Commemorating the late 90s

For those of us who were late to grunge party that was early 90s, albums like Modest Mouse's The Lonesome Crowded West (1997), The Flaming Lips' The Soft Bulletin (1999), and Belle and Sebastian's If You're Feeling Sinister (1996), were a big deal. For me, they helped to lay the groundwork for the musical exploration of my late teens, and gave me a (loose) standard against which I could evaluate other albums.

The albums mentioned above are the first three entries of the Pitchfork Classic series. Each video is comprised of a series of interviews (what amounts to an oral history) with band members, producers, engineers, record label execs, and so on.

Pitchfork is known mostly for its overblown album reviews and so it's really refreshing to see them take a hands-off approach and let those involved speak for themselves.

An obligatory review of My Bloody Valentine's mbv

If you've paid any attention to the music press over the last four days, you've likely come across the name of one of the most mythologized and celebrated bands of the 90s. After nearly 22 years My Bloody Valentine have finally released their ridiculously anticipated follow-up to 1991's Loveless. Especially since the rise of taste-making sites like Pitchfork (who ranked Loveless as the second best album of the 90s, after OK Computer), MBV's sophomore release has become something of an institution. Listening to someone talk about the first time they heard Loveless inevitably brings up all kinds of nostalgic platitudes; it's basically the musical equivalent of your 11-year-old self's first wet-dream and, for a lot of us, it's an event that's fondly remembered.

By the time I first encountered My Bloody Valentine I'd already developed a boyish love for the liquid swell of guitar effects that I'd come to associate with bands like the Smashing Pumpkins. I later realized this sound was the hallmark of a loosely defined genre called "shoegaze." It made all kinds of sense. I suddenly understood what was so great about Siamese Dream: it successfully ripped off the sound--the perfect blending of androgynous vocals and textured guitar layers--that Kevin Shields had perfected two years earlier. The Smashing Pumpkins used Loveless's sonic innovations for different ends, but Billy Corgan did, after all, seek out Alan Moulder (who had engineered Loveless) to mix the Siamese Dream. At the time, anything connected to that album was pretty revelatory for me and MBV was no exception. Even the record store clerk who helped me find the CD was excited for me: "I'll help you, but only because you're buying Loveless, the best album ever made." Loveless's aesthetic was more significant for my own taste than I could have known. And as a cultural document, it served as a key to understanding what I loved best about music of the early 90s.

20 years later and My Bloody Valentine's new release, mbv, is pretty damn good too. It's the unmistakable work of an incredibly influential band, picking up more or less where their 1991 record left off. Upon first listen, it seemed more song-driven than I was expecting, but as several reviews have pointed out, the nine track album presents its songs in three groups of three. The first triad is composed of songs that extend the grainy guitar swirls of Loveless. mbv's ethereal opener, "She Found Now" unfolds like a sequel to Loveless's "Sometimes," while "Only Tomorrow" follows the same shrill guitar hook into oblivion, nicely leading into lumbering chord progressions of "Who Sees You." The next triad is made up of songs that feature vocals by Belinda Butcher. "New You" is the surprising highlight of this middle block in part because it's the closest mbv gets to conventional song structure: it's instantly catchy and melodic, almost danceable. But, as always, the point isn't to craft a good pop song; it's to push frequencies to their limits.



In the end, it's not the song, but the sound that counts. And that's clearly what's going on in the final set of tracks, which become progressively more disorienting and difficult to digest. "In Another Way" features another gorgeous set of vocals from Butcher but is noticeably more noise-heavy; "Nothing Is" fulfills its nihilistic title as it wordlessly rolls over thudding guitars and an intense, pummelling drum line; and, although Shields returns to vocal duties on "Wonder 2," the album's closing track is the closest MBV have come to sounding like a helicopter base. As it ends, you can almost see them flying out of range and out of view.

There's something both satisfying and confounding about mbv. Perhaps it's because so many of us have stubbornly held onto Loveless's aura that the new album comes across sounding like a timeless artifact: evidence that My Bloody Valentine haven't changed, that the freshest sounds from 20 years ago can still be recovered and reconstituted. But as a friend of mine pointed out, My Bloody Valentine don't freeze time, they distort it beyond recognition. Rather than some recovered aura, it's Kevin Sheilds' ability to play with time and sound that draws the connecting line between Isn't Anything, Loveless, and mbv. Most fans talk about listening to MBV as though its a religious experience, a kind of escape from lived reality. By contrast, I think MBV have managed to produce the opposite: mbv isn't the sound of transcendent departure--it's the sound of immanent arrival.

It's 2012 and I'm going to my first Smashing Pumpkins concert

Tonight I will see the Smashing Pumpkins perform at Rexall Place in Edmonton, AB. They were my favourite band from grade 7 to the beginning of university. Over the last year I've been rediscovering their early material, thanks to a series of excellent reissues that collect rare b-sides, demos, and concert footage. It's the both the best and the worst time to be a loyal Pumpkins fan. While the band's legacy is being repackaged and canonized for a new generation of listeners, Billy Corgan's current version of the band has begun a cross-Canada tour to promote its new album Oceania. He's given some remarkably even-handed interviews lately, but shortly after Oceana's release, Billy had this to say about the whole reunion tour thing, which is decidedly not what he's doing:

There are those bands that are essentially coming back only to make money — playing their old albums, and maybe somewhere in the back of their minds they’re thinking there might be a future. I am not in that business, obviously. I condemn anybody who’s in that business but doesn’t admit [he's] in that business. When Soundgarden came back and they just played their old songs, great. I was a fan of Soundgarden, but call it for what it is. They’re just out there to have one more round at the till; same with Pavement and these other bands.

Soundgarden has just announced an album of new material, and the dudes in Pavement never pretended that they weren't coming back to make money. Never mind that. Billy will always find someone to resent. He's had a rough go of it. When he released his one and only official solo album TheFutureEmbrace back in 2005, he also bought full page ads in the Chicago Sun-Times and the Chicago Tribune, where he revealed his desire to "renew and revive" the Smashing Pumpkins. Unsurprisingly, most of his former bandmates didn't take the bait. Jimmy Chamberlin, his former drummer, was the only ex-Pumpkin to answer the call. The immediate fruits of their lame reunion were displayed with pomp and grandeur on the epically bad Zeitgeist (2007), an album so forgettable that I'm just leave it there. Since then, Jimmy has abandoned ship and the group currently touring as the Smashing Pumpkins is about as far from resembling my favourite band as it's ever been. 

I became a Pumpkins fan during the last years of the 90s, and I was 12 years old when I finally got my hands on a tarnished copy of 1995's Melon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. Unfortunately, I was a few years too late to see the band peak (both in terms of coolness and commercial success). At the time of Melon Collie's release I was in grade 3 and thought that Sting's solo material was about as good as you could get. But I adapted quickly, and by 1998 I was ready for Adore (the album which, for most critics and fans, was the band's biggest misstep and the beginning of the end). Despite the fact that the Pumpkins quickly became my teenage obsession, I never managed to see the band perform live. Pretty tragic, I know. That's kind of how it goes when the closest city to your small town is Winnipeg (not exactly a regular stop for most arena rock tours) and all your friends have either moved on to nu-metal (see Korn, Limp Bizkit, Slipknot, etc.) or don't really listen to "secular" rock music in the first place.

So here I am at 26, finally able to see my favourite band in the flesh and, as to be expected, I'm feeling pretty ambivalent about it. Most serious Pumpkins fans who've stuck with the band this long recognize that it hasn't always been the Billy Corgan show. Meanwhile a lot of casual fans and critics consider the band's original lineup -- D'arcy Wretzky, James Iha, and Jimmy Chamberlin -- to be fairly inconsequential. When reviews for the new Smashing Pumpkins album, Oceania, started rolling in, many were quick to point out how similar it sounds to the early Pumpkins. Such critics are, of course, completely wrong. While Oceania is not the heavy mess of guitar sludge that Zeitgeist proved to be, it's still overloaded with gaudy guitar layering and Billy's vocals are still too polished. For some reason, this is all that some critics need to draw a comparison between Oceania and Siamese Dream. Blasphemy, I say! Still, this kind of comparison to the band's glory days is probably what Billy was going for with Oceania (incidentally, it was also what he was going for with Zeitgeist, but we'll do him a favour and forget about it), so I'm glad he's been able to read some positive reviews. 

I'm of the opinion that the original lineup was actually quite unique and had a larger role in the band's sound than Billy has always claimed. Jimmy has often been compared to a gorilla behind a drum kit, but he has jazz training and probably more natural finesse than any of the other major drummers from the alt-rock era. James and D'arcy were also crucial pieces in the Pumpkin puzzle (even though, as Billy famously claimed, they rarely played their own instruments on Pumpkins recordings). D'arcy sang on Gish and Melon Collie and James wrote half a dozen quality songs that mostly appear as b-sides (if they appear at all); but, even if they didn't contribute directly to the music, their presence significantly improved the band's overall aesthetic. They were both unquestionably cool; cool in a way that Billy never could be. I'm also tempted to think that they had some editorial input. Billy may have called the shots -- he may have done it his way from start to finish -- but part of me thinks that their mere presence was enough to force Billy to rethink some of those first impulses. 

Presently, Billy is in complete control of his band, each of its highly skilled members handpicked (most notably, his current drummer won a try-out, despite being only 19 years old at the time) and the latest results aren't great. His guitarist Jeff Schroeder seems like a good fit, but he'll never stare you down like James, and I doubt that he ever really departs from Billy's artistic vision. No surprise, then, that Oceania is a heavily compressed mess of aimless riffing and spiritual platitudes: better than Zeitgeist, but still not as good as the Zwan's Mary Star of the Sea (2003). Billy may be embarrassed about Zwan (his attempt to form a cool indie rock band after the Pumpkins broke up), which had its own clash of egos, despite their initial appearance as a happy family (members included Paz Lenchantin, David Pajo, and Matt Sweeney). Presently, however, any strife on stage or in the studio is pure Billy, and I think his most recent material is all the worse for it. The Pumpkins in 2012 are a homogenous blob.

You can imagine my disappointment when I heard that the setlist for the Oceania tour would be made up of the entire album (this is the only reason I've been listening to Oceania) and would close with five or six classic songs from the band's golden era. Of course, these selections will probably be tracks that I don't much care for -- Bullet with Butterfly Wings, Disarm, XYU, Today, etc.  But I'm trying to keep an open mind and remember that this is probably the closest I will ever come to seeing my old, favourite band live, even if its members look and sound nothing like the band that I spent the better half of my life obsessing over. 

What I won't be expecting is anything from Adore. It polarized fans and drove casual listeners away. By the time Billy tried to advance his band's heavily textured sound on Machina: The Machines of God (2000), most people had stopped caring. But with Adore, the band was heading in the right direction. They were maturing. The claim may not be quite as contentious as I imagine, but I've always considered Adore as part of a near-perfect artistic progression that Billy ended up rejecting part-way through. The album remains consistent with what came before it: it showcases Billy's inward gaze, but this time, we see it at its most precarious and damaged; and unlike Siamese Dream it doesn't fall back on the booming electric guitars or the cheap irony that was everywhere in the early 90s. Aesthetically, it's the band's most cohesive release, with sparse arrangements and even sparser packaging. No colour, no egos. Just a bunch of acoustic/electronic meditations on Sex and Death. 

This is what I won't be expecting to see at Rexall Place tonight. Instead, it's going to be a working through of resentment and delusion (a few days ago, it was announced that Smashing Pumpkins show in Vancouver had been cancelled, probably due to a lack of ticket sales). But I will be there, basking in pale glow of Billy Corgan's newly energized ego, wearing my Smashing Pumpkins tshirt from the Adore era, gritting my teeth and hoping that someone else in the audience notices my hardcore loyalty to the old, fragile ideal of the band as I first knew them: pretentious as hell, but challenging and beautiful.

Summer reading lite

White Noise by Don DeLillo
Like a lot of North American consumers, I've often found comfort in the sterile transcendence of the supermarket, with its white lights and rows of multicoloured commodities uniformly arranged. This summer, I finally managed to read a book that's been recommended to me by several friends and colleagues, Don DeLillo's White Noise. It features several memorable scenes that describe a similar kind of aesthetic experience.

Steffie took my hand and we walked past the fruit bins, an area that extended about forty-five yards along one wall. The bins were arranged diagonally and backed by mirrors that people accidentally punched when reaching for fruit in the upper rows. A voice in the loudspeaker said: "Kleenex Softique, your truck's blocking the entrance." Apples and lemons tumbled in twos and threes to the floor when someone took a fruit from certain places in the stacked array. There were six kinds of apples, there were exotic melons in several pastels. Everything seemed to be in season, sprayed, burnished, bright. People tore filmy bags off racks and tried to figure out which end opened. I realized the place was awash in noise. The toneless systems, the jangle and skid of carts, the loudspeaker and coffee-making machines, the cries of children. And over it all, or under it all, a dull and unlocatable roar, as of some form of swarming life just outside of human apprehension. (36)

The supermarket shelves have been rearranged. It happened one day without warning. There is agitation and panic in the aisles, dismay in the faces of older shoppers. […] They scrutinize the small print on packages, wary of a second level of betrayal. The men scan for stamped dates, the women for ingredients. Many have trouble making out the words. Smeared print, ghost images. In the altered shelves, the ambient roar, in the plain and heartless fact of their decline, they try to work their way through confusion. But in the end it doesn’t matter what they see or think they see. The terminals are equipped with holographic scanners, which decode the binary secret of every item, infallibly. This is the language of waves and radiation, or how the dead speak to the living. And this is where we wait together, regardless of our age, our carts stocked with brightly colored goods. A slowly moving line, satisfying, giving us time to glance at the tabloids in the racks. Everything we need that is not food or love is here in the tabloid racks. The tales of the supernatural and the extraterrestrial. The miracle vitamins, the cures for cancer, the remedies for obesity. The cults of the famous and the dead. (309-10)

Published in 1985, White Noise is a wonderfully angsty novel that articulates the kind of consumer malaise that, in the years to come, is going to become a cultural commonplace. I guess what I'm trying to say is that, here, DeLillo basically prophecies the kind of ideological tropes (especially the vaguely spiritual approach to store bought products--I guess you could just call it, commodity fetishism; as well as the obsession with meaning, pharmaceuticals, the paranormal, and ultimately with death) that I identify with authors like Douglas Coupland (whose Generation X now seems to me like it couldn't have happened without DeLillo) and David Foster Wallace.

But, yeah, also Radiohead.



I also decided to dive into the 33 1/3 series from Continuum. I wanted to prep myself for Jonathan Letham's mega-hyped contribution to the series (published in June), and to figure whether I had the chops to construct one of my own volumes.

Kid A by Marvin Lin
Lin's tribute to what remains my favourite Radiohead album was written by the founder of one of my favourite music websites, Tiny Mix Tapes. Some books in the series are more critical than others, and Lin's book tries to straddle the line between excessive fandom and cultural analysis.Theoretically speaking, the book is pretty hit and miss. But it succeeds in providing a lot of interesting contextual analysis for Kid A's release: the album was notoriously polarizing among critics and, for me at least, has always provided a helpful watershed moment (or, "event," as Lin calls it) for the digital age.

Fear of Music by Jonathan Letham
I wasn't familiar with Letham's style before picking up this book (I did, however, order his novel Fortress of Solitude immediately after finishing it), and I wasn't expecting Letham's writing to be so gutteral. It's definitely one of the most self-conscious books in the series, weaving in and out of personal recollections, meditating on each Talking Heads track, and attempting to articulate the weird relationship we construct with our past.

The punishing intensity we bring to the imperfect reflections we find in the mirror of artworks we choose to love, and our readiness to be betrayed by their failure to continue to match our next moves in the mime-show, our next steps in the dance, is likely a form of mercy. That, because it is a coping mechanism, a deflection of a punishing intensity we mostly wouldn't want -- except maybe once a week, on a shrink's couch -- to apply to ourselves. And any fan who has ever risked disappointment with their love, or any artist who has ever put themselves in the position to disappoint a fan, or a critic, if they are honest with themselves knows that the disappointment that ensues is above all a human situation. (140)

Cymbals Eat Guitars - "Definite Darkness"

Just released a couple days ago, the music video for "Definite Darkness" from Cymbals Eat Guitars' Lenses Alien is every bit a guilty pleasure, for the most part because it unabashedly hits all the right notes for teen angst. For visuals, we have what's probably the most familiar trope of 90s alt-rock music videos: cheerleaders (or, in this case flag-wavers) at a football game. It's the best kind of high school spectacle: you've got all the popular kids at their most visible, phony, machinistic, pre-determined, etc. Throw in some heavy guitars and (extremely) emotive vocals and you've got teen angst in one of its most compact, transparent expressions. Gah! Social alienation. So painful, so liberating. Bottle and sell that stuff!

It's basically crack for outmoded hipsters (such as myself) who are still stuck in the overworn trenches of mid-90s guitar rock. Play the video and you'll know why I'm still listening the crap out of this album a year after its release.

Thoughts arrive like butterflies

A lot of immediately "classic" albums came out in 1991. Not only has it become a touchstone year for grunge, it also marks a milestone for mainstream hip-hop. While most media outlets are obsessing over the deluxe anniversary boxset for Nirvana's Nevermind, some gripping documentaries like Pearl Jam 20  (by Cameron Crowe) and Beats Rhymes and Life: The Travels of A Tribe Called Quest (by Michael Rapaport) are hitting small screens across the country.

For now, here's a pair of music videos from twenty years back: a very dated but no less thrilling music video for Pearl Jam's "Even Flow" (skip ahead to 3:47 if you're getting impatient) and an outmoded video for A Tribe Called Quest's "Check the Rhyme." For me, both clips perfectly capture early nineties zeitgeist: the optimism, the over-the-top aesthetics, and the impulse towards innovation. Pearl Jam tapped into something that sounded primordial and at times universal, while ATCQ pushed the envelope in hip-hop production, with surprising samples and clever rhymes.

Albums, concerts, and '90s nostalgia

“This is the way that pop ends,” Simon Reynolds writes in the introduction to his new book Retromania, “not with a BANG but with a box set whose fourth disc you never get around to playing and an overpriced ticket to the track-by-track restaging of the Pixies or Pavement album you played to death in your first year at university.”

Chances are that if you attended a major music festival in North America this summer, you witnessed a now canonical alt-rock artist playing through one of their seminal albums in its entirity. This past April I saw the Pixies perform their third (and best) album, Doolittle; and, more recently, I saw the Flaming Lips perform their 1999 album, The Soft Bulletin, at the Osheaga Music Festival in Montreal. Believe it or not, the "album concert" trend has been in full swing for a number of years. My best guess as to how it began involves Don't Look Back, an annual series of concerts that began in 2005, where London-based promoters All Tomorrow's Parties ask artists to play through their most celebrated albums in a live setting. The most well-known festivals with stages hosted by ATP are Barcelona's Primavera Sound festival and the Pitchfork Music Festival in Chicago.

As a fan who holds some loyalty to the formal constraints of the LP, I've been pleasantly surprised by the amount of artists who've taken up the idea and are currently using it as a touring strategy. In the case of the Pixies (a band I've now seen three times), seeing them perform their best album in its entirety was good enough incentive to see them again. There are always tracks that bands never (if rarely) perform live, and I was sure the Pixies wouldn't simply end their set after they were done playing through a forty-five minute album. I was right: not only did they play through a bunch of b-sides as a "warm-up" for the album, they followed Doolittle with an assortment of fan favourites. In the end, it was money well spent.

But it's worth asking why this trend in concerts continues to gather steam? Of course, such sentiments are pretty common among music fans from my generation. Not only does my demographic still have enough disposable income to pay for extraneous concerts, most of us gained an appreciation for popular music just as the LP format was on it's way out. For this reason, the British music critic Simon Reynolds is right to lament the current appetite for nostalgia in popular music. Reynold's new book, which I have not yet read, is full of insights into why music from a bygone era continues to take hold of popular imagination.



In a recent article for Slate, Reynolds offers a fair, if not overly grim, indictment of the pop music's current attachment to the '90s, arguing that we're witnessing an ever shortening gap between present trends in music and a detached, apolitical (i.e. nostalgic) appreciation of the past. It's become very apparent (from the growing numbers of new indie bands aspiring to the grungy sounds of bands like the Smashing Pumpkins and Nirvana, to the resurgence of plaid, baggy t-shirts, shows like Portlandia (above), and novels by David Foster Wallace) that the nineties are back in full force. But did they ever really go away? I know I can't speak for everyone who's currently lapping up nineties nostalgia, but ask any of my friends and they'll tell you that I've been loyal to early nineties zeitgeist since junior high (1999-2001). Still, I have to agree with Reynolds when he suggests that

an undercurrent to grunge retrospection is the music media's and record industry's own nostalgia for the heyday of the rock monoculture. It was already crumbling in the early '90s, thanks to rap (the rebel music of black youth, obviously, but a lot of white kids had defected to hip-hop, too) and to the emergence of rave and electronic dance culture (in America destined always to be a minority subculture, but in Europe the dominant form of '90s pop). Grunge was the last blast of rock as a force at once central in popular culture yet also running counter to mainstream show biz values.

Reynolds would be the first to admit that nostalgia and popular music are inseparable--indeed, such retrospection is not only vital to the well-being of high-powered business execs, it usually works at a local level as well. It's also necessary to address the troubled relation to the past that defined gen-x culture: not simply a break from the past failures (whether they be associated with the music of babyboomers or their drawn-out depoliticization since the sixties), but a new sense of optimism and faith in the free market, dot-coms, and American expansion. I'm wondering, in other words, whether there's a certain kind of nostalgia that the nineties, in their burgeoning diversity (what Reynolds sees as a "crumbling rock monoculture") helped condition; how did particular cultural productions of the decade mediate the past, and why are such mediations now attracting a new audience? I suppose I'll just have to read Reynolds' book and see for myself.

valentine

On a day dedicated to last-minute gifts and forced romance, Siamese Dream, the 1994 album by my beloved Smashing Pumpkins, does the martyred saint (Valentine) a small degree of justice. Not only does it capture the band (well, its cheif songwriter, anyway) at their best; it's features all the best parts of the early nineties grunge aesthetic (musically, visually, etc.). Siamese Dream surges with antagonism and resentment (after all this is the early nineties), but, like Gish before it and Melancholy and the Infinite Sadness after it, Siamese Dream ends with a schmaltzy doozy of lovesong: "Luna," comes after almost sixty minutes of emotional turmoil, existential uncertainty, and full-on rage.

Immediately following the abrasive, irritating taunt of "Sweet Sweet," (which is, of course, anything but), "Luna" is the opposite: sincere, but certainly not innocent. I'll be the first to admit that Billy Corgan has produced a massive amount unlistenable mush, but "Luna" isn't as naive or deluded as it first comes across. The popular myth surrounding the songwriting and production of Siamese Dream emphasizes Corgan's depression, which is noticeably channelled here. On any other album, a song like this might be considered overly sentimental, but on Siamese Dream it arrives quite unexpectedly--it's appearance is almost graceful--what begins like a tragedy ends as a comedy.

saxophones are finally cool again

Although I regularly enjoy paging through Exclaim, Canada's monthly music rag, it's rare that I'll actually read anything in it. This month I had to make an exception and it paid off. The October issue features a substantial interview with Deerhunter frontman Bradford Cox. There are a number of particularly great moments and I can't resist posting a few of them here.

On the timeliness of his releases:

Every fall I want to put out a record because I like listening to records in the fall . . . I remember in high school and college, when records came out in the fall and I was really interested in checking them out. If someone in the band was having a baby or something [Halcyon Digest] would have been an Atlas Sound album, though I would have approached it a bit differently. The difference between Deerhunter and Atlas Sound has more to do with scheduling than anything else. There are songs that are just Atlas Sound songs and there are songs that are just Deerhunter songs, but Logos could have been a Deerhunter album. If I had to say this album was most like anything I'd say Weird Era Cont.

On the rising prominence of the saxophone in indie music:

I wanted that sax on there because I was listening to the Stones' Exile On Main Street reissue a lot . . . I began to see a pattern forming. Saxophones are becoming this thing. That's why we did it early. Next year everyone's gonna have a saxophone on their record because saxophones are just cool. This is gonna sound random and cutesy, but I've always had this fantasy of having a dog named Saxophone. Saxophone is one of my favourite words.

I can't help agreeing with Cox's point about the saxophone (all of TV on the Radio's albums are fine examples of this; and then, of course, there's Menomena), but I think it's growing popularity also has something to do with the fact that everyone's (finally!) re-embracing the early nineties. For me, this is a cause for celebration; indeed, it's not difficult to see why I'm such a fan of Deerhunter. The song Cox is referrencing (from Deerhunter's new album, Halcyon Digest), "Coronado," features a totally gratuitous sax solo that could have been lifted from just about any 90s sit-com (see below). Awesome.

 

what's up?

There's a lot of music to talk about right now, local and otherwise. Winnipeg's Jazz festival brought in indie-rock darlings Deerhoof on for a energetic and entertaining show on Monday (it was awesome!). Following the concert, we were all treated to a DJ set by ?uestlove, who rushed over to the Pyramid Cabaret after The Roots played the Pantages Theatre. It was a late night, but ?uestlove's set was worth staying for, sort of. It's the closest I've ever come to the "club" experience. Now I know for certain that clubbing is not for me.


Next week the Winnipeg Folk Festival gets underway, featuring Andrew Bird, The Dodos, Emmylou Harris, the Avett Brothers, Levon Helm, Etran Finitawa (who have the best promo pictures I've ever seen - above), Rock Plaza Central, Konono No 1, the Rural Alberta Advantage, and others.

Matador has just announced the line-up for its 21st birthday bash, and it looks better than most of the festival line-ups I've seen so far this year. Basically all my favourite indie bands from the 90s are playing it (with a few major exceptions): Pavement, Yo La Tengo, Cat Power, Guided by Voices, Spoon, Belle & Sebastian, Chavez, and Liz Phair (who, I'm sure, will be under strict supervision in case she makes the mistake of playing anything from the last 10 years). It's in October, by which time I'll be well into my MA program. And it's in Las Vegas. Probably for the best that I can't go. I wouldn't know what to do with myself and I'd probably blow a huge wad of cash on merch just out of sheer nostalgia for the late 90s. Just think of all the cool band t-shirts I never had access to, suddenly at my fingertips.

I should probably also mention that this Saturday I'll be joining a friend for an acoustic set of favourite rock/pop songs from the 90s. We've been talking about doing this for a long time and I'm pretty excited that it's going ahead, if for no other reason than that I can break out my XL band t-shirts that haven't gotten much use in the last few years. Here's a link to the event.

Secular Parables: An Early Review of Menomena's MINES (part 1)

Click here for a track-by-track review of Mines.

Menomena's third (technically fourth) album, Mines, is probably my most anticipated album of the year. It leaked last Thursday and I've set myself the task of reviewing it long before any official sentiment spreads. The band hails from Portland, Oregon and have been a fixture on my blog since I first heard Friend and Foe back in 2007. I loved that record.

A few general things we can say about the album as a whole. The drumming is absolutely bombastic and continues to be one of Menomena's greatest strengths; the lyrics are never straightforward or dull; each song is unapologetically grand, even with the simplest musical ingredients. All the songs on Mines are potentially explosive, even volatile; and it can make for an album that's difficult to navigate. The first time listening through, I simply didn't know how to maneuver through some of these tracks. And I'm still guessing.

Menomena records are always constructed very deliberately. With song composition, its become their trademark to treat each instrument as an ingredient appears and disappears from the mix continuously. Rarely do we get everything all at once; and, indeed, that's one reason I find Menomena so engaging. They know how to show restraint and they use it to their advantage. That said, each musical ingredient is recognizable and quite distinct. Rarely do the piano, the baritone saxophone, the drums, or the guitar and vocals get lost in the mix. What we're left with is a collection of songs that never settle down. This is more or less how Friend and Foe functioned; Mines only ups the ante.

During our first listen, my friends and I came up with a theory that this album constituted by parodies of alternative rock cliches from the 90s; it unfolds like some epic battle between artistic ingenuity and the most sentimental rock music. Another theory that quickly developed among the group was that this was essentially the best (and perhaps the most self-conscious) "praise and worship" album ever recorded. As with Friend and Foe, it's heavy on religious imagery, but Mines doesn't skimp on the sort of "inspiring" melodies common to most "praise and worship" songs. It's also got moments of gospel-style delivery and more than once employs the sort of transcendent chorus that bands like U2 are know for. Menomena effectively deconstruct all of this. The songs on Mines are, at times goofy and irreverent, but Menomena never flinches. I won't be surprised if this album doesn't get a very positive reception, but one thing is certain: this is music only Menomena could make; and it is surely an impressive feat. In fact may be the strangest (and most intriguing) rock album of the year.