New Hockey Night in Canada Theme!

After 40 years, HNIC will feature a new theme this year, and voting is currently underway on the CBC's website to choose the winning theme from among five finalists. WAHT?? This is what happens when you've been away from Canada for too long -- I only found out about this last week. Well, I guess this is an improvement over learning about the Queen Street West fire some six months after the fact.

Thoughts:

1. CBC didn't own the rights to the HNIC theme song?
2. A contest? I know that Canadian Idol is really popular and all, but ... does everything need to come down to a nationwide contest and vote? The Federal Election, OK fine, but ... the new HNIC theme? Must we?
3. re: #1, seriously? They didn't own the rights to the third most recognizable Canadian song after the national anthem and "Summer of '69"? Really????
3. Gerry Moseby, "Ice Warriors". A strong, uptempo bar rock track that gets the blood flowing. I like the lack of horns and OTT symphonic flairs that set it well apart from the classic theme. If you're going to pick a new theme, make it a NEW theme, I say.
4. Robert Fraser Burke, "Sticks To The Ice". Pretty much the opposite of what I said above. Any attempt to push the exact same buttons that the classic theme did can't help but end in disappointment. It's also a bit too reminiscent of the theme from the Superman movies, and the "Day In The Life"-esque final chord is just silly.
5. Graham McRae, "Eleventh Hour". I was all set to reiterate the comment immediately above, but then the drums came crashing in and I was instantly grabbed by the synth/horn hook. That's great songwriting. I think we have a winner.
6. Christian St-Roch & Jimmy Tanaka, "Let The Game Begin". What, you mean David Foster *didn't* write this? St-Roch worked on the theme for the 1976 Olympics though, which explains the tympani overload, but whereas the Olympics are a larger-than-life drama that plays out once every four years (thereby warranting an epic feel), HNIC is a beer-soaked singalong that plays out in bars with wood paneling and staffed by a room full of mullets. I'll pass on this theme, thanks.
7. Colin Oberst, "Canadian Gold". There's a bagpipe-psych vibe here that gives me hints of what Caribou would submit if he would try to compose the new HNIC theme (read: Dan Snaith's talents are not best utilized toward sports themes). It's a head-scratcher, and I definitely can't see this as the lead-in to a Ford Truck ad.

Evil Preacher Orchestra, Levontin 7, 24/09/08

Some friends and I were in the mood to see a gig at Levontin 7 this week, so I picked this band out of their concert calendar purely on the basis of their name. I operated under the assumption that bands with "Orchestra" in their name generally don't suck, because large bands (eight members according to the concert listing) packing the stage with themselves and a variety of instruments make for an interesting sight and a healthy blast of sound, which at the very worst can be nice for the spectacle.

Better yet, the music turned out to be fantastic, a mixture of free jazz freakouts and semi-improvised funk rock that took me back to Great Moments in Spiritualized History when they recorded songs like "Home of the Brave" and "Amazing Grace", except that Spiritualized have never been able to funk properly (or at all) (maybe at the end of "Cop Shoot Cop"). A lot of people became bored and frustrated with this noise and left early. Screw 'em -- this was proper trance music.

Some techno notes

Carl Craig & Moritz Von Oswald, "Recomposed Vol. 3" ... The concept is absolutely mouth-watering -- two techno legends compose an hour-long suite built around snippets from Ravel's "Bolero" and Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition" (most notably the "Samuel Goldenberg und Schmuyle" section)) -- but the end result is more in the spirit of TV Victor's "Timeless Deceleration", in which the hour-long concept overwhelms the record and exhausts one's patience for many of the lush moods that are offered by the music. Rather than morphing (or better yet, ending) certain thematic elements when they've said everything that needed to be said, stretching everything out to super-epic lengths remains the ultimate, overarching goal that hovers over every minute of the record. Von Oswald also mastered that TV Victor record, and "Recomposed Vol. 3" is painted with a similar sonic brush (Cafe del Mar strained through dub techno, hazy effects and dubby fog, etc.) Villalobos' "Fizheuer Zieheuer" was similarly flawed, and in both cases I can see how it all makes sense as a method for creating semi-improvised trance music (in the more hypnotic, meditative sense of the word, not the hands in the air and wait for the breakdown sense), but it's a concept that can work when you're sleeping in the corner of the club at 6 AM, and that doesn't always translate well into conventional recordings.

Having said that, if you're looking to form a Detroit techno/classical music hybrid, then Carl Craig is definitely the guy you want at the helm. The gentle build of the first fifteen minutes of the piece isn't topped by the forty-five minutes that follow. The classical samples weave in and out of the mix like gentle birdsong, and of course the frittering hi-hat rhythms are pure Detroit and appropriately dramatic.

Of course I will not get to see M83 on tour this year, but Pitchfork provided some handy links to the band's appearance at/on Juan's Basement. Live, M83 have evolved from the shambolic mess of the "Run Into Flowers"-era into a tight and powerful unit that seems to finally understand how to properly translate the band's sound from the studio to the stage. That's right -- MORE SYNTH. Synth-hell overload, all the time, yes yes yes!! M83 just keep getting better and better. And a word about the interview ... I know that it's pretty much a required question when you're dealing with an album like "Saturdays = Youth", but the fanatically authentic style that is recreated on "Kim and Jessie" could never be anything but a labour of love. 80's irony is simply not part of the equation on this album.

Random play works as a bias-removal tool: I had tracks from both T. Raumschmiere's "I Tank U" and David Guetta's "Pop Life" on my iPod, and consistently confused them for each other upon casual listening. It's a good time to be making electronic music if you want to be hailed for your rock star crossover tendencies (witness Justice) and T. Raumschmiere's been straddling that line a lot longer than most. "Brenner", a major highlight of "I Tank U", actually owes quite a lot to Green Velvet (who is a true granddaddy of this style, which in turn owes a lot to Prince's brand of bump-and-grind funk rock), at least until the brief schaffel interlude and subsequent German rap turn up to kick the track into a different dimension. Although for my money, David Guetta makes for a better (and far more underappreciated) rock star.

Low, Sansanna @ Barby

You've got to hand it to the promoters for putting forth the effort in finding the perfect opening band for Low, that is, they found a local group that sounds exactly like them. Sansanna bring out the best in the silence between the notes, just like the headliners, and maximize the sound for their effort in part by reverbing the drums more than I ever thought that drums could be reverbed.

But Low are beyond spectacular tonight, easily blowing away the previous two shows I saw by them. It's been a long time since that most recent show -- in 2002, on the "Trust" tour, and a lot has happened to the band both professionally (two more albums, a box set), and personally (Alan Sparhawk's health). "The Great Destroyer", released in 2005, rejuvenated Low's career by jolting them out of the sweet n soft habits that had threatened to become stale over their previous albums. Although "The Great Destroyer" is sadly underrepresented tonight, its pomp and aggressiveness are all over tonight's set. There are still plenty of moments when one can hear a pin drop (and the all too common crunch of someone stepping on a discarded paper cup), but also transcendent moments of improvised noise such as the searing conclusion to "Untitled" from "Things We Lost in the Fire". The kick in the teeth that was initiated by "The Great Destroyer" has subtlely transformed the band into more spellbinding, arresting performers. Sparhawk sings with more passion and energy than I've ever heard from him, and Mimi Parker has never been in finer voice.

Remarkably, this turns out to be one of the longest gigs that Low have ever played. Beginning with a flurry of short songs (mainly from "Drums and Guns"), the shift to wigging out starts with a furious take on "John Prine", continues through two encores and two hours of Low from start to finish.

We don't take kindly to Michael Jackson's brand of rock and roll music around here

It's like "No Repetitive Beats: 15 Years Later". Except much funnier! I'm talking about this story: Haredim move to eradicate "foreign" pop.

Even though I'm going to make fun of these people, a ban like this is a serious concern thanks to the nearly unbreakable loyalty that Haredim show toward their spiritual leaders. The influence these rabbis have on their followers is on the scale of the Christian Coaltion or dare I say it, Oprah's Book Club. The article does a good job of highlighting the possibly severe economic consequences of such a ban. But I'm not hear to insult anyone's beliefs, I'm here to laugh at their perceptions about music!

• "'Michael Jackson-style music has no place in our community,' says Mordechai Bloi, a senior member of the Guardians of Sanctity and Education". Even though it's not 1987, we'll ignore that Michael Jackson would be the first name that would come to someone's mind when they choose to address the scourge of contemporary music. But I'm really wondering if this is the first time that Michael Jackson has been called out as Public Enemy #1 when it comes to corrupting the youth. At least the conservatives of the 80's had the sense to galvanize their opinions against devil-worshipping long-haired onstage animal-eating heavy metallers as the object of their derision. Is Michael Jackson really that scary a person. Uh ... wait, don't answer that.

• "'We might be able to adopt Bach or Beethoven, music with class, but not goyishe African music and beats.'" Ah yes, Beethoven -- such a fine Jew he was. And Bach? Was his full name Bachstein, or was he simply a religious man with enough kids to form his own baseball league? Either way, he's approved!

• "Menahem Toker, a popular haredi DJ who was reportedly fired from Radio Kol Chai under pressure from haredi activists because he promoted "treif" shows ..." I love the idea of a "treif show" ... it's such a great little phrase. See also: "kosher alternative". Maybe Jewish mothers can take notes and use these less threatening terms when dealing with their partly assimilated sons -- "we wish you wouldn't spend so much time with that shiksa treif female friend and would consider a more kosher alternative."

• "'What are they going to do listen to every single disc that is released? What about the thousands of discs that are already in the market?' Luft admitted that listening to all the discs on the market would be a formidable challenge." [emphasis mine] I'll say! I can't even understand the words on Wold's "Stratification", but although I am therefore uncertain if they are promoting a kosher message or not, they are from Saskatchewan, which makes them most definitely treif.

No More "Paper Thin Walls"?

I've long since fallen behind on keeping up with the ebb and flow of music blogs -- for proof of this, notice how seldom I update my links bar these days. I only check a few sites semiregularly and receive RSS feeds from some megasites (PFM, Idolator), but otherwise my internet habits are fairly disorganized, music-wise. One of my regular stops, almost since its inception, was Paper Thin Walls. The site is closing shop and the news hit me like a ton of bricks. PTW introduced me to a truckload of fantastic new music over the past couple of years, so much so that it's no exaggeration to say that it was my single biggest resource on the internet in that respect. With sites like Pitchfork posting links to seemingly dozens of mp3s and videos daily (not to mention the weekly updates of documentary-length content on the Pitchfork.tv section of their site), I can understand that people might have found PTW to be a bit lacking in material. I felt that they made up for it and then some by maintaining an incredibly high level of quality control not only with the music they hosted, but also with the writing that accompanied it. Articulate, bite-sized reviews of single tracks are a lot more likely to sell me on a band than an essay-length semi-philosophical screed will, not least because the single song mp3 is simpler to digest than an extended play album, no matter whether I'm at work, home, or iPod.

Right now I'm listening to PTW's "Drifts and Drones" mixtape, compiled in April 2007, which remained glued to my regularly used media players for most of the spring and early summer of that year, especially the tracks by Eluvium and Horseback which I heard there for the first time. Follow the links from here to get everything on the tape, after all, what better way to pay tribute to a great website than by listening to the music that made it so special.

Mogwai, "The Hawk Is Howling": a bit puzzling

Recently, a few Youtube clips from recent Mogwai shows renewed my buzz for their upcoming album. They'd retained their nasty RAWK edge from "Mr. Beast", but were indulging their prog tendencies by going more epic with a style that is part Sabbath, part Steve Hillage. I envisioned an album where "Glasgow Mega-Snake" was stretched and toyed with, where the three minute explosion on the record served as the conclusion to four or five minutes of buildup that led up to it. A record filled with "Ex-Cowboy"s, if you will -- "Come On Die Young: The Revenge", an album for people who thought that the first forty minutes of that album were boring and didn't pick up until the "Ex-Cowboy"/"Xmas Steps" portion (there were plenty of those people around in 1999). I'm not craving another "CODY" ("Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait" already filled that role quite nicely, IMO) but Mogwai are long overdue for a few killer epic tracks. When it comes to the correlations between track length and quality in Mogwai's songs, their output has pretty much inverted itself over the past ten years. In the early days they were all about the eye-opening epic ("Mogwai Fear Satan", "Helicon 1", "Superheroes of BMX", "Stereodee", "Like Herod") but it's been years since they've delivered a truly memorable one. For example, "Ratts of the Capital" was one of the weaker tracks on "Happy Songs ...", and "Mr. Beast" didn't really have an epic track, save for maybe "We're No Here", which is again not even close to being the best track on that album.

"The Hawk Is Howling" does a lot of things halfway. It fills a halfway grey area between loud and soft, between epic and succinct, between melodic and freeform. None of long tracks are really that long, and none of them carry that "Mogwai Fear Satan"-esque emphasis that says "get comfortable because this is the big one". There are a lot of tracks in the six-to-eight minute range, and it's almost as if they kept hedging their bets them and weren't sure whether to let one of them really break out to prodigious lengths and dominate the album. Despite my initial hopes/impressions from the live shows, none of them follow the quiet/loud/quiet/loud ride that "Ex-Cowboy" does. The typical pattern is to build slowly and meticulously over the opening few minutes, eventually reach a plateau, and more or less maintain that plateau over the song's second half. Sometimes the journey is magnificent. "The Precipice" twists seemingly endless, Wagnerian melodies into fascinatingly detailed shapes. But large swaths of the album are devoted to wandering through anodyne, "CODY"-ish semi-ambiance without much in the form of an appropriate payoff.

So I'm not sure about this one yet, but Mogwai have always had a habit of not making things simple, haven't they?

The Raveonettes, "You Want the Candy"

Is there a more underappreciated band in music today than the Raveonettes? "Denis"-era Blondie, JAMC's caustic racket, 60's girl group pop, beautiful harmonies -- what's not to like? Why aren't more critics drawn to a band whose design elements read like a recipe book of beloved musical touchstones?

The Raveonettes aren't the first, or the 1000th band to be a better idea in theory than in practice. And there is no doubt that bands will continue trying (and failing) to write their own "Be My Baby" from now until the day comes when robots play and perform music in place of people (of course, the robots will fail to re-write it too). When Blondie claimed that they wanted to take 60's AM radio pop and update it for the 70's, they understood that the key word in the phrase was "AM", meaning that it's all about the three-minute pop single. Blondie weren't generally a strong albums band, but they wrote fantastic singles and that's why we still remember and adore them for it. The Raveonettes are more preoccupied with sounding a certain way, which is why their albums are packed with noise, echo, reverb, and girlie vocals that all sound so glorious, but they typically struggle to write memorable, individual songs.

With "You Want the Candy" (from their most recent album "Lust Lust Lust"), they've finally written their "You Trip Me Up", and provided another data point in the decades-long quest for confirmation of the "Candy Rule" (i.e. songs with "Candy" in the title never suck*). It's all here, the furious, galloping beat a la the Mary Chain's "Never Understand"; sly, titillating sexuality in the lyrics and delivery, and a chorus that's stickier than superglue. Naturally, it's all over in three minutes, but during that time they milk that chorus for all it's worth, cramming it in four times (plus a double dose of it at the end) and yet it's still not enough, as once the song is over I'm basically forced to skip back in the song to hear it a couple more times before finally being satisfied. Like all the best choruses, this one needs no buildup. They launch into it right from the beginning of the song and right away you're getting smacked in the face by distortion, vibraphones, and gooey two-part boy-girl harmonies. The verses are almost gravy after that, as would be the other forty minutes of the album, but the quality remains high until the end, making "Lust Lust Lust" the strongest work of the band's career to this point.

*with the exception of Marcy Playground's "Sex and Candy", which is arguably the worst song ever

Why can't I post Youtube links just like everyone else?

Eluvium, "Radio Ballet" 22/05/08, live in Heidelberg

Noisy, slow-building centrepieces of Eluvium's set, such as "Under The Water It Glowed" and "Repose In Blue", have become increasingly epic in the last couple of years, with new layers of melody and white noise creeping in with every new tour. Good, or even passable sound quality recordings of those songs are difficult to find, especially on Youtube, because the second half of those songs provide pretty much instant death for the mics on cell phones and digital cameras. So instead, here's a simpler, more eardrum-friendly performance of the beautiful "Radio Ballet". Eluvium is kind of like Xiu Xiu in the sense that the louder, noisier tracks are more immediate, but the moment you "get" the slow ones (i.e. they stop feeling like mere interludes between the good stuff and start feeling like the *truly* good stuff themselves) is the moment their albums go from being Verve releases to true classics.

Jesu, "Silver", 07/04/07, San Luis Obispo

What can I say? Jesu are heavier than the planets. They are more brutal and sludgy when playing live than on record, so if you ever thought that Jesu records were too slickly produced, then this is the sound you want. On a different note, it's bad enough when people wear concert t-shirts to concerts, so major points are deducted for Justin Broadrick wearing his *own* band's t-shirt on stage.

Th' Faith Healers, "Spin 1/2" 29/03/06, NYC

One of the great underrated British indie bands of the 90's playing their best song at a 2006 reunion gig. But where's the rest of it? How many more minutes?

Lou Reed and John Cale, "Heroin" (acoustic)

Judging from the looks of them, this would have to date from that brief period around '71-'72 when they were getting along again and playing the occasional gig backing Nico.

Portishead, "We Carry On", Live HMH Amsterdam (04-07-08)

Notable for Beth Gibbons walking offstage during the closing instrumental section and hugging and kissing the entire front row on her way out.

Isaac Hayes, "Never Can Say Goodbye", live Atlanta 1973

RIP Isaac Hayes. Dig the golden chain shirt.

Curve, "Gift"

Curve's fourth album, "Gift", was largely ignored on arrival. You could say that about a lot of albums that were released in the second half of September 2001, but in this case even Curve's own fans passed on this one, partly because few of them knew of its existence thanks to nearly invisible promotion. After starting their career as meteoric indie darlings, they released two albums to lukewarm reviews and "not living up to the hype" derision, split up in 1994, reunited in 1997 and tried to hop on the late 90's electronica bandwagon, and finally ended up back where they started some ten years earlier, toiling away on an indie label and fawned over by a small cabal of post-shoegaze goth misfit fans, but otherwise largely unknown and uncared for by the mainstream music world. Even their sound had returned to its c.1991 roots -- after dabbling in grungy dynamics and near-ambient psychedelia on "Cuckoo", and electronica/DnB on "Come Clean", they returned to the less intricate style on which they formed their reputation, that of hip-hop inflected beats, aggro guitars, and dense shoegaze-y filling stuffed between the two. Swagger over complexity, if you will.

At the time, I had an advance promo EP that contained the songs "Hell Above Water", "Want More Need Less", and "Perish", and was disappointed to eventually discover, upon the release of the proper album, that it didn't come close to delivering on the sensational promise of the EP. Listening to it today, my first impressions (which remained my opinion on the album for years afterward) seem far too harsh. There's a lot of quality in the album's second half, which is a more low-key, less made-for-radio affair that shows that they weren't ready to completely leave their mid-to-late 90's selves behind. "Fly With the High" contains nods to "Come Clean"'s style of dirty electronica, and as such, it's the most skip-able track on the album, something that Republica could have cranked out in their sleep years earlier. Elsewhere, rock songs with tightly coiled moods punctuated by slashing guitars (i.e. "Cuckoo" redux) are precursors to nearly everything that Trent Reznor has recorded in the 00's (after he turned down the noise and turned up the guitars in his music), and Toni Halladay's brand of goth (part sex kitten, part angry young vixen with nails-a-slashing) pretty much invented anything Evanescence had to offer.

But any discussion about "Gift" always comes back to those three standout tracks that were featured on the promo EP. You may already know "Hell Above Water" without realizing it, because it's been featured as background music in a few TV shows and movies, including, most recently "Iron Man". It's easy to see why it's such an ideal piece of film and TV music:

1) fast, galloping beat with aggro guitars = ACTION
2) Toni Halladay's, smooth, sexy, yet caustic voice adds a touch of mystery and exotica (especially useful for opening shot, panorama scenes)
3) touch of electronica adds a hint of futurism, i.e. "this music is the next level shit, which should convince you that the same is true of this TV show/movie"
4) for kids: Curve are not mainstream but their music contains elements of the more mainstream music that they like (i.e.the qualities in points 1,2,3) = cool underground cred
5) for adults: they don't pick up on the specifics of #1-#4, but the music fits their preconception of what kids are listening to nowadays, ergo the song feels suitably appropriate for the movie/show

And finally, there are two songs featuring Kevin Shields, which are either the best songs on "Gift" because he plays on them, or Curve took their best two songs and asked Shields to play on them. There is no easy resolution to this chicken-egg game, but the end results have arguably been the highlight of Shields' non-MBV career, the quality of which were enough to curb any and all thoughts of an MBV reunion for a good year or two. But unlike his other collaborative works, such as Primal Scream's "Accelerator", he is unmistakably the guest artist with Curve, not the svengali whose characteristic style overwhelms the track while the group getting the bulk of the credit get to stand back and watch the magic happen. In simpler terms, "Accelerator", or J. Mascis and the Fog's "More Light" sound like MBV tracks, but "Want More Need Less" and "Perish" are instantly recognizable as Curve tracks.

"Want More Need Less" is one of the fiercest tracks in Curve's catalog -- a guitar-drenched update of their more gothic 90's sound. The nearly manic momentum barely lets up as the song gallops toward the chorus, with the volume growing ever louder thanks to Shields' string-slashing. "Perish" is more subdued but no less intense. Old school Curve were at their best when they added hip-hop-inflected beats into their usual stew (e.g. "Ten Little Girls", "The Coast Is Clear") and it's that sound that is not only resurrected here but is improved thanks to a more finely-tuned hard rock polish and Shields' blistering guitar playing. The heartbreaking lyric finds Toni Halladay expressing fear and anxiety in the face of a relationship that has lasted far longer than it should have -- the core is rotten, both parties are aware of it and yet they continue with the routine merely to put off the tears for yet another day (sounds a lot like "Love Will Tear Us Apart", doesn't it?). It's poignant both at face value but also because, amidst all the turmoil in the Toni/Dean partnership, it's hard to be sure if "Perish" is a just another love song or an encapsulation of Curve's then current state of existence. In fact, the group would release just one more (internet only) album the following year before splitting up one more time, apparently for good. The twisted irony of "Perish" is that they'd apparently exposed their own internal decay in the middle of their best ever song -- lamenting that the tank was empty and that there was nothing left to give, when in fact they had reached the peak of their powers.