In the 14 November NOW, there was a perfectly decent article about Lali Puna, who were playing a show in Toronto that week. There was also a pitiful and unneeded nod to Radiohead.

No wonder they don't like going out in public and talking to strangers. People must be coming up to them all the time and accusing/crediting them with being the first rock band in the history of the world ever to use electronics in their music, not to mention "making" bands through their mid-80's Morrissey-esque endorsements.

Now I can appreciate them turning a few more people onto Lali Puna, but I cannot accept that Lali Puna owe a good chunk of their present success to Radiohead. LP are on an incredibly hip label, Morr Music, and would have garnered most of their attention that way.

More gems from NOW: "Sigur Rós. The Icelandic space rock ensemble went from comfortable obscurity to object of global attention after playing a handful of shows with Radiohead". People forget that "Agetis Byrjun" was released in 1999. The people who forget that sort of thing didn't hear about Sigur Ros until 2001. It was a #1 album in Iceland soon after its release, but a distribution deal with famed UK music shop/label FatCat didn't come about until the end of the year. The initial FatCat pressings sold out in five seconds, and practically nobody in North America was able to get their hands on a copy for months afterward. During that waiting period, the hype surrounding Sigur Ros reached fever pitch among indie heads in the know. THEN, they supported Radiohead. By THEN, their record had become more easily available internationally, although Radiohead certainly had nothing to do with that. I'd be willing to bet that two-thirds of the people who heard of SR after they toured in support of Radiohead (whether they heard of them that way or not) don't know that they have a new record out now. Those aren't fans, those are curiousity seekers and bandwagon jumpers. Sigur Ros probably did more to make themselves by playing high-profile festivals such as All-Tommorow's parties, and the five dates they played in support of Godspeed You Black Emperor! that same spring likely earned them more long-term fans than the Radiohead tour in the fall.

"Warp Records. During his post-OK Computer meltdown, when the sound of guitars would send him bonkers, fragile frontman Thom Yorke plugged the "intelligent techno" catalogue of Warp Records to anyone who'd listen". I cringe whenever I read something like this. It's sickening that by 1991, Warp records had released as many legendary records as any record label in recent memory, and yet when their name is thrown around in rock circles, it's primarily as a "Kid A"-inspiration footnote. It's not Thom Yorke's fault that countless writers are too lazy to do a bit of homework, but he's most definitely guilty of discovering Warp for himself, acting as though he'd translated the Rosetta Stone and opened up new avenues for rock music by doing so.

Warp's catalogue was an electronic music template back when On A Friday were playing to six people in college beer halls. After dominating early UK techno with the infamous "bleep" sound, they overhauled it yet again -- only two years later -- with the "Artificial Intelligence" series, becoming the foremost flagbearers for giving techno as much credibility in a living room as it did on a dance floor. At this juncture in time, Radiohead's "Creep" single, a relatively bright spot on a blase debut album, had failed upon initial release and was being prepped for a second go around, at which point it was disturbingly hailed as a classic in the post-grunge slipstream even though it was nothing but a passable attempt to rip off Nirvana and My Bloody Valentine simultaneously. During the next few years, Warp expanded its repertoire, branching into sweet electronics melded with soul (Nightmares on Wax), pop (Broadcast), not to mention the usual bevvy of excellence from the usual suspects (Aphex, Autechre, Mike Ink, etc.). Thom Yorke was said to be still quite happy playing his guitar during this period, thank you very much. But he's never put up much of a fight when writers and fans put Radiohead into the vanguard of electronica. So, in this specific respect, there's loads of people who need to readjust their thinking and give Radiohead the credit they are due -- which is nothing, absolutely nothing at all.

It's been so long since I ripped on Radiohead, I'd forgotten how much fun it could be (just then, a solitary tear rolls down Barry's cheek, cutting a jagged path through the stubble to the bottom of his chin, and makes a faint splash on the space bar of his grey keyboard ... )

A couple of days ago, I had to kill time while waiting my hair dye to set, so I flipped on MuchMusic. Good music or bad, the station is quite often entertaining. First, I caught the end of the Justin Timberlake Spotlight. Yes, they ran a spotlight on someone with exactly one solo single to his credit. So obviously it was mainly NSync videos and Justin speaking during their interviews. I've now heard "Like I Love You" a few times, and I'm shocked to be admitting that it's actually quite good. I'm not shocked that it *is* good -- the top pop producers and songwriters working on his album have seen to that -- but that I'm *admitting* it's good, since Justin's sissy cute momma's boy look and blatant Michael Jackson mannerisms aren't the kinds of things that I would normally like. Nevertheless, I'm completely sold on the NME's view of his solo career, that is, with the people he's hired to work on his records, they can't help but be good, so the only remaining question is whether they are actual Justin Timberlake records, or if you could have stuck any old shmo in there, Phil Spector stylee, and achieved the same effect. Guess which side the NME and I picked.

Mere minutes later, "French Kiss" began, and the first video was "Symphonie Pour un Dingue" by K-Maro. I don't have the slightest idea what he was rapping about, I can't understand French too well anymore (let alone French rappers) but the video itself was a strange and bizarre amalgamation of styles and trends that was very refreshing. First, kudos for tossing "symphonie" in the title, I don't think any hip-hop artist has had the guts to do that since Maestro Fresh Wes' debut more than a decade ago. Then there's the cheesy synth strings over the music, and the -- hello -- 4/4 beat! In a rap song! But the best is K-Maro himself, dress and posture straight out of Eminem 101, styling and profiling with a club full of bodacious hoochies. And their vice of choice? A fattie?? Malt Liquor??? Hell no, dogg, it's WHITE WINE. Head boppin', booty talkin', mack walkin' guys and their hos and their WHITE WINE. I love French culture.

The new Sum 41 video "Still Waiting" is a parody of the Strokes et al. Complete with a skit starring Will Sasso as a bandwagon-jumping industry exec, he renames the band "The Sums" and they film a picture-perfect knockoff of a Strokes video, complete with low quality film, identical outfits, ridiculous mid-song tantrums, and gigantic shining letters S-U-M-S flanking the performance. Cute, and very, very clever.

But the real joke is on "The Sums" themselves. One fad poking fun at another? Sad, really sad.

The Warlocks are coming to town tomorrow, so I took a listen to one of their discs to decide if the show was worth seeing. This is an unfair trial -- I'm far more partial to wreaking havoc at home than going out to gigs these days -- but nevertheless, I spun the wheel of steel and was mildly impressed. The record proudly displays the octet's love of Velvet-y motorik trance. There are also sharp pinches of jam-band indulgence, which is fine for those who like that sort of thing. But I found their overall sound to be fundamentally at fault. I just couldn't stop thinking that there *has* to be a better way to use four guitars. Grooving along in quadruple-chiming Strokes-style with optional feedback doesn't produce the necessary volume. Nonetheless, this stuff must rock live like a bitch, not to mention the physical spectacle of eight people on stage churning out this stuff.

A completely different use of density comes courtesy of the Delgados, who are surely one of the most underrated bands in the world. If the Doves "Last Broadcast" could shift units, then there's hope for "Hate", the Delgados newest effort. The album springs to life with sweet tunes humming and blazing with ambitious overproduction. Your ears ring and then a flute or a string section plays a lulling melody beneath the din. One might read the previous two lines and believe I was writing about a Super Furries record, but somehow, the Delgados tread a completely different path by eliminating the bonkers preteen jumping on the bed feeling.

Not to pick on the Hives or the Strokes or any of the other "sweet, becoming sour" flavours of the year, but it's really hard for me to fathom why anyone would listen to one of those bands instead of the Delgados, who have massive and singable choruses, play at appreciable volume, and can pull off the difficult trick of being wildly creative without being the least bit indulgent. And if you really want to listen to dumb three chord songs, there's plenty of that being peddled by the Green Day wannabes. Or Avril Lavigne, who brings the added bonus of being really fun to look at.

As always, the key to success in life is to evolve or die. The Vines have dragged Phil Spector out of mothballs to produce their next album. Don't hold your breath waiting for three stripped-down chords. Pray tell, it will sound a lot more like the Delgados than the Ramones.

The US has some important elections looming this week, but the month's biggest decision is whether to buy the new Godspeed album on vinyl or CD. Obviously the vinyl will be better sound quality, but due the large amount of music per side (~20 min) the groove widths are narrower and the loudness suffers. Sure, you can just crank up the amp to compensate, but then you're dealing with amp or speaker distortion, plus the music doesn't seem to jump out at you (as much as it does when the record is loud to begin with). I found this a bit disconcerting with the last Godspeed record, it would come off a bit flat unless the volume was high enough, and then I'd be amplifying more hiss and unwanted noise. All this was passing through my mind after I bought a 12" original pressing of Jesus and Mary Chain's "You Trip Me Up". On one side, you have the Phil Spector-tastic single, with two supporting tracks on the b-side. There was clearly something very deliberate being done. First of all, there's maybe seven minutes of total music here, which means it's overkill to use a 12" format. Second of all, the grooves are significantly tighter on the b-side, meaning it's literally a third as loud as the a-side. Third, and most importantly, "You Trip Me Up" was cut with huge groove widths, we're talking two and a half minutes stretched out over half the area of the record, so the song EXPLODES off the record to the point that any CD version that you might have is rendered more useless than eating soup with a fork. It can be no accident that JAMC were hoping that some unwitting Radio Two DJ would throw this record on the stereo without testing the levels first, stomping a giant bruise on the toes of the A-Ha and Arcadia records that they'd have been playing immediately before, melting an country's hair gel to boot. You know, there's a book that's just DYING to be written that explains in non-technical terms why vinyl sounds better than CD, why music companies and retailers screwed over consumers by force-feeding them convenience in favour of sound fidelity (even though it's not true), and the sociology/underground cult of vinyl lovers who keep vinyl alive and flourishing even though 99% of casual music fans believe the medium is dead. I would love to be the guy to write this book, but it'd involve taking off time from my regular life for a few months.

Something has possessed Sigur Ros' American distributors because they're heavily pushing an album with no title and no song titles. My guess is they're hoping to capture lightning in a bottle twice -- call it Radiohead in a bottle -- and they believe the album can get by on a second round of word-of-mouth buzz, critical jism, and general curiosity. I have no idea if they're hallucinating or if this maniacal plan will work. My gut feeling, given the "Step 1: pop, Step 2: trash" attitude of the entire industry over the last few years, is that the long-term financial prospects for a band like Sigur Ros are practically zilch. In the meantime, they've turned out a fine bit of dreamy grunge (the soft-loud-soft formula is worked to the bone). It reminds me a lot of the first Verve album. That is, Sigur Ros are either delusional noodlers in love with Kid A, or a "white-knuckled, intense experience". The defense calls the final track to the witness stand, a track I instantly recognized as the final track they played in concert a year and a half ago. Such was the impression it left me with even though it was six seasons in the past. I was all giddy, and then I remembered that as good as it is, the final five minutes of the Godspeed record blow it away like yesterdays garbage, which made me calm down somewhat.

Primal Scream's "Evil Heat" is finally released in North America at the end of November (with a bonus DVD!). Hell yeah. It's about time. Why the hell are they waiting until the end of Nov? Did it take a while to get the distribution deal worked out, or are they trying to time it for release "just in time for Xmas"? If it's the latter (and it wouldn't surprise me in the least), then to hell with them. It's the new Primal Scream, not Elton John's Greatest Love Songs Vol XIV. Nobody buying Evil Heat cares when it's released. "OOOOH, 'Evil Heat', that's just what Mom wanted! We can get her that together with 'Celine Dion Unplugged in Las Vegas' and that dietary cookbook that we read about in Oprah's magazine!!"

It is 3:30 AM. I'm feeling a bit tired, and I'm undoubtedly not at my sharpest. I've been managing to drag myself into bed past 3 AM for the past week or so, and although some people can keep up this semi-nocturnal lifestyle almost indefinitely, I am not such a person. Tonight, however, is different, and my frame of mind is perfect for it. I am about to hear the new Godspeed You! Black Emperor album. The new album that is released one month from now. G-d bless Kazaa and whoever got this stuff on it, whether it was leaked, stolen or previewed legitimately. I don't care. I'll buy the album anyway. Hearing it now -- this means something to me. This is exciting to me. It's 3:30 in the morning, why else would I be staying awake to do this if I wasn't such a passionate fool. I'm a peon for my music, for my trade, bless me, curse me, be jealous of me. Whatever. After two years of gigs previewing this material, after all the bootlegs and frustrating non-information "communicated" by the band, it's here, It's the FUCKING ALBUM OF THE YEAR and if "Motherfucker = Redeemer" takes the rest of the night to download then so be it, I'll sit here and wait.

This record begins with "09-15-00", which is the renamed "12-28-99". Sure, they renamed the band by changing the punctuation, might as well change the date on the song title too. I think this album contains deep rooted themes of Godspeed's dislike of American culture. Nevertheless, they enlisted an American, Steve Albini, to "record" this album, and it definitely shows. The guitars chime, attack, blare, and trumpet themselves far over everything else. This used to be a relatively quiet track but now the buildup within it is dauntingly massive. Even, the "outro", usually almost inaudible during live performance, is bathed in echoes and the lonely wailings of sweet electric guitar. I'm certainly not complaining. I love volume. Also, it was obvious from the gigs that the new material was meaner and angrier than their previous work. Tracks like "BBFIII" can be said to grow in volume to raise the drama. "Tazer Floyd" does not. It begins tense and barely restrained. It explodes and does not inch toward extinction, it just lays uneasily dormant. When you're writing these types of songs, you need the guitars. You need lots of them. When fifteen minutes isn't cutting it any longer and you feel the need to stretch "Motherfucker = Redeemer" to thirty-five, while also creating a need to drone and improvise your way through such an epic length, then you need a person in the studio who can capture this careening, spontaneous, live dynamic. Call the master. By the way, this is only the first track, although it's 22 minutes long which makes it seven minutes longer than your average boy bands' career. And it's going to get better.

The Song Formerly Known As "Tazer Floyd" is now called "Rockets Fall on Rocket Falls". This is basically a good thing, since the former title is a cute pun, but altogether inappropriate considering Godspeed are a deadly serious symphonic rock outfit and therefore are not permitted to have a sense of humour. This is the price you pay for acting as the political watchdogs for the rest of us comedy-laced Canadians. The latter title sounds far more like it belongs to a Godspeed song. The content is far more accurate as well. "Tazer Floyd" sounds like some hippie commune bullshit featuring enlightened acid casualties going cross-eyed in a $50 million light show while a bunch of stegosaurus play a meandering song called "We Hate The World and Everything In It" containing synchronized video/sound montages right down to the sixteen separate guitar solos. On the other hand, "Rockets..." is a great title because this track is about as loud as a rocket taking and packs the punch of a rocket crash landing into the ground. Six minutes in, the fake ending begins and the track pounds onward for far longer than you'd think necessary (but in a good way). It fades away into little more than a slow insistent beating of the bass drum, gradually and inexorably building into the shuddering climax which makes my teeth chatter in fear and admiration. This building process persists for FAR longer than you'd think necessary (but in a VERY good way) and it's just beyond loud, beyond awesome and beyond emotional. I'm breathless.

I said I'd wait all night for "Motherfucker = Redeemer" to finish downloading ... but right now it isn't downloading and I'm having a near apoplexy with worry because I can't put a claim to reviewing an album without hearing the final half of it. It has to finish, and it will eventually, but (*loophole*) if it isn't downloading at all, then it's not exactly fair for me to wait for it. Particularly since it's almost 5 AM. So I'm heading to bed, my "exclusive" report shall be continued ...

... sooner than I thought. I could not go home. Not long after I finished typing the words above, the download restarted. Like the episode of ER from this past week, my download showed a pulse mere seconds after I had already declared it dead. So it is now 6 AM. I suffer for my art.

It starts small. No really, I'm a bit shocked. Two minutes of gentle chimes and xylophone drift by before the tick-tocking guitar and violin riffs click in. We trot along, the metronomic rhythms gelling the piece in contrast to the barely controlled chaos of the Live Versions I Have Known. And again, I speak too soon, as blazing ear bleeding hell breaks loose about seven minutes in. I brace myself for the middle, spacey droning portion and hope beyond hope that I won't fall too entranced and fade into unconsciousness.

But again it starts small. The guitars are shuddering away while background flutters gradually begin to force their way into the background. I'm thinking that the arrival of the bass signals a shift into complete stasis, but I'm wrong again and they recede. Only fifteen minutes in. Lots of time.

The next several minutes metronomically pace themselves along. Lost, lonely vocals weave their way underneath the click of the guitar. Twenty minutes in, it's another fake ending. One of the many beautiful things about this song is that a listener can barely recollect the fireworks at the beginning, because this song is so *damned* long. The beginning is another eon ago. Yet, through repeated listens one can appreciate how each movement flows into the next without a sudden stylistic change.

Twenty two minutes in and it's building again. I dare not write that the guitars aren't droning loud enough and the chaos is controlled or some other junk like that, because I'll just be proved wrong within seconds. See, there it is, the guitars are howling. Still, louder boys and girls!! Ah, ask, and I shall receive. It's running, speeding up, showing no signs of stopping. This is the big, and I mean BIG finish. The drums tap away in the background, they're barely audible above the racket. And finally, twenty nine minutes in, it's fake ending #3, and it's the best one yet. Swirling guitars make way for the march-like percussive effort that screams this track, and this album to a close with a fist-clenching, headbanging, and sinus clearing rock out. And in the end, the droning cuts off abruptly/

It's really not fair. I knew what I'd be hearing going into this. Godspeed have been sitting on most of these songs for months and it's been only a matter of time before they figured out a suitable method of translating the live fury and intensity these songs requite onto a disc. Then would come the easy part -- releasing the album to a rapturous audience. That said, I knew what I'd be hearing. And it shouldn't come as a shock to anyone that this album is insanely good. This is the record where Godspeed, musically at least, storm out of their snowed-in Montreal bunkers and strike out with anger. Anger at what? I don't know. I have things in my life to be angry about. Everyone does. Pick yours, put on "Yanqui U.X.O." and rage until your fingernails puncture your palms. It'll feel good. I promise.

6:52 AM.

Vinyl is a lot like the Yiddish language. The Yiddish language is a lot like vinyl. Most people think that it isn't around anymore. They think it's faded away, it no longer has any contemporary value, and has been replaced by something better. True, it's popularity and usage has drastically receded since it's peak of a few decades ago. It reached a nadir in the early 1990's but has been making a comeback ever since. More and more people are discovering it for the first time, or rediscovering it for the first time since their youth. Mainstream tastes may have passed it by, but modern-day enthusiasts know that you just can't get the same stuff from anything else.

The Year in Review: Early Edition!

Normally, I'm maliciously against any kind of review until the last week of December, but I've written so little about current music lately that I felt the need for a bit of "State of the Union"-style sermonizing.

I severely curtailed my spending after buying 48 291 records and CD's while in California and Montreal. I returned home and realised that I was going broke, so I stopped and became yet another enemy of the music industry by downloading huge amounts of stuff from Kazaa. Most of it has been bootlegged live music (the same was true of my downloading habits from the Napster era) so before the president of the RIAA comes knocking on my door, you wouldn't have seen that money anyway, so leave me alone. Therefore, most of my summer was spent trying to catch up with my purchases and downloads, while shopping and gig-going came to a near standstill.

But there wasn't much happening anyway. Fall and spring are the best times for new releases and concerts, so I don't feel as though I missed much. Still, immersion breeds passion, so I do feel somewhat dirty for not being more excited about the release of the new Primal Scream album (in August). Instead, my thoughts were centred on when I'd find the time to spin records and not wake up everyone in my building, and why it was so damned difficult to find Mogwai live tracks from 2001 and 1990's wrestling matches from All-Japan.

I've been on a vinyl fix for about a year now, but vinyl junkies are just that -- junkies -- and extending your financial resources comes with the territory of being a junkie. So now, I can take a hard look at my recent albums without the distraction of wondering about the best way to get Kennziffer records. And my first reaction is that there have been very few excellent albums so far this year. Again, there's a few good releases still expected in the next three months. Also, I was singing the same lament at this time last year (and even later). The only things which have truly blown my mind have been Hollowphonic and Speedy J, and that should surprise nobody given my yen for guitar noise and aggressive minimal techno. Primal Scream's newest is no XTRMNTR, as the Kevin Shields/Scream bipolar monster of noisy dance fear-mongering has failed to spread it's pixie dust over the album as a whole. Scion released a simply astounding compilation of reconstructed Basic Channel material, but I'm hung up on whether to call it a "new" album. Where is their proper album?? With "My Love is Rotten to the Core", Tim Hecker proved himself as the first artist (that I've heard) to expand on the beauty/pop/noise hybrid crystallized on Fennesz's 2001 release "Endless Summer".

The new Godspeed album is out in a month. What will be on it is anyone's guess, I can't find a track listing anywhere. But they've featured three new songs prominently in their concerts: "12-28-99", "Tazer Floyd" and "Motherfucker=Redeemer". The latter is over thirty minutes long, and doesn't the title kick major ass? One of the finest song titles of all time. So, that's over an hour of material from those three tracks. I've been saying for months (and now I'm writing it -- I'm now accountable) if those three tracks alone make up the new album, and the recorded versions do a decent job of capturing the live versions, then it's the album of the year, hands down, lights out, everybody go home. I just recently learned that Albini worked on the recording, so that should answer the question of "capturing the live versions" with a resounding "hell yeah". Keep your fingers crossed.

Movies based around the songs of a particular artist are a bad idea. Exhibit A: "Muriel's Wedding". The director claimed that he'd have seen no point in making the movie if they hadn't gotten permission to use the ABBA songs. The first thirty minutes or so were great but things went rapidly downhill after that. The final hour was nearly intolerable and I've successfully blocked it from my memory. No really, I literally can't remember a single damned thing about the final hour of "Muriel's Wedding".

Exhibit B: "I Am Sam". I haven't seen this one, but anything precious enough to feature a Hollywood Cute Kid (TM) isn't likely to draw my money anyhow. In this case, they were dumb enough to assume they'd be able to use any Beatles song they pleased, even to the point of filming the scenes so that events on screen unfolded were synced in a specific way with the music. So when they didn't get the song rights after all, it presumably ruined some of the movie's message, so an 11th hour collection of songs by other musical artists was recorded as a hasty Beatles Tribute Record. Except that the songs had to still synch up to the film, so everyone had to perform note-by-note renditions of the tracks, meaning the soundtrack was completely devoid of inventiveness and musical interpretation.

I watched Exhibit C last night, I present to you "Magnolia". I actually heard the soundtrack a few weeks previous, so I knew the songs but obviously not their context. In the liner notes, director P.T. Anderson of bloated "Boogie Nights" fame writes about how he'd long conceived of a film based around songs by Aimee Mann. The first eighty minutes absolutely flew by and I was deeply engrossed in his intricately linked characters. Then, I began to notice the Aimee Mann songs creep in, then I noticed the drawn-out, panting soliloquies, then I started getting bored and the time started dragging on. I mean really, somebody get Anderson an executive editor whose sole job is to take the director's cut of his films and chop one hour of total length -- no matter how long the film. One hundred forty minutes in, every character (all in separate locations) started singing "Wise Up" simultaneously. At this precise point, I gave up all hope of this movie recovering and pulling it all together for a strong ending. He may have been striving for the bored, contemplative glamour of the George Michael "Listen Without Prejudice" videos, but it came off as a light farce more in tune with the opening number in "Rocky Horror Picture Show". Even worse, the scene with Philip Seymour Hall and a seemingly comatose Jason Lombard singing was downright goofy (and certainly unintentionally so), recalling George Harrison's "Got My Mind Set On You" video. All the Aimee Mann songs in this film are great, but I refuse to buy into the cinematic "concept" having ten people all so haunted by the awesome power of "Wise Up" that they instantaneously start behaving completely different for the remainder of the movie and throw away almost two and a half hours of character development as a result.

And the ending, which is the most outrageously nonsensical final ten minutes of a motion picture that I have ever seen, leaves us with Mann's "Save Me". It leaves a pleasant hum in the ears but I can't be expected to leave on a moderately high note and forget that the writer/director didn't have the balls to write a proper ending that runs deeper than "they lived (relatively) happy ever after".

Basing a movie around an artists' music must be a hellaciously difficult job. My theory is that it rarely works because the directors have close connections with the songs or the artists. That makes them no different from anyone else, but trying to recreate this appreciation on the big screen is their failure. Trying to tell their audience what a song means to them by projecting their close personal feelings through their characters is their failure.

I have never been a big fan of Cat Stevens, and I have never seen "Harold and Maude". I've been told that I should. After writing this, maybe I will.