Tony Bennett, "Tony Sings the Hits of Today!"

This album is supposed to be the absolute pits of Tony Bennett's career. His popularity had plummeted by the end of the 60's and someone (coughCliveDaviscough) thought he needed to sing contemporary material in order to revive his career. As the story goes, the results were the horrifically bad stuff of legend. Bennett hated making the album so much that he became physically ill while recording it. And unlike other legendarily bad albums (e.g. Lou Reed's "Metal Machine Music"), this one never experienced a critical or popular renaissance of any sort. Bennett's fans still disown it, critics still hate it, it might as well have never existed.

I've never heard this album, in fact until a few weeks ago I didn't know a thing about it. But looking at the tracklist forty years after its release, I have to wonder where all the hate is coming from. Tony Bennett threw up because he had to cover songs by the Beatles and Stevie Wonder? "Here There and Everywhere" didn't move him in the slightest? And he might not have lived in the era of the "official" Great American Songbook, but who's more of a classic American songwriter than Burt Bacharach?

So let's listen and find out if Tony Bennett's "Tony Sings the Hits of Today!" is really as bad as advertised ... while reviewing the album in real time. (songwriters names appear in brackets)

1. "MacArthur Park" (Jimmy Webb). This song has been covered innumerable times, and yet you'd be hard pressed to find someone who likes it. In a 1993 survey, it was even crowned as the worst song ever. In short, "Macarthur Park" is the kryptonite that destroys even the best artists (e.g. Donna Summer). But Bennett's version isn't bad at all! It's a sweet and simple arrangement that does away with all of the lyrical silliness in the song about cakes melting in the rain, and leaves us with lines like "after all the loves of my life / I'll be thinking of you and wondering why". Cole Porter couldn't have written that? We're off to a decent start here.

2. "Something" (George Harrison). A serious misstep. Everything from the odd changes in tempo to Bennett's half-hearted attempt to emote during the refrain just don't mesh.

3. "The Look of Love" (Burt Bacharach, Hal David). Bacharach was the master of sweetness and light in pop. So who thought it was a good idea to get a Hal Blaine clone to play drums and rock the joint up a bit? It should have been a no-nonsense arrangement carried completely by the singer, instead, they tried to merge big band with a touch of pyschedelia. Someone spent too much time listening to "Good Vibrations" before entering the mixing studio.

4. "Here There and Everywhere" (John Lennon, Paul McCartney). And this ... why is this a midtempo swing tune? Did anyone bother to listen to the lyrics before recording it, or were they going for the ironic cover a couple of decades before that became a fad?

5. "Live for Life" (Norman Gimbel, Francis Lai). Perfectly acceptable pop balladry here, I think Bennett was actually trying with this one.

6. "Little Green Apples" (Bobby Russell). I'd never heard of this song, but "G-d didn't make little green apples and it doesn't rain in Indianapolis" is an awful lyric, so no wonder Bennett sings it like he's singing the weather report. There's no joy, humour, or pizzazz in his delivery at all. The only way to overcome the "qualities" of a song so charmingly dumb with lyrics this bad is with an overdose of all three. The big note at the end is haphazardly screamed, as if he just wanted it to be finally over. I concur, let's move on.

7. "Eleanor Rigby" (John Lennon, Paul McCartney). A quick check confirms that William Shatner's "The Transformed Man" predates this by two years. Shatner's attempt to act instead of sing his lyrics was at least authentic (i.e. it was all he was capable of doing, he put his heart into it, and the effort was genuine) and some of the arrangements were quirky and unpredictable (e.g. "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds"). But Tony Bennett lowering himself to this kind of silly dramatic reading almost gave me sympathy vomit cramps, forty years after the fact.

8. "My Cherie Amour" (Henry Cosby, Sylvia Moy, Stevie Wonder). Another no-brainer -- just play it as a string-drenched ballad. And they do. This is rather lovely, it's a winner.

9. "Is That All There Is?" (Jerry Lieber, Mike Stoller). This song was very much in vogue in '69-'70, and had already been covered a few times by other adult contemporary artists in the two years previous. So it makes sense that Bennett's label would want him to record this. There's nothing technically wrong here, but maudlin black humour and Tony Bennett don't mix, although I think he could have communicated the dejected feelings of the song's narrator if he liked the song even a little bit.

10. "Here" (Gene Lees). The line "here I am all alone with a few faded pictures of you" is a heartbreaker, and this song slinks along, wallowing in its selfish misery not unlike Lou Reed's "The Bed". This is jaw droppingly great, no joke.

11. "Sunrise Sunset" (Jerry Bock, Sheldon Harnick). This would makes sense as an epic dramatic finishing song to an adult contemporary pop album ... but not on a Tony Bennett album. The man is many things, Broadway diva isn't one of them.

It goes without saying that any interpretive singer needs the right song with the right arrangement to succeed. Song choice is really everything for someone like Tony Bennett, especially with an experiment like this where he strays outside his comfort zone. In that respect, the album is obviously a failure. Sometimes a great singer can overcome an imperfect arrangement, but that doesn't happen even once here. I would expect that Bennett could have overcome sub-par arrangements at least once or twice on an eleven track album if he were motivated, which he obviously wasn't. It's also odd to think that there was a time when producers and bandleaders didn't "get" the Beatles and had no clue how to perform or interpret their work, look no further than this album for proof of that.

But is it the worst album ever, or even an abominable insult to human hearing, as it has been portrayed? There are at least three really good songs here, although the embarrassments do outnumber the winners. It definitely doesn't deserve to be unearthed as any kind of lost gem, but it's also not quite the disaster that I'd been led to believe it was. And I know I'll be in the minority on this, but I don't even mind the cover!

Sandro Perri, "Impossible Spaces"; Modeselektor, "Monkeytown"

These two artists are more similar than you think. They emerged as outsiders in their respective, widely hyped local underground scenes in the late 90's. They've been very active since, despite not having a large discography to show for it, largely thanks to a steady stream of live performances, remixes and collaborations. And both artists have been wizards when it comes to criss-crossing genre boundaries, often within the same track. Despite their oddly similar career paths, on their latest releases, they're heading in opposite directions creatively.

I can understand what Sandro Perri has been trying to do over the past few years, after all, wanting to shift from making mysterious, atmospheric techno while seated on a stage floor behind a mess of wires to being the singer/songwriter/frontman of your own band under your own name doesn't need much justification. After years spent paying my dues opening for other, bigger name artists, I probably wouldn't want to keep settling for being one of Toronto's best kept secrets either.

Even when his work as Polmo Polpo was derivative (i.e. Gas with twangy guitars), he was still miles ahead of all the other copycats, and with "Like Hearts Swelling" and "Kiss Me Again and Again" he came into his own with some of the most unique music of the 00's. But solo artist Sandro Perri has always strayed too close to generic alt-country artist territory, and "Impossible Spaces" doesn't do much to change that impression.

I've never cared much for Perri as a vocalist, he's capable but not commanding on the mic, and while he might sound more confident on "Impossible Spaces" than ever before, his vocals don't amount to much more than a forgettable backdrop to the music. As I would have expected, he's at his best when he goes epic and lets his songs breathe for seven minutes or more (e.g. "How Will I?", "Wolfman"). Songs have a way of starting out as stripped down indie ballads and wandering their way into a 70's prog record complete with bodacious synth solo, while featuring bits of electronic trickery along the way. Come to think of it, Super Furry Animals used to do this a lot. "Impossible Spaces" is sort of like a SFA album circa 2000, minus the mad hattery and OTT sonic bonkerism that made their albums so great. But the way these songs take their unexpected twists and turns still form the bulk of the highlights from the album.

There are still plenty of things I don't like about Modeselektor, like 90% of their songs when they try to channel Jamaica. The fact that they were genre whores, unafraid to try anything and everything with any big or small name vocalist, used to be their most interesting trait and their Achilles heel. They were simply too hit-and-miss, their records always had some gems on them but were too inconsistent to be great as a whole.

That changed with 2009's "Moderat" album (with Apparat). That's where they perfected the art of siphoning the best traits of their collaborators and adapting their style to mesh with that of the people they worked with. "Monkeytown" still can't shake some of the old bad habits -- their dips into ragga and hip hop on "Pretentious Friends" and "Humanized" are the weakest parts of the album. But "Evil Twin" and "German Clap" are top notch club techno, up there with the best they've done in that style, and they've produced a couple of absolute gems out of their two Thom Yorke collabs, especially "This". It's like a sequel to "Idioteque", something you could conceivably hear on a Radiohead album if they had a fraction of Modeselektor's talent*. They slice up Thom Yorke's voice into nearly indecipherable loops, smother it with brooding bass lines and snippets of late 90's Autechre-style skittery beats, resulting in a haunting track that's not quite of any genre they've attempted before.

All in all, "Monkeytown" is an impressive, varied listen where even the slight misses (like on "Moderat") work well in context.

* slight clarification: this seems like a weaselly comment so I should explain a bit more ... to Radiohead, going "electronic" in the faux-Autechre sense has always meant getting weird and abstract. The real Autechre were never just about that, the magic was always in the atmospheres they created and the odd sounds they came up with. When they were weird and abstract for the sake of being weird and abstract, they sucked too. For Modeselektor, specifically in the case of "This", channeling Autechre means trying to make them sound more like Orbital circa "Snivilisation". Huge difference.

Music In Bordeaux

I wish I could say that I spent most of my time digging through the culture of the city, but the reality is that work occupied all but a small fraction of the two weeks I was there. And yet there's always something to take note of, however small, because music is everywhere ...

My morning alarm was set to a soft rock radio station, it just happened to be the first non-talk station that turned up when I was scanning through the dial, and I never bothered to change it. Once they played a song from Gainsbourg's rather excellent "Percussions", and on a different day they played Alan Parsons Project's "Eye in the Sky" and I couldn't get it out of my head for days (I knew the song, but hadn't heard it in years, and never knew what the title was and didn't know it was by the Alan Parsons Project). Is it just me or does it sound a lot like Lady Antebellum's "Need You Now"?

Total Heaven is a music store in the St. Michel area of Bordeaux, and it's well worth visiting if you're a jazz, metal, or noise/experimental fan. It's even more worth the time to visit if you buy vinyl. The ongoing downward spiral of record stores is depressing, but it's balanced by vinyl's outright refusal to die. There are few things in life that make me feel happier than knowing that vinyl will outlive every format that came after it for (at least) the hundred or so years after its invention.

Do Make Say Think's "Other Truths" is really good, and now I feel bad for ignoring it when it came out two years ago. It's the most chilled thing they've ever done -- including their early dub-influenced stuff -- and thankfully they've done away with the vocal experiments. Funny how I had to travel to France to hear the music I used to regularly hear back home.*

Dub reggae bands at the Saturday protest of the week in Victoire, and rock bands playing in the store windows at Lafayette Homme.

In the taxi on the way to the Bordeaux airport at 5:30 AM, Bryan Adams "(Everything I Do) I Do It For You" came on the radio. Like everyone else over the age of 30, I've probably heard that song one billion times, or approximately 999 999 997 times more than I would have liked. However this was the first time I really listened closely to the production, probably because it was dark and quiet in the taxi and my mind was too weary to concentrate on anything else. My mind did wander to the subject of "Bryan Adams: Can-Con Y/N?" that was all the rage in 1991, so maybe that's why I focused on the production of the track, I don't know. Anyway, it bears repeating that Mutt Lange is a genius. It's a spectacular sounding track, the guitars layering but not smothering the vocals, the gated drums, etc. Swap out Bryan Adams for Joe Elliott and it's a Def Leppard song, it could have been on "Hysteria", or at least it could have been the natural sequel to "Love Bites" instead of the execrable and equally treacle-filled "Two Steps Behind". And I have no idea how I never realized any of this until that moment.

* my French host used to work in Ottawa, so maybe I'm exaggerating the oddity of this a little bit.

Diary of Musical Thoughts Podcast Episode 6

"Sat aft mix" - 98 minutes

In the absence of new writing from me (too much traveling lately), here is a mix that I've been sitting on for the past couple of months.

I originally titled it "the lazy saturday afternoon mix", full of downtempo stuff for wasting away the afternoon on a warm summer day. Except that I never got around to posting it. The seasons have changed, but it probably works even better as a cool autumn day mix. This mix was (months) ahead of its time, if you will.

I've been enjoying making mixes as a way of revisiting a bunch of old CDs that I haven't listened to in a while. I'm rediscovering my own music collection and recording what I found.

Most of these songs were ripped from CD's that I bought over 7-8 years ago. The mix was totally improvised, I didn't even re-listen to anything to refresh my memory before throwing it into the mix. Everything went according to my pre-existing impressions of the music, based on what I remembered about the music from the last time I heard it (which was years ago in many cases).

For more details, read the comments!

MTV European Music Awards 2011 ... diary!

How long has it been since I've done a running diary of a major music awards show?

Red carpet talk is centred around which artists will dominate the awards. Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber, Bruno Mars, Katy Perry, and Coldplay are all namedropped, which means I'm still reasonably up to date on who's who. Then I watched an interview with 30 Seconds to Mars and kept thinking "hmm the lead singer looks just like Jared Leto". One google search later revealed what everybody other than me must have already known -- it is Jared Leto. Looks like I'm not as up to date as I thought.

22:00 Somehow when I was looking the other way, both Coldplay and Maroon 5 became dance bands. For Coldplay it makes sense as they naturally progress along U2's career path and are currently finding their comfort zone midway between "The Joshua Tree" and "Achtung Baby". As for Maroon 5, I have no idea what they're aiming for. Scissor Sisters? I can make jokes, but the results are quite good in both cases.

22:08 Katy Perry accepts the award for Best Live. Even she is twice the size of Snooki.

22:11 LMFAO ride around in a giant zebra and bring the chaos with their hit "Party Rock Anthem". Some people apparently call this electro pop or "party rock" but those of us who remember the early 90's know our reheated Eurodance when we see and hear it. I mean, they've got the anonymous rappers and everything. Sure, it sounds awesome now, but bet your bottom dollar that people will find this stuff embarassing in ten years time. I'm out of it Part II: LMFAO are Berry Gordy's son and grandson.

22:25 David Hasselhoff (!!) presents the award for best female, desperately trying to sound suave and cool in front of the kiddies. He says he drilled a wall from his dressing room to the best female dressing room so they can watch him change. How did he get this gig? It's so creepy, yet so hilarious. Lady Gaga accepts the award wearing a dress that ressembles the giant white cones they strap to the necks of dogs when they don't want them to scratch themselves, with a hat that that looks like a plastic black phonograph speaker, and comments on seeing the 'Hoff's package through the hole he drilled in the wall. This segment will be difficult to top tonight.

22:30 Bruno Mars and his band, all dressed in matching light blue suits, channel the Big Bopper (Mars rocks the pompadour to really nail the part) with a rollicking 50's version of "Marry You". Fabulous performance, easily the best of the night so far.

22:36 Queen receive an icon award, and Brian May let his hair go gray? Amazingly, Queen have been at it for forty years, HALF OF IT WITHOUT FREDDIE MERCURY. It seem possible.

22:47 We're definitely hitting the dregs of the show, as they're hyping the performances still to come later in the show to keep us interested and bringing out the B-list celebs like Ashley Nicole Rickards and Sheamus (!). Sheamus (a Dubliner) rips on Belfast with some Irish in-jokes that go completely over my head, and Justin Bieber (sans mop!!) wins for Best Male. In just a year's time, he's lost that babyfaced cuteness factor that fueled his entire career to this point, and the haircut is a natural next step. He's approaching a crossroads not unlike that of Michael before he released "Off the Wall", where people sort of resented him for not being small and cute anymore, but before they were ready to accept him as a serious grown up artist. The next couple of years should be interesting.

22:55 RHCP have been doing almost nothing for me, going on 22 years. How time flies. They never change, so why should my opinion change?

23:02 Lady Gaga kicks off the second hour with her newest single "Marry the Night". It's a fairly toned down, understated performance (at least for her), most of it spent singing on top of a cratered half-sphere moon.

23:10 Bruno Mars wins for Best New (not "Best New Artist", just "Best New". It gets to the point with the bare minimum number of words), which makes sense because he's the only one of the nominees to have more than two big hits.

23:16 I've been ignoring almost all of host Selena Gomez's jokes and skits throughout the night because they're too dumb and pointless to be worth mentioning. Same goes for her live performance.

23:25 Snow Patrol went dance too? This show is putting me to sleep now.

23:35 Lady Gaga wins for Best Song with "Born This Way" and bawls her way through her acceptance speech. This time she rotates the large plastic phonograph speaker (bronze coloured now) so we can see a corner of her face. I'm all for making cool fashion statements, but if you're sincere about conveying the emotion of the moment, it makes sense to let people actually see you.

23:48 David Guetta hits the stage to save the second hour of this show with Jessie J, Taio Cruz and Ludacris. I'm not sure exactly what Guetta is doing back there. He's sporting a pair of headphones (which probably aren't plugged in because he never uses them), pretends to tweak dials, and holds his hands in the air. But the laser light show is amazing, the songs are too, and the guest singers nailed their one minute each. Guys like Moby will be the first to tell you that DAT shows can rock too.

23:54 Somebody dragged Malcolm Jamal Warner out of mothballs to hype his new show and present the award for Best Worldwide. I seem to remember that they used to give a separate award for each "region", which makes sense because how can all these bands from totally disparate continents "compete" for the same award? The whole point of awards shows is that you have a bunch of acts, who all appear on the same pop charts and roughly compete for the same chart pop fans, and the awards is given to the best person. But how is Britney Spears in direct competition with the biggest acts in India or Asia? Big Bang (from the Asia-Pacific region), win as apparently they are bigger stars than Britney (representing the North America region). Oddly enough I don't think she was even nominated for anything else tonight, so this comes off like an excuse to have her name mentioned on the show. Meanwhile, Big Bang are like Daft Punk on motorcycles. I should check them out.

00:00 The 'Hoff is back! Sucking on a balloon! How DID he get this gig?

00:02 Does anyone really think that Beastie Boys or Justice have a chance in hell of beating Lady Gaga for Best Video? Note to EMA organizers: if you want to build suspense for the Best Video award presentation, you should nominate bands whose names get mentioned more than once during the show.

00:03 Gaga can't be beaten tonight.

00:05 Queen and Adam Lambert perform a medley of songs that I never need to hear again in my life ("The Show Must Go On"/"We Will Rock You"/"We Are the Champions"). I've never really liked Lambert, but this is pretty much his dream gig and it's undoubtedly his calling to be singing songs like these.

Congratulations to Gaga and Justin Bieber for being the most popular stars in the world, although we didn't really need an awards show to tell us that. There were some good performances but nothing all that memorable, and it didn't help that the show almost died in the second hour. But of course the EMA's are never a bad way to waste two hours.

The death of CD shops, the death of the CD

This story about the major labels plan to abandon the CD by the end of 2012 made the rounds this week, prompting some good discussion about whether the story is true or not (it's not) and what the eventual death of the CD means in the musical big picture.

I don't think anybody doubts that the CD is on its last legs, but when the axe finally falls, it'll be major news and not something quietly leaked (allegedly) to a music site and reported on as fact without any sourcing whatsoever.

Remember when the major labels wanted to force you to pay $20 for an entire CD of music that they could manufacture for $1? And if you only wanted only one song then you were SOL, because there was no option to buy singles anymore? That was just ten years ago. Remember when they were willing to SUE YOU to keep that business model intact? That happened even more recently. And now, nobody wants the CD anymore. The music industry has been dragged into the future, kicking and screaming, just like it was with every other major change of listening format in the past 100 years.

Whenever this subject comes up, I wonder whether I made a mistake in not selling off my CD collection while I had the chance. I own enough obscurities that could probably fetch decent money for the foreseeable future, and most of my purchases over the past few years were bargain (and in many cases, rare) CD's that didn't set me back too much money anyhow. But for me it was never about the money anyhow, it was always about the collection itself, something I'd show off proudly as if it were a collection of books or old photos. I could never bring myself to part with a disc I loved, trading the physical object for a few files on a computer. The odd thing is, these days I have piles of music in the form of files on my computer -- and rarely find myself wanting to replace them with a physical object. Irrespective of price, genre, era, and sometimes even musical quality, I get attached to a CD in a way that rarely happens with any mp3.

And isn't it amazing -- and appropriate -- that vinyl will outlive the CD?

I Break Horses, "Hearts"; The Raveonettes, "Raven In the Grave"

More often than not, shoegaze bands seem to emerge fully formed, at least compared to bands in other genres. For every rock band that releases an iconic, generation-defining debut (e.g. Sex Pistols, Strokes, Smiths), there are a million other bands who need a few albums to find their proper footing. But shoegaze bands have a knack for appearing perfectly crystallized right out of the gate.

In the first wave of shoegaze you had bands like Ride and Slowdive who were never able to top their pre-debut album singles according to some of their most diehard fans. I'm still blown away by the quality of tracks like "Morningrise" and "Avalyn", and how such a young band (in terms of how long they'd been together as a band and in terms of the ages of the individual members) were able to master their craft so quickly and definitively. It took a few years, but eventually both bands started to stray from their initial template and to search for a post-shoegaze identity. The results were more mixed, which is usually the case when you're dealing with a band that's looking to redefine itself.

I'm not sure why shoegaze bands are such fast learners, but I suspect it's because their list of influences is fairly short -- in other words, all shoegazers are stealing ideas from the same few bands. It's redundant to even list those influences because everyone knows who they are, and the bands on the shortlist haven't changed much in the past twenty years. Rock bands have immeasurably more influences to chose from, so it takes longer for a young band to find a combination that works for them.

I Break Horses fit the pattern of shoegaze bands that emerge from nothing and arrive fully formed with a great debut album. After listening to "Hearts" just once, you know exactly what they're all about, which is the nice thing (or most boring aspect, depending on how much you like this kind of music) about bands like these -- when everyone takes cues from the same small set of influences, you don't need to waste time trying to dissect hidden levels of detail or to work out what confluence of styles went into the making of album. After the first listen, you've pretty much heard it all, how much replayability the album will have is a matter of personal taste.

I Break Horses combine electronica and shoegaze, but not in an annoying twee way like most other bands who do similar things, they channel a bit of the warped sampledelic abrasiveness of Disco Inferno, they love "Run Into Flowers"-era M83 but bring the rock much better than M83 did back then, and they wrote a song called "I Kill Your Love, Baby!" (with barely any lyrics besides those in the title). If any of this sounds a little bit enticing then you can safely assume that you'll like this album.

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Once upon a time, The Raveonettes emerged fully fomed with their debut album, "Chain Gang of Love". I've been a fan of them for a while but I bought and heard this album for the first time only a few weeks ago. Just the album title and the fact that it was produced by Richard Gottehrer tells you most of what you need to know. It's thirteen blistering tracks of exhilarating motorcycle feedback doo wop JAMC-drenched fun. They continued in the same vein on their sophomore album, on their third album they cranked the feedback as high as it would go and succeeded in out-Psychocandying "Psychocandy, but by their fourth album they were searching for something new and didn't know where to look for it (I almost never feel the need to hear this album).

Now, on their fifth album "Raven In the Grave", they're still in the midst of an identity crisis but the results have gotten a lot better. It's their mellowest album to date, leaning more toward the doo-wop side of the classic rock and roll they love so much. The most interesting tracks are the loop-based "Recharge and Revolt" and "Forget That You're Young", which is a style they've dabbled with in the past (e.g. "Aly Walk With Me") but have never pulled off this successfully. "Aly Walk With Me" is all about holding back until going for the volume kill during the bridge, but "Recharge and Revolt" nails the vocal melody and doesn't rely on sheer volume to eventually hammer home its point. It's like nothing they've done before and therefore makes for the perfect album opener. It's also one of the best "(slightly) less is more" songs in the Raveonettes' catalogue that still manages to unimpeachably rock. The idea of marrying hip-hop and shoegaze seemed preposterous when Bowery Electric tried to pull it off in 1998, but I think I'm ready for the Raveonettes to give it an album-length try.

M83, "Hurry Up, We're Dreaming"

M83's newest effort sounds even more like an album recorded and released in the 80's than "Saturdays = Youth" did, and I bet you didn't think that was possible. Any hint of an experimental bent to the album has been swept away by the even more audaciously gated drums, layers of vocals drenched in echo, and cheap, cheerful sounding synths. Where are the noisy tracks that recall the band's twee/shoegaze roots, like "Highway of Endless Dreams" or "Fields, Shorelines, and Hunters". Where's the epic closing track in all its 10+ minute technicolour glory, like on all their other albums? Instead, it's a steady stream of three to four minute pop tunes and short, mellow interludes. The interludes beautifully tie together sections of the album, allowing the band to segue between different styles. They're like quick, fleeting snapshots of how their music used to feel and sound, as if these short snippets are all that remains of M83's pre-2005 past.

The fact that they shamelessly rip off all of their favourite 80's bands is a huge part of the album's appeal, I know. For instance, if "Coulours" was their attempt to rewrite New Order's "The Perfect Kiss", "Claudia Lewis" strays so close to "Thieves Like Us" that you can practically sing the latter's lyrics on top of the former. But they've also gone the extra mile to steal from themselves, and I can't be sure whether this is intentional or not. I simply can't get around the notion that "Hurry Up, We're Dreaming" is the first M83 album that comes across as nothing but reassembled pieces of old M83 albums, rather than a new piece of music in and of itself. The starblinded, proggy, cigarette lighter waving "Intro" is a dead ringer for "Moonchild" -- both tracks open their respective albums too. The wailing, rapid-fire synth rushes and rhythmic cadences of "New Map" are lifted straight from "Don't Save Us From the Flames". "Splendour" is the piano and choir weepy ballad that recent M83 albums have been contractually obligated to have (e.g. "Safe", "Too Late"). "Echoes of Mine" and "Raconte-Moi une Histoire" revisit the energetic instrumental + fake TV/movie samples combination (i.e. vocal snippets that were made to sound like samples from some obscure, long lost movie but were actually kitsch-y bits recorded for the album) that M83 have done a few times already.

But bands steal from themselves all the time. All we should really care about is whether or not the old tricks still work. Despite the intimidating running time (75 minutes), the album feels like a sprint, never dragging for a moment as it runs through 22 tracks of treble-drenched 80's pop throwbacks. It's dripping with titanic sounding songs that, on the whole, are more immediate than anything M83 have ever done, and whatever the album might lose by recycling so many old ideas, it makes up for in spades by presenting such a varied palate of instantly addicting tunes.

In case you needed reminding, this is why you sometimes still need to go into music shops; Wolves in the Throne Room, "Celestial Lineage"

I've been a black metal fan for about fifteen years.

The previous sentence is technically the truth, but it isn't particularly accurate. One might be inclined to assume, based on the claims of a person who claims to have been a fan of a type of music for fifteen years, that he regularly buys albums, goes to concerts, reads interviews and album reviews, and is halfway knowledgeable about said genre of music. None of those things apply to me and black metal. In a good year, I'll hear three or four albums. I'm intimidated by the sheer volume of metal out there (across a sprawl of subgenres) and have always felt too intimidated and too daunted by the task of trying to dig through it all. When it comes to journalism, I don't know where to start, all the reference points are unfamiliar to me, it's like I've fallen way too far behind to ever catch up. Metal is one of those genres that I never listened to growing up -- for instance, I didn't listen to 80's icons like Metallica or Slayer, and couldn't even appreciate Guns N Roses like most of my friends did. Simply put, I have no history with the genre. Trying to catch up on folk or country would be just as difficult and feel just as foreign. It's not like techno, where the mountain of music getting released every year might be gargantuan, but I already know the history and culture of the genre, know what I like and what I don't like, and can therefore disappear for a while and always slip right back in.

So if I hadn't walked into Aquarius Records on Valencia St. in San Francisco a few weeks ago, would I have ever heard about Wolves in the Throne Room? There's no way to know for sure. Sometimes it seems that a little bit of internet research and regular trips to a stock list of blogs and websites is enough to keep a person exposed to enough music to keep him or her scrambling for the time to hear everything that piques their interest. And yet all the Pandoras and blog links and Youtube playlists never seem to replicate the thrill of walking into a cool music shop and having your mind blown by a record you've never heard about getting played over the in-store stereo.

When it comes right down to it, all I'm looking for in metal is a killer Wall of Sound.

Across town, I was convinced that goth and metal should almost never be mixed. Ulver's "Blood Inside" (from 2005) was such a disaster that I never believed that a kitchen sink approach to black metal would ever be advisable.

I would have never believed the awesomeness of the intro to the opening track of "Celestial Lineage" if I hadn't been forced to hear it in Aquarius Records with my own ears. After three tense minutes of soothing chants, wind chimes, and sighing synths, "Thuja Magnus Imperium" smoothly segues into its guitar intro before erupting into a choral blizzard of guitars and drums. It's the most satisfying payoff to the long intro of an opening track on an album I've heard since ... well, is there a better one? I need some time to think about this. And only three minutes later, it's back to a Steve Roach lite interlude before exploding again. Spector made three minute operas for the kids, Wolves in the Throne Room prefer a full eleven minutes. Who's counting? Each track is exhausting, exhilarating, and inexplicably heartbreaking.

Give me an honest answer: how would you expect to feel at the end of a ten minute metal track called "Astral Blood"? I promise that if you listen to the penultimate track on "Celestial Lineage", you won't be disappointed that it doesn't match your preconceptions.

The nearly drums-free "Prayer of Transformation" is an elegiac extended hymn that caps off with a distorted drone of guitars that grows slowly in volume only to disappear abruptly. Shouldn't all metal albums end like this??

Ladytron with Sonoio and VHS or Beta, Phoenix Concert Theatre

This was my first time back at the Phoenix in over five years. Never has a place felt so completely familiar and yet also so oddly foreign. It seems like I know every inch of the place, having stared at these pastel coloured four walls dozens of times over a fifteen year period. But I'm also an outsider now, it no longer feels like *my* place, it feels like *their* place. A venue "belongs" to the people who frequent it, and that's definitely not me, at least not recently. And who are these people, these Ladytron fans? It's a surprisingly male dominated crowd with a few goth types mixed in. What was once a niche electro-pop band who weren't expected to last until the end of the last decade have carved themselves a healthy slice of the local indie scene. The truly surprising thing about the crowd tonight is how boring and generic looking they are.

I only catch the last five minutes of Sonoio's set, which is a shame because it's great stuff, a midpoint between kid-friendly 80's synthpop and the noisy aggression of 00's industrial and rhythmic noise. VHS or Beta seem to have a number of fans in the audience, and to their credit, they come across more as rock stars compared to what you'd expect from bands playing this kind of music. They're kind of like a Depeche Mode-loving version of Linkin Park (or is that just Linkin Park?)

Last year, I wondered aloud whether Ladytron had the endurance to really slay an audience from the gig's start until its finish, and if tonight's set is any indication, it would appear that they knew their limitations too. They've cut the guitars and the noise, loaded up on more synth bells and whistles, slowed the tempos to a more relaxed pace, and settled for going only half throttle. Slow and steady works better for them, even though they sometimes walk a dangerous line between pacing themselves and going through the motions. This style also tends to homogenize their material, cancelling out the highs and lows in favour of a steady stream of middles. But in the end, a juicy selection of oldies mixed in with new tracks from "Gravity the Seducer" show just how many great tunes Ladytron have. The new album might be a mixed bag, but there are enough goodies there to pad their increasingly impressive back catalogue, and once you have enough killer songs in the bag then it's hard to play a sub-par gig.