Madonna, "Confessions On a Dancefloor"

This past Friday night, I sat contently in an alcohol-aided, smoke-induced haze while some friends DJ'ed. I kept intending to get up and dance, but somehow never got around to it. That's OK, I guess, but I felt a little bad about it when they dropped "Hung Up". Girls seemed to appear out of nowhere, packing the dancefloor. It's possible that I was gushing about M83 at the time.

Madonna's new single is spectacular, it's easily her best since "Ray of Light", and before that ... I don't know, "Justify My Love"? Powered by a tremendous, unrelenting beat and the best use of an ABBA sample, well, ever (are there even any other deserving nominees?), it feels destined to be timeless much like Kylie's "Can't Get You Out of My Head" is timeless, as opposed to the "electronica sure seemed like the hot new thing"-quaintness of the "Ray of Light"-era singles.

Suddenly, scores of people chime in and exclaim that Madonna's music hasn't been this deeply soaked in club culture since her earliest records (um, "Vogue"? "Express Yourself"?), which are then held up as the best of her career ("Holiday" wasn't that great a record. And the singing on early Madonna singles is atrocious).

I'm suspicious of the album in the same way that I'm suspicious of almost every 60-minute album (so many of them could stand to lose a few tracks and 15-20 minutes). It's supposed to ressemble a pumping DJ set, a concept which leaves little room (for such a disco-fied style, anyhow) for the types of balladry that typically appear on Madonna's albums. The album is frontloaded with corkers, but the second half comes down from a massive high, the vocals become lusher and more drawn out, and the lyrics become more introspective. It feels like some of these songs were conceived as ballads but the overriding album concept didn't allow them to end up sounding that way.

But at least half of this album KILLS, and that half certainly provides an incredible rush.

Mogwai + Sex and the City

I caught a rerun of SatC this and they managed to slip a Mogwai song past me in a scene where I somehow hadn't noticed it before. Somebody who works for that show LOVES Mogwai because that makes three songs of theirs that they've used during the series' run (and maybe more are lurking, unnoticed by me for whatever reason? I just discovered that the episode guide on HBO's web site also includes musical credits, so ... anyone wanna check for me? Nah, I'll eventually look through every one of them myself anyhow ...)

Season 4, episode 14, "All That Glitters". The first and best. Trey and Charlotte decide to separate just days before House and Garden magazine planned on visiting to photograph the happy couple in their fashionable, renovated apartment. Cue Trey's dramatic arrival as the opening notes to "Take Me Somewhere Nice" slide in.

Season 4, episode 16, "Ring A Ding Ding". I suppose I hadn't noticed this because unlike the other two instances, the song doesn't appear during a climatic final (or near-final) scene. Instead, "Close Encounters" shows up as Carrie sits down to read what she believes is a goodbye letter from Aidan, only to have the scene (and music) abruptly cut away to the coffee shop once she realizes it's a letter from his lawyers. There's also some serious superfan trainspotting shit going down here because "Close Encounters" was only available on the Japanese version of "Rock Action" (although it was later compiled on a European tour EP).

Season 6, episode 3, "The Perfect Present". Carrie and Berger lie in bed and finally spill the beans re: their emotional devastation at the hands of their respective exes, and in the background -- as they reveal the skeletons in their closets -- is "Kids Will Be Skeletons". It really is one of the most peaceful songs Mogwai ever recorded.

John Cale, Priya Thomas @Lula Lounge

It's my first visit to this venue, and I'm a bit startled to see that it's an actual lounge, with people eating dinner and stuff. It's funny how I find myself here just a couple of weeks after getting a looksee at the "A Night With Lou Reed" video from 1983 that was held in a similar-looking club in New York, with tables up front and standing room in the back.

Opener Priya Thomas is well-versed in "Is This Desire?"-era PJ Harvey, although PJH had started singing instead of wailing by that point. And I can't get over a nagging feeling that her guitar+voice are badly out of tune with the canned parts from her sequencer. Cale manages to take a career of wild unpredictability, avant-gardism, and defiantly anti-pop nonhits and turn it into something polished and nigh on professional. His new album "Black Acetate" is a slick piece of churning rock and roll that is ably recreated with his live band. The likes of "Pablo Picasso" (mammoth, intense) and "Guts" (feeling nearly like a handheld singalong with Cale at the piano) fit comfortably alongside newer straightforward rockers like "Outta the Bag" and "Hush". Overall, it's a tremendously entertaining two hours spent watching a 63-year old dude who's vigourous beyond his years. Oh, and Matthew Sweet would have killed to have written "Perfect" a decade ago.

Cool Drummings - Steve Reich and Friends @ McMillan Theatre

On Sunday night, I saw one of those concerts I thought I'd never see. In the early 90's, I had a few close calls with the Orb -- rumoured shows, a cancelled show, a tour stop in Montreal but not in Toronto (and I wasn't able to make the road trip to attend it) -- but I knew I'd see them eventually. Being conscious of that didn't erase the frustration of having to wait years to see them, but I knew that it would happen someday.

On the other hand, I never thought I'd see Steve Reich. That was a fantasy. That was the type of concert that I knew was happening somewhere in the world, but I couldn't envision it happening in the part of the world that I inhabit.

These weren't unfounded paranoias -- Steve Reich hadn't been to Toronto in twenty years. But last week, he visited the University of Toronto Faculty of Music as a Visitor in Composition, and the gala concert featured a trio of Reich pieces, "Music For Pieces of Wood", "You Are (Variations)", and "Drumming".

Members of percussion ensemble NEXUS have been playing with Steve Reich and Musicians for literally decades, and the ease with which they play are clearly the result of years of familiarity with the countless nuances of these semi-improvised pieces. They are absolutely astonishing -- them old dudes have SKILLS. They possess a sick sense of rhythm, and an uncanny ability to keep metronomic tempos just as easily as they can phase them out from each other and lock them back into place completely at will.

The flimsiness of a CD recording of "Music For Pieces of Wood" is lost in a live setting. All music is best heard live, but with percussion-based music in particular, the high harmonics inherent to the instruments are largely lost on a recording (not to mention the concert hall reverb that requires being there in person to experience). Each strike of the wood drills loud, ringing tones into one's ears with pristine clarity. The hypnotic "You Are (Variations)" is instantly recognizable as Reich, with four pianos driving the piece forward in a semi-Spectorian type of spectacle.

Lasting 57 minutes on this night, "Drumming" is the clear highlight. As the sound made by nine marimba players filled the hall, and the spider web of eighteen mallets billows above their instruments, the overall effect seems to be one of sustained tones despite the underlying rhythmic complexity. These soft, near-melancholy drones wouldn't be out of place in the more ambient portions of Bowery Electric's "Beat", or perhaps a Stars of the Lid album.

Animal Collective, "Feels"

The Warlocks did it, and now it's Animal Collective's turn to make the Great Album That I Didn't Think They Had In Them. In this case, I thought AC were too obsessed with being weird, too enamoured with starting at the crawling walls they saw in their acid flashbacks to keep their focus over the course of an entire album. I wanted them to make an album of two-minute psych-pop songs, with ten minute drone pieces interspersed around them. The mesmerizing "Banshee Beat" comes close to the latter. It's eight minutes long but could easily stretch on for twice that length.

They haven't gotten less weird on "Feels", but it's a mellower, more restrained album and perhaps that's why I like it so much more than "Sung Tongs": I'll take a good chillout album any day over an album of yelping and screaming.

Warlocks, Gris Gris @ Lee's Palace

This scarily underattended show brought back memories of a Bardo Pond show at the same venue three years ago. The gig was scary good and the crowd was shy, but game, although most people didn't dare to descend upon the largely empty floor until the second half of the headliner's set. The aftermath of this is that Bardo Pond haven't come back since.

Last night, Gris Gris impressed me greatly with their metronomic Spacemen 3 act. Setting up on the floor, presumably because there was no room on the stage to set up around the Warlocks multi-guitar, multi-drum arrangement, brought an intimacy to their set that you wouldn't expect from pounding drone-rock (which always seems like such a standoffish type of music to me).

When the Warlocks took to the darkened stage, the energy level in the crowd was approaching zero, and the band launched into their set with calculated efficiency. As the crowd loosened up, they seemed to do the same (chicken? egg? chicken? egg?), relying mainly on the concise songs from their new album "Surgery". Their last Toronto gig was frighteningly loud, with a couple hundred souls packed into a sweaty Horseshoe to listen to one two-chord jam after another. But just as "Surgery" favours songs over mesmerizing jams, so did this gig, with the bulk of the new album rubbing shoulders with the more "hit-single" qualities of "Phoenix Album" tracks "Shake the Dope Out" and "Hurricane Heart Attack". Although I have to wonder why, if they opted to play a pop set rather than a rock one, why they left out the 60's girl group/"Psychocandy" excesses of "Angels in Heaven, Angels In Hell" or "Evil Eyes Again". Even the critics that dislike the new album (of which there are many, but fuck them) enjoy those two songs. What is holding the Warlocks back? Loyalty to their "jam it out" beginnings? Go whole hog and become a pop band! Verve started out as a jam band and became a pop band. Animal Collective are headed that way too, if their new album is any indication!

Depeche Mode -- Playing the Angel

Eight years ago, they delivered a great album when you might have least expected it. It would have been easy to forgive, though. A band is allowed to make a misstep after losing a member (and primary knob-twiddler) to careerism and almost losing another member to the throes of death. Fortunately, this is all a moot point because Tim Simenon stepped in as producer, Dave Gahan sounded fierce and determined on record, and "Ultra" was one of their best albums.

However, "Exciter" didn't live up to the lofty expectations of a DM + Mark Bell collaboration. Beatstompers ("I Feel Loved") and lush, ambient deep sighing tracks ("Freelove", "When the Body Speaks") were the main selling points, whereas their attempts to curl their lips and rock out ("The Sweetest Condition", "The Dead of Night") were not. With half of a brilliant album, plus some of Martin Gore's dullest ballads, I was resigned to an endless future of Depeche Mode albums that repeated "Exciter"'s hit-and-miss rate. After 20 years, I'll take that from just about any band.

But consider my mind blown -- they rendered another point moot. "Playing the Angel" is nothing short of outstanding. It's their best album since "Violator", and might be their best album OTHER THAN "Violator" (pardon the wishy-washiness, but I'll need a few months of perspective with this).

Given the smorgasbord nature of producer Ben Hillier's varied career, I was puzzled as to what the band expected out of him. I wasn't expecting an album packed with such gorgeous industrial noise, quaking bass tones, and electro-sheen. The only fault I can find with it are the ballads, which in contrast to those on "Exciter", are the weaker moments here, despite having a very similar feel to them. That just goes to show how strong the more upbeat tracks are.

"A Pain That I'm Used To" takes the "I Feel Loved" template and adds a smattering of Nine Inch Nails' "Reptile" to it, resulting in an instant industrial pop classic that has future single written all over it. "John the Revelator" is Depeche Mode doing gospel ... ho hum, you say? ... over electro beats straight out of "Computer World". Another corker, and for my money, far less derivative than the very popular "Lose Control".

"Suffer Well" gives a stiff shake to "A Question of Time" and amps it way, way up inbetween the ethereal backgrounds that cloak the verses. Elsewhere, "Black Celebration" is given another stern talking-to, as "Nothing's Impossible" one-ups "Fly on the Windscreen" and brings the dense, near-industrial gloom while Dave Gahan intones "how did we get this far apart?" in blank disbelief. There's a lot of Projekt Records' cinematic gothic intensity in this album -- and if the idea of Depeche Mode making that type of album appeals to you in the least, then you need to run, not walk, when this album is released next week.

"Precious" is one of the most understated Depeche Mode singles ever, as Gahan shows the sort of vocal restraint that is usually reserved for the Martin Gore-sung tracks. The lack of a gigantoid chorus doesn't hurt this song a bit, making it the stark opposite of a single like "I Feel You", which is ALL chorus. I make that comparison here because "Precious" is easily their best single since "I Feel You". Elsewhere, "Damaged People" people adds extra layers to DM's "Construction Time Again"-era minimalism, and looks back to how ballads might have sounded on that record if they had let up on the metallic wasteland concept just a bit.

A one-line soundbyte for this album might be "Black Celebration done better". Incredibly, we still seem to be living in Depeche Mode's peak years.

MIA and Dylan

The mini-controversy over the Honda ad featuring MIA's "Galang" is a a great example of what I called a "trivial" issue in my last post. The two sides of the argument are as follows:

Side A. MIA has sold out to a big corporation. She makes anti-capitalism/anti-imperialism overtures in her interviews and therefore she is a hypocrite for allowing her song to be used in this commercial.

Side B. A girl's gotta pay the rent.

Preamble A. People still care about "authenticity"? Is it 1977? Liscensing songs for use in ads -- is this uncommon?

Preamble B. MIA is already a total hypocrite in regard to her so-called "values", because in interviews she talks about being anti-war and how violence solves nothing, but her album cover is adorned with pictures of bombs, machine guns, and tanks -- imagery which effortlessly slots in next to her fascination/hero-worship toward her PLO-trained father.

Now then, she let Honda use her song, a move which appears to be in conflict with her personal politics/values. And you know what -- it is! However, she can carry on pushing the same issues she's always pushed and I don't have the slightest problem with it. Similarly, I have absolutely no problem reconciling my feelings about unionism with my habit of shopping at Wal-Mart. There's a Wal-Mart three minutes from my house, they sell things I want and need, it's fucking cheap, and I'm not exactly rich. I sleep just fine at night after shopping there, knowing that I'm going to work at my unionized teaching job the very next day.

I'd much rather talk about "No Direction Home", the strongly-hyped four-hour Bob Dylan documentary that aired this past week. The attitudes I just discussed were also raised in this excellent doc, which needless to say, is required viewing for even casual Dylan fans. A couple of quick thoughts:

-- Joan Baez does a great Bob Dylan impression
-- Dylan was remarkably lucid (for Dylan), although he did seem noncommittal at times in that he dodged potentially revealing questions ("my songs weren't about anything", "I was always an outsider" = "I will only comment on the things I personally did and can't (or won't) provide my present-day perspectives on the folk/political scene as a whole")
-- Part I is a remarkably detailed historical document (old pictures, recordings). Part II's power is slightly curtailed if you've already heard the 1966 concerts and seen "Don't Look Back".

Dylan famously (supposedly) sold out by going electric, but even before that, some people within the folk scene weren't happy that he signed to Columbia and started cutting records, leading to (naturally) a spike in his public profile. Ires were raised because his behaviour ran contrary to the intimacy/politics/monetary goals of the NYC folk scene. On the other hand, it was noted in the doc that some of this animosity was because Dylan's success forced some folkies to look in the mirror and notice that they were hungrier than they cared to admit. They needn't have bothered tearing themselves apart over this -- you can sell a few records and not worry about how you're going to eat without feeling that you've betrayed your personal politics. In the mid-60's, maybe this presented more of a dilemna ... Joan Baez talked about how everything was so polarized -- you were either for or against the war in Vietnam, for or against segregation, etc. -- to the extent that you had to decidedly pick sides, leaving no room for any "shades of grey" fence-straddling attitudes. But in 2005, mobilizing around the big issues is more of a slog, and such polarizing rhetoric is more easily marginalized. In 2005, you can have your cake (speak your mind) and eat it too (sell your song to a car advert).

Why I do more thinking about baseball than I do about music (garbling ahead)

Well, that's not actually true. However, I find myself writing almost exclusively about bands, and not about, shall we say, "issues". I hear some music I like and I write about, whereas I haven't felt at all compelled to write about rockism or whatever issue various music websites are up in arms about. In some sense, I think you reach a point where everything becomes subjective and at that point, what other people are saying becomes irrelevant. At that point, certain issues become increasingly trivial. Like this one: Soulseeking

I've felt that need to consume, both in the downloading age and before it. But what happened to Nick a couple of years ago was the need to hear everything, and I haven't felt that in at least ten years (not even everything within a scene or genre). Compared to my teen, it's considerably more fruitless to even attempt such a thing and engage in that sort of completism, since there's so much more music available and it's easier than ever to get hear it. Nick doesn't want to know everything about postpunk and grime -- hey, neither do I! -- and the solution is simple. Don't listen to it, no need for drama, listen to something else. It's that simple. That's the sort of triviality I was referring to. My response is brief and I don't feel the need to discuss it beyond "just listen to whatever you want and leave it at that".

The need to hear everything is foolish, but the need to hear lots and lots is not -- it's a simple addiction just like any other. As I've said on other occasions, I accept the fact that there's practically an infinite pool of music out there that I would absolutely love if I ever got around to hearing it. I'm becoming convinced that the timing of anything I hear is essentially random. Recommendations are everywhere -- I follow through on some right away, some get filed away in my brain for years, and others are simply forgotten. Why? What determines whether a song or album is heard immediately as opposed to never? The crucial question is how much of this depends on factors that I can control (absolute choice over what I hear and when I hear it) and how much of it is pure randomness that is unrelated to music (moods, finding the time, millions of other real life pursuits).

My main objection to the article (which I enjoyed for the most part) is the way it looks toward the past, implying that we are, to some extent, powerless to avoid judging new music (and the feelings we get from hearing that music) with how we felt about music we heard in the past. Why won't new albums don't make him feel like InSides did? A valid concern, perhaps, but that will never happen -- those feelings will never return. You hear music differently at 18 than you do at 26 or 31. Nothing is the same. Kissing a girl isn't the same at 31 as it was at 18. It's not less exciting or less special, it's just different because 18 is not 31. I went through what Nick went through. I used to wonder out loud if I'd ever be truly excited -- heart-palpitation excitement and life-affirming joy -- for any band ever again. Then I discovered Pulp. Again, it felt like the end of something, a conclusion to diehard fandom and I continued to wonder whether those feelings could ever be repeated. That was 1995. If I was incapable of feeling that strongly about a band over a period of ten years, I would have lost interest in hearing new bands several years ago. Nothing could be further from the truth, as this blog clearly shows. A steady stream of comparisons to the past helps to confine the past to a self-enforced higher pedestal that can never compete with the present, and then you're no different from those people who say that nothing can or will ever be better than the Beatles or Zeppelin.

Black Dice, Et Sans, Awesome @ Gladstone Hotel

There's a gas leak in the building. Oh wait, it's Awesome in their stage outfits, with soft glowing white lights where their faces should be, blowing into spooky horns, sampling and looping their voices, and pushing buttons on ancient toy organs. Watching all of this in the darkened room heightens the ghostly elegance of their music, and although the tension slowly builds toward a Black Dice-ian bleep-filled finale, I think their strengths lie in their more anodyne moments. They captured a feeling of pastoral stasis similar to that on Flying Saucer Attack's "Distance", which FSA couldn't or wouldn't recapture after that (typically relying on layer after layer of reverb to make their points both before and after that album).

I know essentially nothing about the state of goth music, or anything related to goth music (except for darkwave, which is still recycling 1995 trance the last I checked) but if more of it sounded like Arcana's "Inner Pale Sun", then I'd listen to a lot more of it. In contrast to highly intimidating labelmates such as Brighter Death Now, this album is lush, inviting, and cinematic, exuding warmth with each blaring note. Goth music always seems to bring thoughts of horror and fright to my mind -- a spider-infested haunted house as opposed to the grand prescence of a true gothic manor with leafy green ivy crawling around its exterior. Why can't more music in this genre sound this grand? Where do I find more of this stuff -- is this as simple as (finally) buying myself some Dead Can Dance CD's? As you can tell, I haven't a clue what I'm talking about when it comes to this stuff, but I know what I like.

I've been meaning to write about that album for a while, but conveniently, it fits into a discussion of Et Sans because they've found another wonderful goth formula that I wish others would use as well. Bouncy synth pop and shimmering keyboards form the basis for improvisational noise and fits of unrestrained screaming. Sure, let's let Fennesz's computer go nuts all over Depeche Mode's "Get the Balance Right", why not? The band are barely able to contain their smiles, which is perhaps a reaction over being not allowed to smile in their 4839 other bands. The sense of fun in their music is mostly absent on their album -- there's obviously something to be said for watching a performers' face and having the option of dancing along with them.

Since I'm writing this a couple of days later, I might as well open up a time loop to the night following the concert in order to talk about one more thing that I know nothing about. I saw five minutes of Canadian Idol last night. These were the only five minutes I've seen all season. What is wrong with my country? The emperor has no clothes and I think I'm the only one who realizes it. The judges certainly don't because they're working overtime to polish turds into gold and if I hadn't seen the two finalists with my own eyes then I might have bought what the judges were selling. Neither Rex or Melissa looks like a star. They look like ordinary kids. Ryan Malcolm looks like a waiter who won a singing contest. He doesn't look like a star and that's why he isn't one. Kalan Porter is a dewy-eyed manchild. He looks like a star and he is one. Rex and Melissa don't look like pop singers. Neither has a future as one.

Rex's version of Five For Fighting's "Superman" was delivered in a brutal monotone that had me aghast at the notion that this was actually the finale and not the round where they eliminate 32 contestants down to 16. Plus, the dude's a midget. Sorry. Melissa has a fine voice and should clearly be the winner, but taking on "Angel of the Morning" was a potentially suicidal move because of the extremely high risk of falling flat on your face with a song that difficult. My perception is that she managed to do enough with it to not change anybody's opinion of her, no more and no less.

Canadian Idol, then: let's have some humility and quit before we make ourselves look any dumber.

Black Dice rocked my socks off. They have got to be in my top five of bands that you absolutely have to see live to appreciate. They're punishing in person, but on record, their electronic squiggling carries maybe 10% of the power (one or two tracks on each album excepted).