Much Music VJ Search (Premiere)

I'll give them credit for trying to be different. Unlike most reality shows, in which the contestants are thrown together at the start with little explanation (Survivor, the myriad of Bachelor/Bachelorette-type shows) or are shown auditioning in front of judges (Canadian/American Idol), the first episode of the MM VJ Search featured in-studio host Dina Pugliese introducing a series of taped submissions and live auditions from malls across the country. Watching people goof off on film isn't the most enthralling way to spend an hour, and it didn't help that the pacing felt random and the production was somewhat amateurish. But as Ben Rayner wrote in last week's Toronto Star, MM has always prided itself on lo-tech, unscripted reality, so maybe that's exactly the vibe they were aiming for with this show.

The most annoying part was the self-promotion overkill -- far too much of the episode was devoted to putting over the, er, "prestige" of the VJ position. It was enough to make American Idol seem modest about its role in the industry. Nevertheless, the 20 semi-finalists (from what little was shown of them) look fairly interesting, so I'll certainly keep watching to see how this turns out.

2005 Coda, Part 2

Results of the Village Voice's Pazz N Jop poll are expected this week. In anticipation of the deluge of comments that will soon be blitzing a blog or messageboard near you, here is my PnJ ballot along with the comments I submitted. For album rankings, 100 points are distributed amongst ten albums, and no album can receive less than five or more than thirty points. For song rankings, each vote counts equally (so my #1 is worth just as much as my #10. Still, it's fun to rank them).

I kept the comments short and sweet. I'm not a fan of "The State of Music in the Year 2XXX" rants but I felt compelled to write about my fave album and single, took a shot at MIA (the likely winner of the albums poll), and added some lighthearted stuff about the MMVA's and The Killers. I'll probably be back later in the week with some post-results chinstroking. Until then, join me in rooting for Animal Collective's "Feels" (top 20? "Sung Tongs" was #21 last year) and hoping that Depeche Mode can crack the top 200 (in either poll).

Your Pazz & Jop albums ballot was submitted as follows:

1. Sigur Ros - Takk... - Geffen (17)
2. M83 - Before the Dawn Heals Us - Gooom/Mute (16)
3. Depeche Mode - Playing the Angel - Mute (14)
4. Animal Collective - Feels - Fat Cat (13)
5. Rhythm and Sound - See Mi Yah - Burial Mix (10)
6. Low - The Great Destroyer - Sub Pop (9)
7. Jesu - Jesu - Hydra Head (6)
8. Broadcast - Tender Buttons - Warp (5)
9. Silver Mt Zion Memorial Orchestra&Tra-La-La Band - Horses In the Sky -
Constellation (5)
10. Ellen Allien - Thrills - Bpitch Control (5)


Your Pazz & Jop singles ballot was submitted as follows:

1. t.A.T.u. - All About Us - Interscope
2. Polmo Polpo - Kiss Me Again and Again - Intr_version
3. MFA - The Difference It Makes - Kompakt Pop
4. Madonna - Hung Up - Warner
5. Kelly Clarkson - Since U Been Gone - RCA
6. Killers - All These Things That I've Done - Island
7. M83 - Don't Save Us From the Flames - Gooom/Mute
8. New Order - Krafty - London
9. Ciara - Oh - LaFace
10. Of Montreal - So Begins Our Abalee - Polyvinyl

Considering it was my #1 album of 2005, I should probably say something nice about Sigur Ros' "Takk...". Unfortunately, every time I try to write something, I find that what I've written is indistinguishable from a description of a really crappy album by Mum. For what it's worth, I was ready to give up on this band back in the "Von"/"Agetis Byrjun" days, when it seemed as though every Sigur Ros review or feature had to include the word "glacier" at least four times. More importantly, the records weren't even all that good. But with "Takk...", they've made their Disneyland album; equal parts hallucinatory childlike wonder and maudlin adult
requiem. See what I mean -- corny take on a shit Mum album or brilliant opus by Sigur Ros? You decide.

I stayed away from the MIA debates that held blogs and messageboards in a stranglehold this past spring. I'm not a fan of her records so I didn't feel the motivation to speak up. Anyway, here's a half-serious apples and oranges comparison: Roots Manuva drops similar beats (compare "Chin Up" from his underappreciated 2005 album "Awfully Deep" to anything from "Arular") and is 100 times more skilled as a rapper and lyricist. So basically, I had very little use for MIA in 2005. Unfortunately, at a Roots Manuva gig in Toronto in May, nobody so much as budged when he played his then-new single "Colossal Insight". I don't think the crowd wanted to hear a disco song.

Five Reasons Why You Might Want to Watch a Canadian Music Awards Show Next Year (2005 Much Music Video Awards Edition):
1. Where else can you see the Backstreet Boys interviewed by a sock puppet?
2. The chance to see the wheels spinning in the Killers' heads as they read from the winner's envelope and try to figure out how to pronounce rapper k-os' name (proper pronunciation = like "chaos"). Sadly, they ended up with "K.O.S.", like "S.O.S.". Their embarrassment is MY petty entertainment -- and it can be YOURS too! Which Canadian performer's name will be mispronounced by a non-Canadian next year?
3. VJ's hosting segments in seemingly unexpected locations, such as nearby rooftops and in the street outside the studio. Almost everywhere except the stages, for the most part.
4. Let's face it, there isn't a single awards show that couldn't be improved by holding it outdoors.
5. You can always be assured of getting a good laugh at some predictably terrible bands. Americans get to scratch this itch via Good Charlotte. We have Billy Talent.

My video of the year was The Killers' "All These Things That I've Done", not least because I can practically imagine Beavis and Butthead making the requisite jokes about tits and laughing at how ridiculous the band looks in those outfits. And you can't hate on the always excellent Anton Corbijn directing a charming Russ Meyer pastiche.

The lesbian thing is actively hurting t.A.T.u these days, at least in North America. Their act no longer courts controversy, instead, the reaction is one of general disgust -- "no, not those fake lesbians again." This is how Jerry Springer fell from grace. Once the yen for notoriety becomes blatantly obvious, people become bored with the entire spectacle. However, the album that supported this sideshow, "Dangerous and Moving", is packed with fantastic songs. "All About Us" should have been unstoppable -- part Wagnerian thunderbolts, part Thelma and Louise;
accompanied by an alluring video stuffed with mindless violence and push-up bras. I couldn't ask for much more than that from my pop stars.

Happy Anniversary To Me!

I forgot about my own blog's sixth anniversary earlier this week (Tuesday the 17th). We are officially an old married couple now, clearly.

Unlike last year's fifth anniversary entry, I won't identify one specific post that stands out from the past year. I think the Gainsbourg and Magnetic Fields entries offered unique takes on music that receives less criticism and attention than it deserves, but my State of the Union statement on the final day of 2005 is probably the ideal summation of the past year.

So let's look forward instead ... to a new collaborative blog, Jew vs Indian, that coincidentally shares the same birthday as this one. Great, that's one less date that I need to remember!

Anticipating ...

I can't get into the start of a new season of American Idol. There's only so many times I can watch stupid people act like dipshits on camera, no matter what new pithy phrases Simon Cowell comes up with. The people who can watch these interminable first few weeks of the show and laugh right up until the end without ever getting bored are the same people who kept "America's Funniest Home Videos" on the air for so long.

While waiting for AI to transform into a watchable show, I can look forward to Much Music VJ Search: The Series. Ten VJ hopefuls, one winner to be determined using reality show rules. In the past, the competition proceeded at a breakneck over just a few days. Stretching it out over several weeks will establish the personalities more thoroughly than the weekend specials did. The inevitable villain will probably be some 20-year Montrealer who always dresses in black and won't get off the other contestant's backs for saying disparaging things about System of a Down.

I have really been, er, feeling Animal Collective's "Feels" this week. Every year there's an album on my year-end top ten that I know I'm either underrating or overrating. Badly. I realise it while I'm putting together the list. "Feels" was my favourite album during those listmaking days, but since it's a year-end list, and not a "faves of the moment" one, I had to be careful to take the entire year into account. Flipping out and putting "Feels" at #1 doesn't do anyone any good. Cool heads had to prevail.

My favourite albums make me feel joyous, sad, and romantic. My pantheon-level favourite albums can make me feel all those things at the same time during nearly every song. "Takk..." and "Before the Dawn Heals Us" both fit that bill. "Playing the Angel" wasn't quite there, which was why it was a distant (but still tremendous) #3. "Feels" has stepped up to a higher level, and it sure is making me wanna scream these days.

A Northern Chorus, Sianspheric, Alive and Living @ Lula Lounge

Alive and Living, the first of the night's trio of Hamilton bands, cover similar ground to their headlining colleagues, albeit with a whiff of goth sensibility. Or maybe I felt that way because of the two dark-haired black-clad women in the band.

Sianspheric are chameleons. The first time I saw them, they played on a darkened stage while kaleidoscopic shapes were projected everywhere. The second time I saw them was amidst a continuous cloud of dry ice smoke in a crushingly loud club.

The fourth time I saw them, they were The Verve. They projected a loose, jam-it-out attitude. They scaled back on the FX, had only one guitar player, and the singer was a beer-chugging waif with mussed hair. And now, once again, I think "who are these guys?" as the unfamiliar faces take to the stage*. No projections, no lighting gimmicks, no smoke, just the band and a mainly seated audience lounging in a supper club with oil candles flickering on every table in the room. In this setting, they seem determined to sound as incongruous as possible. Sianspheric are overwhelming tonight, cranking out the fierce, up-front sound of "There's Always Someplace You'd Rather Be" (as opposed to the more laid back, space-rock sound of their first and third records) as if they'd never sounded any different. The lurching, emotional drive of both "Audiophone" and set closer "I Like the Ride" produce a lump in my throat the likes of which I've never felt from this band's music in the seven years it's been since I first heard them. Sianspheric, the band famous for their vanishing guitarists and being notoriously slow-working recluses (only three albums in eleven years), the band currently pushing a career retrospective DVD that has largely been slammed by the press, have never sounded better.

A Northern Chorus certainly try their best to follow all that. The sombre pace and boy/girl harmonies might paint them as a shoegaze version of Low, but the symphonic swells (aided by cello and violin) and massive, outpouring crescendoes aren't too far from Sigur Ros' last two albums. The typical putdown of Sigur Ros is to declare their music boring, with minutes spent waiting for something to happen and being underwhelmed when it finally does. I'm getting a taste of that feeling tonight, but fortunately, A Northern Chorus usually deliver a payoff that is good enough to make me forget it (or ignore it).

* as it turns out, I am not losing my mind: the band's website reports that two members left the band at the conclusion of last spring's tour with A Northern Chorus.

2005 Coda, Part 1

ILM is counting down its Top 50 tracks and albums. The list is tabulated from the votes of about 70 people, each of whom submitted up to a Top 20 in each category. A lot of people are burned out on year-end listmaking (even me), but that's because every list starts looking the same as the others after a while. But the ILM results have coughed up some nice surprises thus far, and I always love a good countdown.

Even though some of them were adapted from my year-end post on this blog, I will repost the blurbs I wrote for the poll. What can I say, my rewrites are always better!
(as of this writing, only two of them have appeared on the actual poll thus far)

Sigur Ros, "Takk...". Here I sit, going through the motions of another failed attempt to describe Sigur Ros' "Takk..." without having the finished product turn out like a description of a shit Mum album written by a twee indie fuck. What's the point of writing about how "Se Lest" feels like a soaring, Peter Pan-like excursion over a twinkling Disneyland when I can't stand the way those words look on paper? Why write about how "Heysatan"'s four minutes serve as an exhausted, extended sigh that help the album tail off into nothingness better than any final chord could? There is no point.

M83, "Before the Dawn Heals Us". When M83 became Anthony Gonzalez's solo project, his band's life as a synthtastic "Loveless" clone came crashing to a halt. Setting the controls to "epic" for nearly every track, they broadened their template to include heart-crushing ballads ("Safe" might have been the saddest song I heard in 2005), sweeping, cinematic instrumentals ("Moonchild"); as well as surging, pseudo-shoegazer rock ("Don't Save Us From the Flames", "Teen Angst"). What's more, "A Guitar and a Heart" is the best song Loverboy ever made.

Depeche Mode, "Playing the Angel". It's a comeback only in the sense that few would have expected them to re-peak twenty-five years into their turbulent career. The album's surprises include tracks such as "I Want It All" and "Nothing's Impossible", both of which were penned by new DM songwriter Dave Gahan and brooded like the "Black Celebration" sequel that was never recorded.

Polmo Polpo, "Kiss Me Again and Again". Anecdote. February 2003. The fifth anniversary of Wavelength, a popular weekly indie showcase in Toronto, remains semi-legendary to this day. Before the gig started, I spent a healthy chunk of time trying to explain the genius of local act Polmo Polpo to a few unsuspecting friends. It was difficult to communicate the sound of Wolfgang Voigt-inflected minimal techno with string samples and shoegaze-y guitar to people who had never heard anything remotely similar to it. In the end, Polmo Polpo threw the entire club for a loop by playing but one track (as per his norm) -- a head-nodding twenty-minute disco-funk number with no apparent beginning or end. I felt like the boy who cried wolf. The legendary part came immediately after, as five hundred brains were fried by a scorching set from prog metallers Rockets Red Glare.

Two years later, Polmo Polpo decided to release that Arthur Russell cover after all. Rockets Red Glare have long since imploded. Meanwhile, at a gig this past summer, a spectacular live version of "Kiss Me Again and Again" (lasting more than thirty minutes) convinced me that Polmo Polpo and I both needed to grow into the song a little bit.

Animal Collective, "Feels". Compared to the sleepy backwoods folk of earlier releases (that's a putdown only if you want it to be), "Feels" teems with adrenaline-fueled life. I still feel strongly about my post-"Sung Tongs" assertion that the ideal Animal Collective album contains only three minute pop songs and twelve minute drone pieces. In that sense, they could have improved the album by roughly doubling the lengths of "Turns Into Something", "Banshee Beat", and "The Purple Bottle", but admittedly, my heart's not in these complaints about near-perfection.

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"George Bush Doesn't Care About Black People", by The Legendary K.O. has popped up on some people's year-end lists. I obviously understand why someone would prefer it to Kanye's "Golddigger" (I think am one of those people), but I have trouble understanding why someone would rank it near the top of their singles list. It's lyrically sharp, but nothing extraordinary, and there probably isn't enough politically-motivated music being made these days (I certainly can't argue with the importance of the cause). Nevertheless, I wonder how many people are ranking more due to hatred of George Bush than their love of the song. How many of them would have ranked *any* cleverly-written novelty tune that took a shot at the US Prez, just because they were itching to make a list-motivated statement? How many of them didn't like "Goldigger" that much to begin with? Wouldn't it had to have been a near-lock for these people's lists to fully justify including The Legendary K.O. instead?

The Leather Uppers, The Midways, The von Drats @ Smiling Buddha Bar

Friday's solid night of rock and roll begins with the (horizontal?) striped-shirted surf rockers (I forget which opening band was which ... OK, I never knew ... OK, I was a bit too apathetic to find out at the time. This is nothing against the band, but more a case of constantly gravitating near a pitcher of beer that happened to sit near the bar with a decent view of the stage. I'm not sure I've ever seen a live surf rock band, unless Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet count. Fun stuff, but it's nothing I would go out of my way to play at home. And that's why cheap gigs at neighbourhood bars were invented).

One might be tempted to accuse Leather Uppers of hopping on the White Stripes trashpunk bandwagon, two-person guitar/drums instrumentation and all, but this band was founded in 1991. After sitting out the late 90's, they reunited a couple of years ago (maybe in response to "rock becoming hip again", or maybe not, it doesn't matter) and have gigged occasionally ever since. They start out tentatively, but soon enough the guitarist is scaling the amps and working up a good sweat. Suck up that beer-soaked energy!

Go! Team USA

The Stateside rerelease of The Go! Team's "Thunder Lightning Strike" was part of my Boxing Day haul. I already "own" the original album in mp3 form (fairly good fidelity though) but the idea of having a remixed/remastered/remodeled version was uniquely appealing to me. I'm somewhat fascinated by albums that exist in more than one form (excepting, of course, those of the "digitally remastered 20 years later" variety) such as the third Velvet Underground album, and Manic Street Preachers' "The Holy Bible". Track-by-track, in-depth sonic comparisons of these types of albums is quite rare in music literature, most likely because the existence of duplicitous albums is also rare. Following on the heels of my Velvets* and Manics** analyses from years ago, how would the Go! Team fare? Which mix comes out on top?

A track-by-track cage match would be pointless. The UK mix (one of my uncrowned top five albums of 2004) is superior in nearly every way.

Not many publications seemed to notice or care about this. Pitchfork addressed the issue in their review of the US release, but didn't raise much fuss about it and assigned it the same rating they gave to the UK version. My main criticisms have little to do with sampling clearance issues. I went through both versions track-by-track, but not in a nitpicky, trainspotting manner. To me, the biggest differences in content are the beats in "Bottle Rocket" and the horn part in "Everyone's a VIP to Someone", neither of which could dramatically reduce my enjoyment of two of the album's better tracks.

It was like comparing a vinyl copy (UK) to a CD copy (US). The US version is choked with bass, the drum levels have been hugely reduced, and the cymbals supressed (a near-tragedy in the case of a band that employs two drummers plus canned beats). Overall, it sounds tighter, less cluttered, and less busy. They've chopped away so much wonderful treble, the source of all that barely controlled chaos that made the UK version such a joy for me. It has nearly vanished. Granted, I'm comparing mp3 (UK) to wav (US), but mp3 rips normally suppress the treble.

The addition of two b-sides to the US tracklisting is a nice bonus, but I'll trade in a hundred of those to get my chaos back.

* 3rd album final score: Closet mix 5, Valentin Mix 3, with 2 ties
** The Holy Bible final score: UK mix 6, US mix 5, with 2 ties (although listening to the album as a whole, I prefer the US mix)