Cleanse Your Spirit: Bodies of Water's A Certain Feeling

I'm still kicking myself for not actually talking to the L.A. band Bodies of Water when I saw them open for Sons & Daughters in Toronto earlier this year. Instead, I hung about like a vagrant outside the venue, surreptitiously watching them duck in and out of their trailer and take photos of the gig poster. You see, I was embarrassingly early for the gig, and was literally the first and only audience member for at least twenty minutes after the doors opened. So, rather than skulk next to the door and slightly shivering, I should have attempted to engage Bodies of Water in some sort of conversation. In the end, I only spoke to them when I bought their debut album, Ears Will Pop & Eyes Will Blink, off them directly after the show. They seemed very sweet, but I being a dunderhead, will never truly know. At any rate, their second album, A Certain Feeling, is due out this coming Tuesday, and I'm counting myself very lucky that I got to see them live, and in fact, performing Gold, Tan, Peach and Grey from this album.

Bodies of Water fall somewhere between the power and cultishness of the Polyphonic Spree and Arcade Fire, but unlike those two bands, Bodies of Water only use four people to generate their massive sound and spine-tingling atmosphere. Of their opening slot for Sons & Daughters, I wrote:

For only four people, they create a choir of voices, filling the small venue with waves of beautiful sound. Their songs are long and meandering, switching time signatures several times before ending, but it never gets tedious; instead, you feel like you're accompanying them on a journey that no one has mapped out yet, but is bound to be filled with serendipity and wonder. Styles seamlessly moved from gospel to reggae to latin to operatic epic.

Of course, the recent departure of drummer/vocalist, Jessie Conklin, may shift things a bit for live performances and/or future recordings, but to fill a venue with such palpable emotion without the aid of matching robes or the waving of flags, was/is a grand achievement. A Certain Feeling is certainly on par with their debut with perhaps a slicker production, which I'm not one to find fault with.

The album begins with the magnificent Gold, Tan, Peach and Grey, which starts rather subtly with guitarist David Metcalf's tenuous, evangelical vocals, but when the rest join in for the "oh-oh-oh's," the song launches into a whole new level. And just when you think it can't get any more intensely beautiful, Meredith Metcalf, who also plays organ, sings a counter-melody over top of the "oh's," pushing her voice into a breathless, implosive force, and then the song shifts into a driving, chanting juggernaut. The following track, Under the Pines, which can also be streamed and downloaded from the band's MySpace, begins with a spindly organ line only to be joined by rather dramatic guitars and drums, and then a scratchy guitar line starts up (with an angularity akin to the riff from Franz Ferdinand's Take Me Out), making way for more choir-like strains from the entire band. The melding of Meredith and David's vocals creates a springboard for the syncopated drums and half-shouts that arise when the rest of the band's vocals comes in. They slow it down for the briefer Only You, which features Bjork-like vocals as Meredith plaintively sings, "I am trying to be near you." Water Here then begins with brass sounds and Kyle Gladden's bass, almost sounding like an orchestra tuning up, until a playful melody kicks in, see-sawing along with the band's voices, rallying like a well-tuned band of revolutionaries, and then the song changes speed as though it has a mind of its own, moving into a jazzier, funkier style as voices overlap and criss-cross each other in a lattice-work of sonic intricacy.

The second half of the album is just as commanding and meandering as the first. Keep Me On recalls the dramatic openings of songs like Gold, Tan, Peach and Grey, with quieter strums of guitar and light organ paired with their unique vocal ensemble, and has an eerie Old West feel, reminding me a bit of Nick Cave. Lines and phrases like "hold me on the narrow way," "in the grey grass" and "sting of the nettles" conjure up a difficult, but sublime journey, reminiscent of a hymn. For its first minute, Darling, Be Here is a more straight-ahead rock number, but as is expected with Bodies of Water, it wriggles out of those constraints into different, unexpected rhythms and instrumental combinations. With the theatrical flourishes, it feels like a mini-film-soundtrack contained in five minutes. Like Water Here, Even in a Cave starts with random, yet pleasing sounds like honks of clarinet and muted trumpet, and then Meredith comes in with a hushed voice, but through the fantastic serendipity of the song, it all ends with a festive, squiggly Latin style. If I Were a Bell makes several different stylistic choices before settling into that arcane wailing that they do best. The album closes with the two-minute The Mud Gapes Open, a folkier tune with a sense of slightly warmed earth parting for new life - a wonderful way to end the record.

There is something undeniably organic about Bodies of Water - in fact, they move like one natural body, but with the unpredictability and versatility of water. When you try to put your finger on their music, it rises and resurfaces somewhere else, all the while it pushes you in strange directions with a gentle, but insistent power, sometimes baptizing you with a wave of fervour. Their esoteric, pastoral lyrics add a further austere, magical quality to their work. I highly recommend both purchasing this latest effort and seeing them on their coming tour (I'm quite stewing over the fact I won't be anywhere near to the cities they're playing this time around) - it's bound to be a religious experience.

So as not to be emailed with notices from Secretly Canadian to take down the tracks not authorized for download (other blogs appear to have been told already), I've only included the legal MP3s provided by the label and then one track from Bodies of Water's debut album. It's more than likely that the label never would have found me and my humble little blog (it, like me, is as stealthy as a ninja), but stranger things have happened.

Bodies of Water Web site: http://www.bodiesofwater.net/
Bodies of Water MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/bodiesofwater


Gold, Tan, Peach and Grey - Bodies of Water

Under the Pines - Bodies of Water

Our Friends Appear Like the Dawn - Bodies of Water

Spend the Night: Zeigeist's The Jade Motel

Whether or not the Swedish electro band, Zeigeist, is actually a conspiracy concocted by The Knife as blogs such as Caffeine and Music and More Than Milk have proposed, doesn't really affect the fact that I highly enjoy Zeigeist's debut album The Jade Motel. Yes, I really like The Knife, too, but at this point, it doesn't matter to me whether the two acts are related, or, in fact, the same one. I'm more fussed about the missing "t" in their band name than the concrete identities behind the music. I don't want to get bogged down with technical terms either (electroclash, electropop, electro-whatever) - I just want to share my enthusiasm for a new record. The Jade Motel was apparently released in April of this year, but I only just came across it a couple of weeks ago. I should have just called this blog Better Late Than Never at the rate I review things, but as Vonnegut says, "So it goes."

Zeigeist, consisting of Princess, Per and Mattias, and citing the influences of Andy Warhol and David Lynch, straddles the likes of The Knife (last time mentioning them), Revl9n, Depeche Mode, and Ladytron with their crisp electro and dark, trashy underbelly. Their visuals are also rather stunning in a glam masquerade way - see their MySpace. Album opener, Humanitarianism, which also graces the second side of the Bunny single, is probably one of the less memorable tracks on the record for me, but it still hints at the brilliance of later vocals and rhythms. The second track, Tar Heart, is one of my favourites on the record - it blends unhinged, banshee vocals with precise beats, and though it very obviously borrows from Running Up That Hill, it still manages to sound fresh and rather eerie in places. The following track, Wrecked Metal, which is also the latest single, takes New Romantic synths and pairs them with fey, detached male vocals. After a brief interlude, the next song, Bunny, shimmies in, sounding like Depeche Mode's Just Can't Get Enough on speed, and improving on Gwen Stefani's What You Waiting For. Zeigeist's first single, Black Milk, pulses along in an upbeat way to accompany the contrast of lyrics like "We are the prophets of sorrow," and the dichotomy creates a dancefloor anthem.

Cuffs takes a much darker turn as the tones step down into the spiral stairwells of lower registers, whispering at violence while Pressurized Chamber uses breathy, smooth male vocals like Dave Gahan at his dreamiest. Fight With Shattered Mirrors begins in a style quite similar to the preening of acts like Dragonette and New Young Pony Club, but then scatters into different directions for the chorus like refracted strobe light, staccato and spinning. Final track, Dawn//Night uses a riff that sounds a bit like Gorillaz's Dirty Harry, but then whips it into a funkier, Justice-like track, adding dashes of disco falsetto.

Blending the art and beauty implied by "jade" with the clandestine sleaze of "motel," Zeigeist's debut is an electro feat of dancefloor desire and rendez-vous reverie.

Zeigeist's Web site: http://www.zeigeist.eu/

Tar Heart - Zeigeist

Black Milk - Zeigeist

Fight With Shattered Mirrors - Zeigeist

Will Robinson, I Never Had a Chance: The Sound of Arrows' Danger!

I've fallen in love with Sweden's The Sound of Arrows, composed of Oskar Gullstrand and Stefan Storm, based on the strength of their single Danger!, which falls somewhere between Peter, Bjorn and John and the bouncier, gypsy side of Patrick Wolf's The Magic Position. When I listened to the rest of the original material off their EP of the same name, they instantly became one of my new favourite bands.

The Intro for the EP is a brief, twinkling track with harp flourishes, and leads into the title track with which I am so enamoured. Its skipping intro reminds me of something wonderful that I can't put my finger, or ear on at the moment (maybe a twee version of Justin vs SMD's We Are Your Friends), and when the chorus riff kicks in, I go into some sort of sugar shock - like I got a hit of some particularly fantastic drug. The Mr. Pedro remix, which I'm also including for download, is a brilliant 80's synthpop take on it. The next track, A Very Sad Song, swirls through The Radio Dept-esque reverb and hovering synths while guitars come forward in the mix halfway through. It feels like a refreshing sea breeze carrying a single red balloon off into the stratosphere. Winding Roads is more subdued dreampop with a gentle piano line bolstered by bell chimes and electronic whizzes. Its layered, overlapping vocals are like cumulus clouds scudding across the summer sky. In fact, the whole EP is pop genius, and with all sky/cloud metaphors exhausted, it encompasses an irrepressible joy and freewheeling freedom.

You can stream some of the songs off the EP (basically everything but the remixes) at Last.fm and then purchase it for a mere six euros at Labrador. The Sound of Arrows aimed right for my heart and definitely hit their target.

The Sound of Arrows Web site: http://thesoundofarrows.com/

The Sound of Arrows MySpace: www.myspace.com/thesoundofarrows

Danger! - The Sound of Arrows

Danger! (Mr. Pedro Remix) - The Sound of Arrows

Everyday is Like Sunday, Except for Blue Monday and Ruby Tuesday, and...Well, Friday I'm in Love: Weekly Mix #25

I believe Bastille Day is tomorrow (or depending on when this actually gets posted, it could be today), so that gives me a fantastic excuse to post a mix of music by French artists. I chose an image that means a lot to me to accompany this post - Monet's Les Roses. But more about that slightly later.

In my innate tendency towards all things British, I have never really been one to embrace France and all things French easily. Odd, since I'm Canadian, and the French language, at the very least, is something you grow up with even if you don't live in Quebec. Sesame Street in Canada inserts French-Canadian characters, teaching you French words and numbers before you likely encounter French in elementary school (for me, French was compulsory from age six to age eleven, but I continued to take it all the way up until high school graduation - the unfortunate and embarrassing result is that I can read French pretty fluently, but am a complete failure at speaking and understanding spoken French). Of course Canadian French is still notably different from French French, which any French French person will remind you.

I mentioned my European backpacking trip a couple weeks ago, and on this trip it was inevitable that we would visit France. The friend I was travelling with was as passionate and excited about France as I was about the UK, Germany and Italy. She speaks French fluently, so I'm sure that's part of it. When we visited the small town of Sarlat-la-Canèda in the Perigord region, and subsequently hitch-hiked to the nearby castles on the opposite sides of the Dordogne (Château de Castelnaud and Château de Beynac, which constantly changed hands between English and French, if you're interested), we mockingly took sides, she on the French side, I on the English. There was no doubt that I found France and French history interesting, especially because I love a lot of French art and literature, but I was just more relaxed and happier in other countries. Rather than some romantic city of lights, I found Paris to be, through no fault of its own, too touristy, too crowded, and too stifling. However, the Musée Marmottan Monet, a rather small museum by most standards, was an oasis amidst the frantic souvenir hawking and freak heat of that particular summer.

If there is one museum or gallery you visit while in Paris, I would definitely recommend Marmottan. Unlike in the overwhelming Louvre, you can get incredibly close to the paintings, which are of course primarily Monet but also include other impressionists, and you don't feel like you're part of some indifferent herd pushing through just to say you saw something. I was in awe of the fact that I could actually examine Monet's brushstrokes, and built as an exhibition hall based on that of the "Grandes Décorations" in the Orangery at the Tuileries Gardens, the intimate space in which the paintings are displayed gave them a deserved air of calm. While the waterlilies, Japanese bridges, and the burning orange sun of Impression, Sunrise all deeply impressed me (no pun intended), I stood rooted to the spot in front of a lesser known, and probably unlikelier piece. Les Roses is a rather large canvas which features, as you can see, a branch of pink roses spilling across a blue sky background. As I stood beneath it, I felt like I was outdoors, inhaling the summery, soft fragnance of roses - Impressionism is supposed to give you just enough visual information for your eyes and brain to complete the picture, but this particular painting was a conduit for a utopian place I could only get to through my mind's eye. I filled in far more than the flowers. Though others will always praise Monet for his waterlilies, I will remember him for his roses.

Up until that backpacking trip, my outlook on French music was rather grim and my knowledge of French bands/artists was pretty patchy. And my friend's off-key, but constant singing of some Champs D'Élysée song throughout our entire time in France put me off even further. But as my musical tastes grew, they ended up encompassing a fair bit of music from French artists, not always in the French language, mind. I discovered the bittersweetness of Jacques Brel and the playfulness of Serge Gainsbourg along with the twee beauty of Peppermoon and Emilie Simon and the heady stratospheric sounds of Air, M83, and Indochine. And of course all those English-singing French artists like the relaxed, retro Phoenix, the bouncy, poppy Rhesus, and the New Wave Mary Goes Round. With one of my all-time favourite films being Amélie, Yann Tiersen's romantic instrumentals also worked their way into my playlists. And all of these find their way on this mix. Also, as part of a joke to myself over French musical stereotypes, I'm including the excellent Foux Du Fafa by Flight of the Conchords (I still snort when Jemaine comes in with "baguette").

Incidentally, we spent Bastille Day of 2003 in Sarlat. I'm going to call this mix Écoutez.

Game and Performance - Deux

Poney, Pt. 2 - Vitalic

Waters of Nazareth - Justice

One More Time - Daft Punk

Peach - Louis La Roché

Danceteria - Indochine

Couleurs - M83

Once Upon a Time - Air

One of These Days - Pix

Desert - Emilie Simon

Laisse-moi - Chantal Goya

Nos ballades - Peppermoon

La Valse des Vieux Os - Yann Tiersen

Je t'aime moi non plus - Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin

Voir un ami pleurer - Jacques Brel

Psyche - Nouvelle Vague

Mary's Garden - Mary Goes Round

No Directions - Rhesus

Alphabetical - Phoenix

Foux du Fafa - Flight of the Conchords

The Thirteenth From The Cure: Will It Be Lucky or Unlucky?

I've been a fan of The Cure for a fair portion of my life. My interest in them came via the better-known hits that I was exposed to in my teen years (Boys Don't Cry, Friday I'm in Love, etc). Of course, later I discovered The Cure that I absolutely love and admire - The Cure that produced the delicious moodiness of Seventeen Seconds, Faith, Pornography and Disintegration. I am by no means a Cure expert, but I do understand the stir and significance the return of Porl Thompson has caused, especially with the thirteenth studio album to release on September 13; I just seem to have lost track and/or interest in The Cure in recent years. I admit that I can be a bit of a sentimentalist with older bands/artists, usually loving the earlier stuff far more than the recent; whether this is my own peculiar quirk or based on some sort of inevitable running out of steam on the artists' part, I don't know. It would be best if it was just my problem. Anyhow, I was excited to hear earlier this year that The Cure was planning a thirteenth album with a plan to release singles monthly leading up to the album's release, but remembering the fact I had pretty much ignored Bloodflowers and their self-titled last album, I went back to listen to get a slightly less-biased opinion about newer material.

Having done this, I realize that Bloodflowers can be seen as a step in the right direction after the dip with Wild Mood Swings, but it still doesn't affect me in the same way their earlier albums did. Nevertheless, there are some notable tracks that I still liked, including The Loudest Sound, which features a reverby, dreamy pulse that reminds me of the internal sounds you hear when you rest your head on another's torso, and the lyrics are some of Smiths's better ones. The title track has some of that cosmic atmosphere of classics like Plainsong, and 39 has a rather nice guitar solo amongst the cacophonic symphony. As far as the self-titled 2004 album, I found less to be pleased with. Smith repeats "I can't find myself" over and over again at the beginning of the record, and the phrase seems apt in light of the rest of the album - I couldn't quite put my finger on what The Cure is anymore either. I also can't quite articulate what's missing for me. Maybe it's as though they're trying too hard with too many layers going on until the beautiful lines of simplicity disappeared. Maybe they're not as led by the bass as they used to be. Maybe I'm just being picky. Admittedly, the last song on the album, the rather epic The Promise, with its wavering guitars, is the saving grace of an otherwise rather directionless effort. Smith can oscillate between petulant whininess and truly passionate vocals, but in The Promise he thankfully uses the latter.

On to thoughts about the latest work. Thus far, Robert Smith and Co. have officially released the singles The Only One and Freakshow with Sleep When I'm Dead to follow tomorrow and then The Perfect Boy in August. So far, I've been pretty disappointed - it feels like The Cure still can't find their feet, uncertainly straddling the shimmery, more commercial pop of their mainstream heyday with the post-punk, darker aesthetic of earlier albums, and not really achieving either. While there have been some overlap in their more memorable pop songs (I still sometimes confuse Inbetween Days and Friday I'm in Love), The Only One feels like the mediocre, half-hearted sibling of Mint Car with just as sappy lyrics. Freakshow confuses me with its strange retro-60's-slinky-hand-clap rhythm - catchier and perhaps more memorable than The Only One, but it still doesn't sit right with me. Maybe because it sounds like a shoddier version of Close To Me b-side A Man Inside My Mouth. Sleep When I'm Dead is a more raucous affair with its screeching, swirling guitars, but this cacophonous spinning sounds like it could have been at home on the last album. The Perfect Boy is more poppier than rock-influenced, but pretty much non-descript. The b-sides thus far are also nothing to scream about - my favourite is probably Down Under, which is the flipside for Sleep When I'm Dead and which hearkens back to some of their breezier pop sensibilities. I don't want their music to become just as much a mortifying caricature as fright-wig Robert Smith is at this point. But rather than carefully building sonic atmospheres and soundscapes, The Cure just seem to be smearing more and more sound together, layering it just as heavily and unnecessarily as Smith has been with his make-up.

I miss the sheer majesty of Plainsong, which sounds like how you would imagine a supernova would sound in air rather than space and it still sends shivers through me. I miss the graceful simplicity of the rhythms and subtle melody in All Cats Are Grey. I miss the eerie voices and feedback over those incessant, paranoia-inducing drums in Pornography. I miss the genius of that basic but brilliant guitar line in A Forest. I even miss the superb, memorable pop of Inbetween Days. You would think four years between albums would be producing better effects than they have been for the last decade.

Will The Cure's thirteenth album be lucky or unlucky? At this point, all I can wish for is that these recent singles aren't the high points and that Robert Smith still has some winning cards up his sleeve. Or under his hair.

Sleep When I'm Dead (live) - The Cure

The Perfect Boy (live) - The Cure

Plainsong - The Cure

Everyday is Like Sunday, Except for Blue Monday and Ruby Tuesday and...Well, Friday I'm in Love: Weekly Mix #24

I was a strange child. Well, that only figures since I'm a strange adult. However, one of the strangest things about me as a child was my keen sense of nostalgia and self-reflection. My first memory of this was New Years Eve 1989 - I was seven, but I knew the decade was changing, and I felt a profound sense of loss about never being able to return to the 80's. Time marched on and no one could ever go back, and that did a number on me as a child. The next time I panicked was when I turned ten - this time, I was keenly aware of the fact I could never go back to a single digit age. If anything, my tenth birthday was more traumatizing than my thirteenth, sixteenth, eighteenth, and twentieth, and it likely prepared me for all these other "landmark" birthdays. Perhaps I had an overdramatic outlook on life, or an overdeveloped romanticism, or maybe I was just bonkers. The best way to explain my emotional state when these changes occurred, changes which didn't even register with regular kids, is that it felt like leaving the movie theatre after the end of a particularly amazing film or watching the last episode of a television series you enjoyed for a long time, knowing it had to end, but also knowing you could never encapsulate that moment again. To combat all of these feelings, I think I tried to arrest my development for as long as possible. I never looked forward to growing up like other children did. I never felt like adults had it better or had more freedom - it's like I knew that being a child was the best time of my life before I even left it behind. The last time I felt unequivocally happy and satisfied with life was when I was eleven years old.

Adolescence was still a relatively naive time for me, but at the same time, I couldn't capture the unbounded creativity and self-assurance of my childhood - I had written three novels by the time I was fourteen, but then I stopped writing creatively until I was in my first year of university, and even then, I found it rather difficult. I was caught in a weird dichotomy of naivete and intellectual maturity, and I swung between the two like a pendulum throughout my teenage years. I entered my most embarrassing period of music for a couple of years in high school, following my friends' penchant for diabolical, vapid pop music of the worst kind, but at the same time, I penned the following poem at age fifteen:

Generation X

Indecision, indifference,
A bleak yet volatile combination.
Standing on the brink of nothingness,
Knee-deep in aromatherapy and pop culture.
Numbing from the coldness of society
Moving to the extremities.
Intellect maturing beyond experience
Futile, but articulate.
Pressure to be perfectly imperfect
Perhaps even cynicism is parried by apathy
A confused, deviant future
Labelled Generation X.
A variable without a common denominator,
Nevertheless, a variable that equates
The future.
A category derived by psychoanalysis,
Making a vain attempt to conceptualize people
Terming them as gothic rebels with a cause;
Excuses made for them, telling them what the inkblots mean;
In actuality, they are raging against the stereotypes
Searching for hope in a frantic world;
Varying, a spectrum of integrity,
as much as 'x' suggests,
Desperately clutching the receiver
listening to the busy signal
From a world that has hung up on them.

Whew. I hadn't even heard of Douglas Coupland at this point in my life. Nor was I even a member of "Generation X" - I missed that by a whole generation. I won fourth prize from the Poetry Institute of Canada for this little piece of poetry (my guess is the ones who actually won monetary prizes may not have been so bleak). Sufficed to say, I haven't really written poetry since.

Throughout my teens, my preemptive need for nostalgia and bizarre fear of the loss of cultural artifacts manifested itself in my compulsive documentation via video and audio cassette. I still have over a hundred videotapes of all sorts of things (interviews, music videos, television shows, movies, advertisements, etc., and I recorded tons of material off the radio at the time - even the stuff I didn't particularly like - with the rather odd feeling that I may want or need to listen back to it in the future - for the record, I don't think it's worth my time or my ears at this point...if anything, these tapes are a concrete document of the bad mainstream music scene of the late 90's and evidence for anyone who wants me sectioned). And I have a feeling no one, including myself, will be interested in VHS copies of the short-lived TV series Teen Angel. Maybe I should have taken anthropology in university instead.

I am getting to a point somewhere here, and not just to conclude that I was a cracker as a child and teenager. I decided to make a mix of music that either celebrates or encapsulates that feeling of being young. From those simple chords of Baba O'Riley that always make my heart pump faster to the wild vindication I feel listening to Stay Beautiful, this mix will attempt to catch that romantic notion of youth, whether as a child or an adolescent. That feeling that your whole life is still ahead of you and you still have so much potential to explore. That feeling that living fast and dying young is a brilliant idea. That feeling that things could never be this good again. I'm going to call it I Don't Wanna Grow Up. And yes, I realize I didn't include Teenage Kicks, but that was because I already posted that song in a previous mix, and that also goes for Whipping Boy's When We Were Young.

Eanie Meanie - Jim Noir

Childhood Memories - British Sea Power

Pumpkin Soup - Patrick Wolf

Sixteen - The Indelicates

Pretty Young Thing - Blondfire

So Young - Suede

One More Lie In - The Delays

Time to Pretend - MGMT

Baba O'Riley - The Who

Teenage Lust - The Jesus and Mary Chain

Stay Beautiful - Manic Street Preachers

The Prayer - Bloc Party

Antmusic - Adam and the Ants

You Were Young - The Associates

Once and Never Again - The Long Blondes

Alright - Supergrass

You! Me! Dancing! - Los Campesinos!

Burn Baby Burn - Ash

Teenage Thunder - Sigue Sigue Sputnik

Rebel Yell - Billy Idol

MP3 Blogs vs. Music Blogs: Different Purposes?

My thesis has got me thinking a lot about music blogs' purpose lately. In my research, I stumbled across a music blog symposium, which included participants like Maura Johnston of Idolator, music journalist/critic Simon Reynolds, and music writer Carl Wilson. They discussed the differences between writing about music professionally and writing music blogs more informally. But one of the more interesting bits that may have a considerable effect on my thesis is the response to the fifth question: "Would you agree that the back and forth conversational aspect of the music blogosphere has died down somewhat in the last few years? Any theories as to why?" It was here that the distinction between MP3 blogs and music blogs comes out, a distinction that I originally didn't take much note of. I had started using the terms interchangeably, which I realize now that I shouldn't have done so glibly. Perhaps the inclusion of MP3s does a lot more to a music blog's purpose than I would have expected. What appears to emerge, is a rather firm division between the "old guard" music bloggers and the later crop of MP3 bloggers. Both seem to have their own communities and their own beliefs about what the purpose of a blog dealing with music should be, and it seems rather rare for them to cross paths and/or engage each other. Carl Wilson, who I would consider one of the "old guard," lists reasons as to why dialogue and dialectic have decreased on music blogs, and one of them is MP3 blogs:

MP3 blogs, which turned the music-blog scene into an acquisitive feeding frenzy which spares little time for reflection and contemplation. It’s a shame, as the earliest mp3 blogs such as Said the Gramophone and Fluxblog present an entirely different model, but few are the people who have followed in their model, compared to the here’s-the-latest-leak-with-200-words-of-hype model. The earlier, more criticism-oriented bloggers lost some focus and, more so, I think, have been turned off by all that.

I can see Wilson's point, but at the same time, does this difference between criticism-oriented, text-heavy music blogs and promotion-oriented MP3 blogs point to something deeper? A respect for the primacy of text versus an immediacy provided by non-textual samples? An elitism of bloggers who know more about music than more amateur efforts? Or is it the elitism of intellectuals, so to speak, over the more negative connotations of PR people? If we're all music fans, and writing music/MP3 blogs comes from a fannish impulse, can our purposes vary so much? I'm not sure, but I'm beginning to think there are differences in purpose, and this difference has a lot to do with whether MP3s are included or not.

The inclusion of MP3s does point to a conundrum: why would you post music up for people to sample if you don't like it? For one thing, it's wasting your time, and if you're a blogger who maintains a music blog as a hobby, wasting time on music you don't like seems silly. Secondly, why would a reader read your bad review of the music and then decide to give the music a try anyway? The second way MP3s are affecting bloggers' purposes is via the MP3 blog aggregators like The Hype Machine and Elbows, which function either completely or nearly completely because of MP3 links in each blogger's posts. The focus, especially on The Hype Machine, is definitely the MP3s over the text accompanying them - the tracks are the most prominent text on the home page of the aggregator, dwarfing the text around it. To be included, and thus to be more easily found by others (a concern of nearly all bloggers because as much as bloggers say they blog for themselves, they are writing in a public space, thus ostensibly seeking some sort of attention), a blogger has to include MP3s. This is one of the reasons I hadn't really stumbled across music blogs without MP3s in my earlier travels in cyberspace. In a way, aggregators force MP3s to become the attraction for the audience rather than the text first. This is not to say that people don't subscribe to MP3 blogs for what the blogger writes and his/her style because several of the MP3 blogs I've come across are worth reading for the calibre of writing alone; however, I also admit that I can flit from blog to blog on the basis of MP3 selection alone, often without reading the blurb accompanying the links.

I suppose the distinction between MP3 blogs and music blogs boils down to a difference in rhetorical approaches - with music blogs the readers are being persuaded about issues and arguments about music, whereas MP3 blogs are persuading readers to sample and purchase certain artists' music. I would say, though, that in both cases, the blogger him/herself also wants to persuade readers to visit his/her blog and validate him/her along with the blog itself.

Early in my research, I hypothesized that MP3 blogs are places where one can create music criticism/journalism with the immediacy of samples unavailable to those operating in print, but now I wonder if they are more often primarily promotional tools for both artists and the bloggers themselves. In the end, blogs vary so much that I can't state anything definitively or too generally. I have observed, however, that MP3s have seemed to increase the number of bloggers who post in a slapdash manner in order to be the first to post a particular track or to follow the frenzy over a particular artist, but perhaps the audiences for these types of blogs want quantity over quality in posts, so they can form their own opinion about the music posted rather than engage with lengthy textual opinions. They prefer their music in bites and bytes just like their regular consumption of other information.

Maura Johnston answered the aforementioned symposium question slightly more positively than Carl Wilson:

with the rise of the MP3 blog and the idea that a person doesn’t need to write about a record in order to communicate what it sounds like, the space hasn’t become just for critics–while there are some great writers running blogs that have MP3s and music samples on them, there’s also been a rise in blogs that are much more enthusiasm-driven and interested in sharing music directly, without any verbal clutter. There’s a definite divide between the two generations of music bloggers, with a few people (Matthew Perpetua of Fluxblog, Sean at Said The Gramophone) straddling it.

What is the impact of no "verbal clutter"? What would happen if MP3 blogs became more and more about posts with links to YouTube clips and a couple of free MP3s (The Music Slut comes to mind)? Do these things mean something on their own without words? This approach takes selection of reality quite literally, and could end up becoming a debate on orality and literacy. Are MP3 blogs more oral and music blogs more literate? Maybe so. After all, MP3 bloggers most closely remediate word-of-mouth and mixtapes, which belong within oral culture rather than literate culture. And if this is the case, do MP3 blogs foster a different sense of community and solidarity whereas music blogs encourage deeper individuality and value logical thought?

I can't help but notice that most of the music blogs without MP3s and the most criticism-oriented approaches are written by people who also write about music professionally. For these bloggers, blogging is an extension of their career, where they don't have to worry about editors and word counts; in contrast, for MP3 bloggers, I think blogging becomes more of an act of subversion and an expression of power within a market they don't have control over. And all this thinking has gotten me wondering what my purpose for this blog is. And whether I'm even fully aware of the purpose or could ever be fully aware.

So far, I think I've leaned towards the MP3 blog tendency to write about music I actually like and endorse, rather than criticize music and/or other people's opinions of it. I think this is only the third post to deal with music as an issue and argument to be explored, and I think I've only criticized music in a negative fashion four times in the six months I've been running this blog (a criticism of The Long Blondes' latest album, this year's Brit Awards, the Manics' cover of Umbrella, and the Tokyo Police Club gig I went to). For me, I think the issues mentioned earlier (time constraints and not feeling the need to post links to music I don't like) are the most obvious reasons. Then again, to be honest, I also post MP3s to gain some extra attention I likely wouldn't without them. My blog isn't on The Hype Machine, so I have no idea how being on it would affect traffic to my site, or whether that would even matter so much, especially if most traffic was to download the MP3s and move on. I quite value any comments I do get and any emails I've received from both artists and readers thus far.

The idealistic side of me, to some extent, has deliberately tried to post about bands who are either unsigned or independently produced because I know it's less likely they'll get promotion via more mainstream channels. I've also tried to maintain integrity in terms of what I post about - I don't post music just because I've been asked to (as guilty as I sometimes feel about ignoring requests). These sorts of things help me sleep at night. But there are times when I wonder if I should be posting more complex posts or deeper insights with a critical slant or not. Am I restricting myself and my personality by only posting positive things about music I like? I'm still unsure.

I've seemingly used this blog far more personally than I originally intended, for better or for worse - my relationship with music seems too deeply rooted in my personal life to extract it more objectively. I'm also one of those people who expresses him/herself much more effectively in writing than in speaking, so writing is important to me - I don't think I could ever be one of those blogs that just posts MP3s and YouTube clips. There's always that part of me that's been an attention-seeker, too - I identify with Andy Warhol, who once said he wanted to be famous and gain everyone's attention, but once he got their attention, he didn't know what to do with it. I seem to need attention while shunning the awkward interactions that ensue from said attention, and blogging fulfills these requirements quite nicely. Again, if I'm completely honest, I do want any readers (all four of you out there) to trust me and value my judgement and taste just as much as I want them to support the musical artists I'm promoting. I know my impact and influence is miniscule, but I guess it's my proactive way of battling the frustration over the music covered in the music press.

MP3-free music blogs like Blissblog, K-Punk, and Pop Life are intimidating to me because as music-crazy as I think I am, I'm definitely not in their league. I don't write about music for a living, and have always shied away from it because I've never been secure enough about my music knowledge, and I can't imagine going head-to-head with the people who write this seriously about music.

Has this gotten me any closer to an answer to my thesis? I couldn't say at this point. I have become more self-aware about my own purposes, mind, and that's a start.

Sense of Purpose - The Sound

The Reason Why - Ladytron

Take Me to an Owl Sanctuary: Hemme Fatale

I first heard about Welsh band Hemme Fatale via Fluxblog's brief post about them, and I immediately went to their MySpace page to check them out. Their rather clever name aside, Luke, Ellie and Jen produce some very fun and witty electro-pop. Their track Animal Lover, which includes the line "I know a girl who says/she wants to take me to an owl sanctuary/the second biggest in the country," made me think immediately of Alan Partridge and his Valentines Day trip to the owl sanctuary, and I'm big enough to admit that this fact swayed me as much as, if not more than, the music itself.

Fluxblog described them as influenced by The Human League, which I can hear, but they've got a looser style and an unhinged quality that comes with making music for kicks. For example, Animal Lover begins with a massive disco intro before going into grimier beats that have been popularized lately with groups like Justice. Baby Witch begins with a distorted retro 60's sound before settling into electropop featuring a duet of male and female voices that play off each other - there is a time about one minute into the song when the female half slips into that vocal riff from Islands in the Stream, but which bears most resemblance to the Pras and Mya's updated version in Ghetto Superstar. And Hag in a Black Leather Jacket shimmies to a Latin beat before moving into 80's synthpop and then back again. What truly stands out about Hemme Fatale is their sense of fun and humour, which reminds me of Robots in Disguise in places, and since there are times when I weary of bands taking themselves too seriously, Hemme Fatale provide the perfect antidote.

Their debut Silent Sleepover EP includes the following tracklisting as elaborated on by the group themselves:

"1. Peryglus Lucifer - a song about the darkest party this side of Austria.
2. Animal Lover - a song about the dirtiest girl this side of Merthyr.
3. Baby Witch - a song about the devil in your womb.
4. Hag in a Black Leather Jacket - a song about the despised."

My favourites are, of course, Animal Lover and Peryglus Lucifer, a song which features vocals from Aled Phillips from Kids in Glass Houses and grooves along to a funky beat and snatches of 80's girl group sounds. Also for your information, "peryglus" is Welsh for "dangerous," which indeed Lucifer is to most people. Unless maybe you're Aleister Crowley. I look forward to hearing how Hemme Fatale develop, and hopefully, there will soon be a full album release.


Hemme Fatale's MySpace: www.myspace.com/hemmefatale

Animal Lover - Hemme Fatale

Hag in a Black Leather Jacket - Hemme Fatale

Everyday is Like Sunday, Except for Blue Monday and Ruby Tuesday, and...Well, Friday I'm in Love: Weekly Mix #23

Of course this week's mix had to be one for my country's national holiday coming up this Tuesday. I seem to reflect most on Canada and being Canadian when I am away from home or have recently returned. Five years ago, when I went backpacking across Europe, as North American youth tend to do as some bourgeois rite of passage, the Canadian flag sewn to my backpack produced a rather awkward moment. While the very same embroidered patch had garnered both me and my travelling companion much gleeful recognition from fellow travelling Canadians and general camaraderie from European strangers, it also prompted an American girl to ask us why we wore it. We had been hanging out with her for a couple of days rather pleasurably in the Italian villages of Cinqueterre, and the question seemed to come out of nowhere, but was nonetheless very serious. Both my friend and I just stood there, completely unsure of how to proceed. We knew we didn't want to say outright that we didn't want to be mistaken for Americans even though we knew that was the truth and that that was what the girl was driving at. I don't quite recall how we wriggled out of it, but considering we're Canadians, we somehow managed to defuse the situation diplomatically like the peacemakers we are.

This incident illustrates something at the core of being Canadian, and that is negative definition, a Kenneth Burkean concept meaning we define ourselves by what we are not and against what we are not, in this case, namely, American. When asked to come up with what makes us Canadian or what defines Canada as a national identity, Canadians shrug their shoulders and say "We're not like the US." Despite the flawed logic to this response (especially considering the fact we are very much like Americans in a lot of ways), it points to an interesting and seemingly unique Canadian conundrum: we are a non-nation, a cipher. I remember the provincial English exam for Grade 11 asking us to write an essay on what Canadian national identity consists of. Probably because the school board didn't have an answer and really wanted to know. What country but Canada would ask such a question on a high school exam? Having written and passed that exam, I'm still unsure about Canadian national identity myself.

Being the rather sparsely populated but land leviathan that it is, Canada often struggles against its heavily populated and rather bolshy neighbour to the south, whether in terms of cultural production or economic strength. When we're not inundated with all things American, we are greatly reminded of our ties to Britain and its Commonwealth - we have a Governor-General, who is the Queen's representative in our federal government, and the Queen graces all of our coins. And I think all of these close, sometimes smothering, connections often force our very young country into some interesting issues, including one that has bearing on Canadian music.

Since I was a teenager and first listening to the radio, I noticed that Canadian artists were played at regular intervals, and that was when I first noticed the Canadian content requirement put in place by The Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC). This requirement is there to "protect" Canadian culture against a powerful influx from other nations' music. I'm not sure how I feel about this mandate or how I feel about radio in general, especially considering I listen to very little radio, and when I do, it's college radio. Does our music need protection? Do we need to pump our radio stations full of Canadian music even when it's not worth promoting just for the sake of it? For the most part, most of us Canadians probably don't really care.

Yeah, Canada, we stand on guard for thee, but only if we have to. From what I can tell, most Canadians, including myself, aren't particularly patriotic - you don't find a lot of maple leaf flags hanging outside houses, even on Canada Day. However, I like to think of Canada's seemingly lazy non-patriotism as a healthy apathy and as our saving grace; after all, patriotism leads to all sorts of mess, violent and otherwise. We carry on day to day in our multicultural mosaic surrounded by rather massive, unpopulated areas full of natural resources and bilingual food packages without really thinking about it. I read somewhere that the reason Canada has produced such prolific academic figures in the area of communications is because communication has always been one of our prime concerns in a country this large and this full of gaps.

At the same time that we are unpatriotic, we are often, humorously so, quick to "claim" the best celebrities any way that we can. For example, though Arcade Fire has members from both the US and Canada, we undoubtedly claimed them as Canadian, and I think several of us still want to claim Rufus Wainwright even though he technically wasn't born in Canada. If you're enormously talented and happened to live on Canadian soil for a few weeks, we'll count you as one of us.

My memories of Canadian music while growing up consisted primarily of Bryan Adams and that crop of '90's "alternative" bands like Our Lady Peace, Moist, The Tea Party, Econoline Crush and I Mother Earth - to be honest, I was more impressed with early Bryan Adams than I was by the latter. Also, from my high school years, I remember the pre-Gorillaz animated band Prozzäk (which despite their beating Damon Albarn to the punch, should best be forgotten, umlaut and all), the bubbly pop of Sky (as short-lived as Prozzäk), the one-hit wonder band Pluto (blink and you would have missed them), and the pop-punk of Treble Charger (who will likely forever be known as the band who discovered and promoted Sum 41 only to disappear completely under their protégé's shadow). All in all Canadian music was rather bleak to me when I was younger. In addition to this rather sad array, we had and still have our drivel just as much as any other country, including the aforementioned Sum 41, Nickelback, Avril Lavigne, Three Days Grace, Loverboy, Shania Twain, and the national disaster that is Celine Dion, but as this mix reveals, we also have a lot of music to be proud of. I may have come late to an appreciation of Canadian music, but better late than more clichéd phrases.

No Neil Young, Leonard Cohen, Gordon Lightfoot, or KD Lang on this mix - they are legends to some but not to me...at least not at this juncture of my life. There may very well be a large contingent from Montreal - it wasn't deliberate in the sense that I favour Quebec over other provinces for music, it just so happens that this one city has made much of my favourite music of late, and often within an incestuous group of musicians weaving in and out of each others' work. I also have artists from British Columbia, Alberta, Ontario, and of course from my home province of Manitoba. They range from electro acts to political punk acts to quirky indie to dreamy pop. For an honest, yet quirky, look at what truly makes Canadians Canadian, read Douglas Coupland's books Souvenir of Canada and Souvenir of Canada 2 and watch his documentary of the same name. Of course Coupland was technically born in Germany, but he's definitely Canadian to us. I'll call this mix Canadian Content. I don't think we have any reason to worry about CRTC regulations. Then again, we probably wouldn't worry anyway.

I Was a Pre-Teen McCarthyist - Propagandhi

Blood On Our Hands - Death From Above 1979

Monster Hospital - Metric

Black Flag (Juan Maclean Remix)- Duchess Says

Teacher Teacher - Dragonette

The Looks - MSTRKRFT

In the End It's Your Friends - Shout Out Out Out Out

Call Me Up - Chromeo

You're a Hologram - Hexes & Ohs

Dacha - Montag

Neighbourhood #4 (7 Kettles) - Arcade Fire

Heart - Stars

Falling Through Your Clothes - The New Pornographers

Lola Stars and Stripes - The Stills

Fine Young Cannibals - Wolf Parade

Our Retired Explorer (Dines With Michel Foucault in Paris, 1961) - The Weakerthans

Still Life - The Russian Futurists

Drifters - Patrick Watson

You and I Are a Gang of Losers - The Dears

Shampoo Suicide - Broken Social Scene

Present of Future End - The Most Serene Republic

Of Resurrected FOPP and the Importance of a Real Record Shop

I was looking at an issue of Uncut the other day, and when I got to the back cover, there was a full page ad for FOPP, the UK chain of record shops. There was a time when this wouldn't have attracted my attention in any particular way, but this time it did. It was a bit like seeing a ghost of a loved one. You see, I thought FOPP was still dead.

FOPP, a record store chain that had evolved from a Glaswegian one-man stall, shut down all of its 100+ stores last summer - I was, in fact, there when the stores mysteriously closed for "inventory" right before they closed for good. I had been purchasing CDs from their Cardiff, Bristol, and London locations right up until they shut down, completely unaware that as I left for home at the end of June, they were slated for execution. Apparently, FOPP's takeover of rival chain Music Zone put them into cashflow problems, forcing them to close. I was rather crushed at the time because despite the fact it was a chain store, FOPP came to mean a lot to me. FOPP allowed me to buy tons of albums from British artists for as low as $10 each, which is pretty magnificent when all of these albums would cost much more back in Canada. It was the type of store I could browse in for hours, and even when I had gone through all the music, I could then turn to the books and DVDs. It had a more independent vibe than shops like HMV and Virgin, and would often showcase in-store artist performances. Apparently, when FOPP shut down, the slimy white knight that came to the rescue was HMV. Now there are only eight FOPP stores throughout the UK and they're owned by one of the biggest music retailers. And so the story of music stores continues with the larger ones eating up smaller ones while still fighting for their lives in the age of digital music.

I will admit that I do like browsing in the British HMVs because they're often multi-level edifices with more of the music I like than any store in my hometown. I once said I could sniff out an HMV from miles away, and I don't even want to try to count how many I've visited up and down the UK. At the same time, they don't have the soul a real record shop should have - they feel like corporate shrines to music, bright, shiny, superficial, and more often than not, very overpriced. The HMVs in Canada, barring big city ones like the ones in Toronto, are like the shrivelled corpse versions of the British ones - they're usually one floor with one album per artist available in their racks. They make me hugely depressed. I prefer to spend my money in record shops that feel like proper record shops, including Selectadisc, independent music shops in Camden Town, and the beloved Spillers.

Established in 1894 and located on The Hays in Cardiff, Spillers is the oldest record shop in the world and feels like a true record shop, the kind every real music fan feels nostalgia for. The people who work there are obviously there because they're passionate about all sorts of music and want to tell people about it, and despite the tiny size of the place, it holds more quality music than an entire Virgin Megastore. The walls ooze authenticity with the numerous music/concert posters and jam-packed racks, which include the best selection of Welsh music you'll ever find. The people who shop there are the type who could spend half a day within this small darkened space, hunting for an obscure find that will potentially change their lives, and these people are the type whose lives will be changed by records over and over again. Of course like all fantastic record shops, Spillers was seriously threatened with closure a couple of years ago (of course because of further commercial development of the city centre, including a second phase of St. David's Mall), and for all I know, it may very well still be in danger. I signed a petition a couple years back (I think I also signed one to save The Electric Ballroom in Camden a long way back and more recently I signed one to rescue The Point, a Cardiff music venue, which just shows you how many decent places connected to music are consistently in need of saving), and I know there were several others pushing to save Spillers, including the Manic Street Preachers who used to shop there all the time in their youth.

Because the choices for music shops in my hometown have shrunk considerably, I've turned to online sources, especially for all the imports I inevitably buy. I realize that this kind of shopping is no replacement for a real record shopping experience, but I've been forced into it by the meagre selection in Winnipeg. Aside from Into the Music, which sells a lot of used music in both CD and vinyl, I don't have anywhere else I can go to really feel like I'm in some blissful music haven. Music shopping should be a dialogue - there should be passionate people present to engage you in music discussions and introduce you to new stuff you would never have heard of otherwise. Music shopping should be visceral - you should be able to try out new music in headphones before you buy it and you should be regularly surprised and impressed by the music playing in the store itself, prompting you to find out what it is. Music shopping should be tangible - I love the click-clack of flipping through racks of CDs and the excitement of lifting a vinyl LP out of the rack to survey its sleeve. Online shopping can never replace any of this.

In my opinion, when the music industry has been turned upside down and their pockets have been turned inside out, there will still be a place for independent record shops that exist purely because of the music. All the Tower Records and Sam the Record Mans can shut, along with HMVs and Virgin Megastores, as long as the real ones stay open and offer more than just a commodity, including a proper experience that befits the affective relationship people are meant to have with music.

While the old Web site URL http://www.fopp.co.uk/ still reads RIP FOPP, the relaunched FOPP resides at http://www.fopp.com/, promising a resurrection for loyal customers. Time will tell whether I'll ever be able to ignore the ghostly epitaph forever lurking in cyberspace like the whispers of black box messages in the Bermuda Triangle and accept the re-animated over the venerable corpse.


I Buy American Records - Saint Etienne

This is Capitalism - Snog

Three Quarters Full Or One Quarter Empty?: The New Pornographers at the Groove FM Jazz Festival

And so I returned to the Groove FM Jazz Festival and the Pantages Playhouse for the second show of the "indie package" - Canadian indie supergroup The New Pornographers. This was a make-up show for the Winnipeg gig they had to cancel earlier, and it was my first time seeing them live. Due to their supergroup nature, not all members are present at all shows, and unfortunately, at this one, both Neko Case and Dan Bejar were absent, and thus Kathryn Calder, AC Newman's niece, took over all of Case's vocals with delicate aplomb. The audience was definitely lively, often shouting out to the band, and they still put on an excellent show live despite the fact they were missing a quarter of their members, but at the same time, I didn't quite feel like I saw a complete show. I don't know if this was because a quarter of the band were missing and because they were vocalists, or because I'm not as huge a fan of the band as I am of others, or because the some of the ludicrous banter coming from the audience appeared to be making the band feel a bit awkward (continuous requests for Freebird were annoying me and no doubt annoying them as well).

Following a rather raucous and fun set from Winnipeg mod-popsters and Mint Records labelmates Novillero, who also managed to get the crowd dancing early, The New Pornographers took the stage led by Newman with his Challengers-emblazoned guitar, and launched into a set that included Challengers, Use It, All the Old Showstoppers, Unguided, Adventures in Solitude, Stacked Crooked, All the Things That Go to Make Heaven and Earth, Testament To Youth in Verse, and Twin Cinema. My personal highlights were hearing the bouncy, shuffling classic Mass Romantic played live, and singing and dancing along to Sing Me Spanish Techno - one of my favourites despite the fact it doesn't seem trendy to state as such. I was also impressed with the tender duet between Newman and Calder for Adventures in Solitude as both closed their eyes in rapt emotion. One point at which I really noted the fact members were absent was when I missed Bejar's vocals for Testament to Youth in Verse - the feel of the song seemed to shift from quirky to gentle and bland.

Newman attempted rather sarcastic banter with the audience (including a shot at Winnipeg's Burton Cummings - the audience's utter silence spoke volumes about the crowd's apathy for their "hometown hero"), and at one point a rather vocal older man, who kept screaming how much he loved the band, decided to yell "We still love you," prompting Newman to ask "Despite what?" in a bewildered tone.

Somehow the set still seemed too short and I was still missing key songs I wanted to hear like Myriad Harbour, Mutiny, I Promise You, and Falling Through Your Clothes. There were also some sound issues where the bass appeared to be overpowering the vocals, muddying the sound so much that I grew frustrated - I was thankful when one of the audience members piped up and told them to turn the bass down a bit, but it came too late in the show to really make too much of a difference.



The set proper concluded with a nearly endless cover of ELO's Don't Bring Me Down, which was fun and a crowd pleaser, but I think I would have preferred a more powerful original song as a closer. If anything, the cover might have worked better as an encore number, especially since they had a disappointingly short two-song encore, finishing with usual show ender The Slow Descent into Alcoholism. I was left with a strange feeling of incompletion and I still don't know whether I should look at the show as an above average gig for a regular group or a below average gig for a supergroup. I would really like to see The New Pornographers live again to get a better sense of how I feel about them, and hopefully, I'll get to see the full line-up next time.

Mass Romantic - The New Pornographers

Adventures in Solitude - The New Pornographers