00.000-07:00

Outkast's Aquemini is the finest hip hop album of all time. If you listen to it, you will join me in this opinion.

I think I need to talk about indie music some time soon.

Man Man has consumed an incredible chunk of my listening time since I first stumbled upon them back in April. I can't find any lyrics, and it is thus far unconfirmed to me whether to pronounce the band's name MAN man or just manman (I've favoured the latter), but I'm blessed by them all the same. With Tom Waits nearing death, I'm overjoyed that his spirit - and fubar'd vocal chords - have found a new home in frontman Honus Honus. I'm pretty sure that isn't his real name.

I haven't got a hold of the band's debut, but Six Demon Bag is more than enough to secure them in my top ten best evar list.

I played the album for my dad once, briefly, and he's a pretty cool guy, but he fairly summed it up as "Circus music. Like the kind people would play if the end of the world were announced and their minds snapped." It's cacophonic, to be sure. Drummer Pow Pow is astonishingly high in the mix, and isn't the least bit shy about taking charge of songs with richocheting floor tom beats. Beyond him, I can't rightly discern what if there are any other goddamn standard instruments. Members switch between trombones, pianos, synthesizers, woodblocks, and the odd cello. Electric and bass guitars are used spastically, and more to add punch to particular measures than as any kind of centrepiece. Songs get their hooks from Honus's monstrously strong voice and uncanny sense of rythm (Black Mission Goggles clips along with a delicious rip of Come Together's infalliable cadence; it is teh motherfucking awesome), which his bandmates assist via further insane growling and girlish squealing.

The album's punctuated with the occasional throw away track of pure freakout. You don't want to put SDB on your iPod and then hit shuffle, these songs will fuck you up if you're not prepared. While such unnecessary show-boating (Cedric and Omar, I'm looking squarely at you two idiots) usually makes an otherwise great album an exercise in pure tedium, it works here. I still can't quite palate the two second long Fishstick Gumbo (summary: a squeaky door slams and Honus lets loose the scariest peal of laughter you will ever hear), nor the way way overdone Hot Bat (it repeats the same scathing couple of bars for a minute and a half), they work in the context of the album.

It's one of those. You have to listen straight through or you only receive 1/3 your daily requisite intake of awesome.

Einstein on the Beach is the finest swath of total madness ever to come out of non-grind music. Honus's adoption of a shrill scream instead of his usual Waitsian crackle is deliciously well done, as are the pumping synthesizers manned by some other guy. The big payoff? The ending breaks down into Russian Dancing Music. You know that time where russian guys in big coats and little fur hats cross their arms and kick their legs out like they're made of rubber? It's phenomenal.

The absolute centre piece of the album is the unbelievably sharp Van Helsing Boombox, a melody infused dirge that's the easiest starting point to appreciating the band. It's had a fair bit of airplay on college stations, as I understand it, and it's about the only song I can get non-believers to listen to on a regular basis. But for good reason: Honus plays the piano with an eqloquence that isn't readily apparent on other tracks, and the low chord/high chord melodies he summons for Boombox are absolutely enchanting. He tones down the vocal intensity to sing about loss and hopelessness, and is flawlessly accompanied by his bandmates' New-Orleans funereal march playing.

Engwish Bwudd is also a must hear, if only for the chorus. Honus rythmically barks out, "Fee fie fo fum", and the band chimes in falsetto, "I smell the blood of an English maa-an!"

It's gorgeous, you'll see.

The album closes with the enigmatically poppy Ice Dogs, which is about as confusing a closer as an album can get. Beginning in strong Man Man form, the band takes a breath halfway through and skips off into a mo-town sing along that has to be heard to be understood. The band creates a wall of effeminate "doop. shee-doobie-doop." while Honus soars above on a positively bluesy high. It's not like anything on the rest of the album, and it fills me with bewilderment and joy even after six months of listening. I still haven't properly registered the instrumentation of this fine closer, it's all about the band trailing off into what I'm sure are neon-sign lighted forests and rhine stone canyons.

I like to think Man Man lives in a place like that, and are deliriously happy about it.

Everyone go to sleep.

I can't wait until it doesn't work

2006-10-04T15:03:00.000-07:00

I really think it would be awesome if the newest iteration of iTunes hadn't removed all convenience and most functionality from managing my iPod (Ziggy), or introduced useless and cumbersome new levels of screens, or decided to crash every time I try to exit it.

And wtf is gapless playback information and why does iTunes7 slow down my entire system trying to figure it out over and over again?

Google desktop, you're my only friend.

Grand larceny and the Man in Black

2006-10-04T13:31:00.000-07:00

Gavin is my BFF. It's a real indication of love when someone's willing to steal electronics for you, even if that person is a kleptomaniac and a sociopath. And works in technical support. He's got awesome curly hair, everyone should see it.

Josh said:
it doesn't want to stay connected and it's only getting a very low signal all the damn time
Josh said:
I might have to rearrange my room
Josh said:
damnit
Gavin said:
probably because of the low signal it keeps dropping
Gavin said:
does your attena screw on to your computer/
Josh said:
yep, out the back
Josh said:
anything I can do about it?
Gavin said:
hold on a sec

Five minutes pass.

Gavin says:
i got you a big antena from work
Gavin says:
i gotta run to class now though, so i will ttyl tonight
Josh says:
hot diggity damn!

After years of apathetic resistance, I've listened to my first Johnny Cash album. American V was put out posthumously, as I understand it, and I really wish I didn't know that little fact because the album sounds like Johnny's reaching out from the other side to scare whomever dares listen to him. Previously, when I sat down to listen to the Man in Black, I could never get past the blaring lights and klaxons that went off in my head every time I heard Johnny's voice. They all said, "COUNTRY. WARNING." In bold glowing letters and attention shattering whoops.

Long nights spent with Tim Kasher and Jack White have alleviated this particular condition somewhat.

It's good to get past it, the album is wondrous. Johnny's guitar playing is mesmerizing throughout, and the minimal, but very polished, additional instrumentation is uniformly perfect. There's rarely more than one instrument accompanying the guitar and vocals on a track, be they subdued string flourishes or snapping drum beats. They're most always low in the mix and leave plenty of room for Johnny's guitar tinklings and signature world weary wheeze. It's a perfect arrangement, particularly with the lyrics being overwhelmingly on the topic "I am so old I am going to die soon but damn that shit was good". You know, the blues.

It's not going to supplant Streetcore or Bone Machine in my "Best OMG I'm OLD" album category any time soon, I think. Joe Strummer was a veritable god, and his final piece of work was not so much a gorgeous lament for youth-now-lost as it was his Triumphant Ascension to Heaven. And Tom Waits? I have too big a crush on him. I don't think he expected to live as long as he did when he penned BM.

Come to think of it, Nick Cave is getting old. Soon he'll write a "BOMGIO" album and I won't know what the fuck to think.

Anyway.

Having only previously heard the famous "Hurt" cover, and snippets of the recent biopic I watched solely for Joaquin Phoenix's handsome face, I feel horridly out of place saying more than this. Who am I to comment on Johnny fucking Cash's legacy? I'm a... a city slicker. I can't go and tell Johnny whether he's got his shit together or not. Plus, he's dead.

I will mention that I didn't expect God's Gonna Cut You Down to turn out to be Run On. Or that If You Could Read My Mind would be, well, If You Could Read My Mind. Turns out both are actually folk stand-by's and were respectable long before Moby and that awful 90's outfit got a hold of them. Thank you Mister Cash, you learned me something good.

Both tracks do disturb the shit out of me.

I need to read somewhere in the vicinity of 100 pages of Plato, 14 pages of Larkin, and twice the sum of those in some bloated Cognitive Psychology textbook by the end of the night or I will fall down, die, and quit school. I will, however, wait until after Canadian Thanksgiving to do so. I'm headed to London to spend it with my Dad, and that man can cook. I'm so deeply pleased I am essentially his genetic copy. You know, being a laboratory clone.

It's Liisa Donaldson's birthday today: Happy Birthday Liisa!

While you're up

2006-10-04T00:00:00.000-07:00

I'd also like Boris and Sunn 0))) to collaborate on an album which will be released on Hallo-fucking-ween. It will be known as the scariest mother fucking album of all time.

And I want Tom Waits to come to my house and sing me Happy Birthday.

Best Birthday Evar.

For my birthday I want a Trail of Dead/Blood Brothers tour

2006-10-03T22:12:00.000-07:00

You mean there is one? Fuck yeah.

"With their new record coming out October 3 on Interscope, ...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead are putting the rock-mobile into overdrive. They have just* announced the dates of their autumn tour with the Blood Brothers, who also have a forthcoming album. We wish all the best 4 the band on this tour and hope the new album is worlds apart from the last one.

The Blood Brothers album is called Young Machetes and is due out October 10 on V2. Crimes/Sleater-Kinney producer John Goodmanson and Guy Picciotto of Fugazi produced the record, and considering that Fugazi probably won't be releasing new material anytime soon (never say "never," right?), this is probably your best chance to feast on some of that good old Picciotto sound" Pitchfork

The tour is coming to venues in Toronto AND Montreal next month, the fifth and sixth of November, which happen to be the two days leading up to my birthday. I'm hopefully headed to the latter. Money is tight, but it's a safe bet that a money laden birthday is nigh, so I'll take a chance on the thirty dollar bus tickets and twenty one dollar admission.

I've never seen either of the bands put on a show, but I've heard some mixed reports. ToD are legendary, for sure, and I'm all for bands kicking the shit out of equipment they've spent thousands of dollars on and need to make their living. The Bloods, if unconfirmable rumours from high school students can be believed, are hit and miss. I'm not sure if I'd pay money to see Jordan Blilie and Johnny Whitney do their thing if they couldn't do it in key. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a stickler for technical acuity in music, but have you heard those motherfuckers? One note out of place and they could cut you.

More important than that, however, is both bands' shiny new albums. There's no way either of these outfits are going to be at less than peak performance when just getting out of the gates with new material. ToD's So Divided dropped today, I think, but I've yet to get my mitts on it.

TBB's Young Machetes is due out next week, but I've been blessed with a promotional copy. I've given it a few listens, but I still can't quite give a sober analysis of it. The initial rush of "OMGZ SHINY AND NEW", and all pertinent euphoria, has settled down into fairly calm percolation, but beyond that I'm still digesting it. It's good, and I'm sure it's going alienate fans, both the pre and post Crimes kind. There's no mistaking the Blood's style or form. It's post-Hardcore of the most frenetic persuasion, but I'd say it's fair to call YM their tightest realization of it yet. I don't want to say "fullest" or "deepest" or "best" just yet, but holy cow do the Brothers rock out.

There was talk, months ago, about a possible break up for TBB, when the members were going off piecemeal to other projects, namely Neon Blonde and Headwound City. It looked bad, but with YM in hand it's apparent that these guys working out their own shit for a while has made the band stronger than ever. Previous albums worked on the basis of each member completely flying off the handle within their respective roles, with the occasional straight ahead piece like Ambulance vs Ambulance punctuating more aggressive freakouts. The new songs are different in that they've got the best of both worlds without losing any bite.

Jordan, who was put in a bit of a secondary role for Crimes, is much more prevalent in these tracks and sounds better than he ever has. I'm thinking being numero uno in Headwound City did wonders for him. Johnny's still Johnny, and I don't think fans would have their favourite manbanshee any other way. The weird piano flourishes and synthetic touches, care of bassist Morgan Henderson, which were a bit too overbearing in Neon Blonde have found a comfortable home on tracks like Spit Shine Your Black Clouds (which is also probably the first TBB song one can properly shake one's ass too).

Mark Gajadhar is my favourite drummer in punk music- goddamn that man is creative. He's a little reserved and cymbal crazy for too many tracks on YM, but drumming like that in Set Fire to the Face on Fire and Vital Beach is just not to be fucked with.

I hope it stands up to repeated listens, I can't be sure just yet. I am sure that it'll make for a hell of a good show.

I think I'll appropriate CFRC's copy of So Divided. I need to swing by to pitch my Drum n' Bass idea at them, so I'll be in the neighbourhood.

I wonder what time it is.