After spending the last couple of weeks hedging on it, I decided to see Isis last night. Other than a volume deficiency (for a band with three guitarists, anyhow), I can't say I was disappointed. I caught the last couple of songs by These Arms Are Snakes (Tool, prog-metal, yep), Isis came on for what began as a formulaic performance. Big, riff-heavy start gives way to smouldering restrained section, gives way to slow buildup and big, riff-heavy ending. Fine stuff, but not something I'd want to hear eight or nine times in a night. The way out of that rut was to do everything the same, but MORE. Long middle portions gave way to supremely long middle portions with precise drumming, shimmering effects and guitars, making me wait even longer for the finale. This fell precisely in line with thoughts I'd had earlier in the week, namely, my desire to hear an Isis record with four fifteen-minute tracks rather than eight eight-minute ones.

I'm starting to convince myself that the new Low album is as good as it is because they've never sounded so much like Drugstore. Songs that might have been 100% quiet and hazy on past Low albums are suddenly breaking loose midway through with squalls of feedback. Low records are highly controlled affairs, you always got the feeling that no notes were wasted and every last particle of sound was carefully mapped out in advance. Sure, the reverb would thicken (and perhaps randomize) the band's sound, but these embellishments never threatened to deviate the proceedings from the script at hand. But on tracks such as "When I Go Deaf", the guitars come screaming in halfway through, the sound is raw, unrestrained, and I keep expecting to hear Alan Sparhawk completely break down and start yelling his face off. Drugstore have always been so good at that -- bringing their songs up to the brink of losing control of them, and then abruptly returning them back to a safer haven (and the lyrical subject matter often mirrors the music, "Nectarine" and "The Party Is Over" being the first examples to come to mind).

From the Magnetic Fields "69 Love Songs" NYC performance in 2000, they play a version of "Luckiest Guy on the Lower East Side" that kills the version on the record. Goodbye bouncy beat -- hello piano driven show-tune, accompanied by guitar and cello. It's a version I can imagine Drugstore doing. It must be the cello. Maybe the semi-joyous, semi-emasculating lyrics too. Unfortunately, there hasn't been any news about the 'Store in months -- who knows if they actually got around to starting a new album last year like they were supposed to.

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Jake Fairley's wonderful new album, "Touch Not the Cat", reminds me of Peaches. Sure, both are Toronto ex-pats now living in Berlin, but it's more than that. It's mainly the beats -- dirty, sloppy, and grungy -- all compliments, of course. But in Peaches' case, the beats are there to adorn her voice. They're a backdrop to her sexual fantasies/demands, they're something to clog up the speakers while she (loudly) speaks her piece -- similar to house records by Screamin' Rachel in the 80's. Fairley has pulled off something very different, he's made a minimal techno (read: NOT microhouse, there's not nearly enough empty space for this to be microhouse, this is not Matthew Dear's "Leave Luck to Heaven" revisited) record with vocals. I'm not even certain the album needs the vocals, because the music is strong enough to hold up on its own. But they're there, adding another instrument on top of the rest of the pounding.

I caught a snippet of MM's "On Set", featuring Ashlee Simpson. Hearing her talk, she definitely not braindead, which wouldn't ordinarily be something you'd say in praise, but considering that family ... anyhow, she talked about the clothes she wears and how she dresses in her videos, and explained how she likes wearing loose comfortable clothes. She mentioned JoJo (14-year old girl discovers tight tops) and Lindsay Lohan (18-year old working-hard-to-be-a-baaad-girl with her tops perpetually flayed open) as examples of other "music stars" who like to dress sexy and reveal a bit of their bodies.

Nevertheless, the video Ashlee was shooting involved her writhing about on a couch, arms sprawl out around her, midriff easily visible, with her pants riding low nearly down to her ass crack. So I guess we've reached the point where "dressing sexy" = "getting your tits out" and as long as you're not doing the latter then it's fairly conservative. Just to let you know.

Gold Chains and Sue Cie brought an energetic and gritty performance to an active ElMo crowd last night. This was my first time downstairs at the ElMo since they renovated it. They've transformed it from a cramped, dingy space into a more open space with decent sightlines from anywhere in the room and a spacious dancefloor upfront (which experienced heavy use during the show, from both the audience and the performers). Skipping liberally through genres, from semi-industrial bumper beats a la Peaches, to guitar-laden screamalongs, GC worked his birthday butt off, with SC not far behind. The only worrying thing was the small crowd -- 40 people at most -- giving me the fear that it won't be worth it for them to tour here again. It reminded me of Bardo Pond's summer 2002 gig in front of a very active (er, for Bardo Pond fans anyhow) crowd ... of just 70 people. And they haven't been back since :(((

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For the first few years of their career, Saint Etienne were widely considered to be a lousy live band. In the studio they produced one of the finest runs of singles by any artist in the 1990's, but live, they were out of sync, out of tune, and out of the sparkle that made their records so noteworthy.

Then they took a few years off and quietly returned with "Good Humour". Not sure what to expect, but glad to have them back, I went to see them when they came to town ... and was blown away! They brought a full band, the live drumming gave a welcome jolt to both the older techno-folk songs and the (then) newer, bouncy, sundrenched tunes. Sarah Cracknell's voice, usually a focal point of StEt live criticisms, was in perfect form. It was like StEt filtered through a Stax-Volt revue with Sarah playing the perfect party host. Every song ended with rapid-fire thoughts bursting through my head ... "I can't believe how GOOD this is" ... "I've never even heard these songs, but they sound fantastic and so, so, so addictive" ... and by the time they closed the show with "He's On the Phone", the song I would have jumped off the balcony to hear, the concert has provided me with all the entertainment I could have hoped for, with plenty of room to spare.

Recently, I bought their most recent album, "Finisterre", probably their finest album since "Tiger Bay". I decided to track down some live recordings to hear what they'd been up to in concert. I found a 1998 gig from Chicago (likely only a few days difference from the show I saw in Toronto) and it was as wonderful as I remembered. I had to hear "He's On the Phone" multiple times in a row to get my fix, soaking up the multi-part harmonies while prancing around the apartment waving a beer.

Fast forward to 2002 ... what happened? They were back to singing out of tune over the flat thump of their drum machines. The live arrangements seemed so empty, as if several melody lines had gone missing between the studio and the stage. A check of 2000 (touring "Sound of Water") revealed the same full sound and glistening harmonies they'd had in 1998, which shone through despite the more downtempo, hazy ambient feel of the "Sound of Water" suites. So what will the next album (early 2005) and tour bring? Flip a coin, perhaps?

I recovered from the devastating back-to-back cancellations of Black Dice and Fennesz and headed out to a little Morr Music showcase last night. The Go Find offered guitar pop with simple dance beats. They even busted out a couple of guitar solos, which instantly brought back flashbacks of Ratatat last month, albeit with the rawk histrionics turned way down. Their follow-up perfomance was considerably better, for indeed, Styrofoam and the Go Find (the touring versions anyhow) are exactly the same people. This time, the beats were glitched up, and the guitars smeared out into shoegaze paste. But Lali Puna managed to outdo them. Thanks in large part to a live drummer and bassist, theirs was a set of motorik funk, blasting out the sort of stomach-quaking grooves that Stereolab have largely forgotten how to do. In fact, the squalls of effects added on do recall the Lab/Mouse on Mars collab, except Lali Puna were more like Lab '94 + MoM '04, rather than the Lab/MoM '98.

Crazy Coincidence!!! No really! I just finished reading "I Wanna Be Sedated" by local writerfolk heroes Phil Dellio and Scott Woods (funny, I even got about 70 % of the jokes. I think. It's hard to know you've missed a joke if you can't even recognize the jokes). This left me with a hankering for George McCrae's "Rock Your Baby", which I haven't heard in so many years. Downloading happened, song was heard, and what a great song it is ... then I queued up the new (as yet unreleased Low album, which I have been loving for the past couple of weeks, btw) and guess what? The song "Broadway (So Many People)" sounds just like "Rock Your Body"! Honestly! You can hum George's melody on top of Alan and Mimi's! Try it for yourself!!

The Low album just may be their best ... easily their best set of mantras a la "Lullaby" from ten long years ago, as in two chord snarling monsters, distorted and amped up with blinding intensity. And some lovely soft tunes too.

Disappointment ... I was supposed to see Black Dice and Animal Collective tonight, but when I got to the venue I learned that Black Dice cancelled. I went with the second leg of a lose/lose situation and chose to go home. Despite reading a few articles about them over the last couple of months, I had purposely avoided hearing Animal Collective's music. Sometimes I enjoy going into a show "cold", and this was one of those times. So, it was either throw money at a different show from the one I paid to see in order to see a band that I'd never heard, or go home and save the money for something else. I had been hugely looking forward to seeing Black Dice, and that's what mattered in the end. That, and the fact that I am poor and could use that money for other things (like the Gold Chains show next week!). Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go download some Animal Collective and progress toward my inevitable regret about passing up seeing a lauded band whose live shows have an excellent reputation.