Photograph by Dan Stack
August 28, 2010 – Though my day was spent eyeing Lieutenant Commander Worf and Chewbacca from afar, my night was yet again spent at the Horseshoe Tavern, this time to see Wye Oak, who captured my interest when I first heard their cover of the Kinks’ ‘Strangers’ from the AV Club’s Undercover series. Following that I discovered The Knot, an album that would have definitely made my 2009 best of list. Needless to say, I was excited. Female-fronted Toronto band the Caraways opened, providing a genre-hopping start to the evening. What began as a sort of alt-country vibe morphed into something completely different during the set. Still, what captured my eye the most was the drummer’s odd kit setup.
Following a brief interlude, Wye Oak took the stage. For the uninitiated, Wye Oak is a made up of Jenn Wassner and Andy Stack. While Wassner handles vocals and guitars, Stack is on drums AND keyboard bass. This multi-tasking makes them far more complex than your typical duo, and I have to applaud the lack of a backing track. You would think drumming one-handed would bring limitations, but Stack performs ably while Wassner thrashes about. Material was largely drawn from The Knot and this year’s EP My Neighbour/My Creator, along with a pair of songs from their upcoming album. Following Wassner’s plea for a Canadian husband (“I’m available!”), Wye Oak made their exit.
Though I was mostly there for Wye Oak, it was clear from the chants of “Lou!” who everyone was there to see. Not knowing much of Lou Barlow, but knowing that he was a member of Dinosaur Jr., Sebadoh, and the Folk Implosion, I felt a certain reverence towards him. As one of the more influential artists I’ve seen, it struck me as odd that he was manning his own merch table, kindly signing anything fans brought. Given his huge back catalogue, I had no idea what to expect from his setlist. I had already ruled out any Dinosaur Jr., but I wasn’t sure if there would be a focus on his recent release with the Minutemen. As soon as he reached the stage, Barlow outlined the plan for the night: an acoustic set by him, followed by an electric set joined by backing band the Minutemen, followed by another acoustic set incorporating his ukulele.
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Arcade Fire on Olympic Island in Toronto effectively closed out this summer concert season. Our first trip to the island saw Beach House, Band of Horses, Broken Social Scene, and Pavement serenade Torontonians as we rushed between shows at NXNE and Island Fest. A few weeks later and for roughly the same ticket price – barring a donation to Partners in Health – the Sadies, Janelle Monáe and Arcade Fire welcomed us. A torrent of whispers in line for the ferry argued the value of Win Butler and company, some chastising Arcade Fire for charging such exorbitant fees while others refuting that the Canadian faces of indie were worth each penny. I believe Arcade Fire had a deeper motivation than aggrandizing their sense of self-worth: to disseminate their latest record, The Suburbs. What better way than to fill an island with well-to-do cosmopolitans and charge a price we could all too easily afford. In terms of gathering a target audience to sing-along to the “emotional hopelessness of being a privileged young person in a developed country,” as Sabrina put it, the band hit the bulls eye. But if your heart is set on seeing Arcade Fire, whether you’re there for the message or the music, it matters little if they charge ten dollars or a hundred; when it comes down to it, the band knows how to put on a fine show.
Janelle Monáe served as a curious choice for an opener as it was hard to imagine any musician on Bad Boy Records opening for a group of Québécois baroque singers. The audience received Monáe’s mix of afro-punk and hip-hop enthusiastically as her beehive-like hairstyle bobbed in harmony with each strut and shimmy. As her set wrapped up and the sun dipped lower on the city skyline a sea of black and white balloons floated through the crowd and into their untimely demise at the hands of the “Balloon Guy,” who was determined to purge the island of inflatables. Arcade Fire’s intricate set rose from the rubbery remains with a life-size projection of twisting highway serving as a backdrop for an array of floodlights.
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If I wasn’t stranded on an island at the time, I would have made every effort to get to Wrongbar to catch Les Savy Fav’s NXNE performance. Of course, being on dry land wouldn’t have increased the odds that much, as the venue was filled instantly. Presumeably, the lucky few who got in were treated to at least a few tracks from Root for Ruin, Les Savy Fav’s latest album. While 2007’s excellent Let’s Stay Friends featured guests spots for everyone from Fred Armisen to Emily Haines, Root for Ruin remains an in-house affair. This back to basics approach lets the band members’ individual talents shine through.
To the uninitiated, Tim Harrington would appear to be a strange, balding, and bearded fat man. To everyone else, he’s one of the more engaging and eccentric frontmen in modern rock. While there is a notable visual component to his madness, his enthusiasm shines through on record, particularly on album standout ‘High and Unhinged’. While songs about gods from a forgotten age are less common here, Root for Ruin continues to deal with aging and altered paradigms, as on ‘Excess Energies’. This world-weary attitude recurs throughout the album.
Root for Ruin rocks. It’s not quite as exuberant or forceful as Let’s Stay Friends was, but it shows that Les Savy Fav has a softer side to their typically hard-edged post-punk leanings, and that they still like to party, even when a little bummed out.
Les Savy Fav – High and Unhinged
Les Savy Fav – Let’s Get Out of Here
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Photograph by Caleb Beyers
As the newest New Pornographer, Kathryn Calder faces a special hell of a challenge in dropping her solo debut, Are You My Mother?. It never was going to be easy to stand out among the sea of side project jewels that emerge with welcome regularity from the individual members of that West Coast indie pop institution. A.C. Newman’s The Slow Wonder and Neko Case’s Middle Cyclone, to pick a couple, have earned sales figures and critical fawning that set the bar in the stratosphere for any solo New Pornographer project, but especially so for Calder.
Hired by the New Pornographers to replace Case’s yowling vocals on tour when her exploding solo career often left her otherwise engaged, Calder missed out on some of the band’s most productive years in the first half of the 00s, though she does appear on each album since 2005’s Twin Cinema. What’s more, she’s Mr. Newman’s niece, and you couldn’t fault her for her being a little intimidated at the prospect of having her own project stacked up against those of her uncle and the indie Goddess Queen she was hired to understudy for — not to mention the catalogue of terminally hummable New Pornographer hits that has built up over the last decade largely without her.
It’s probably more fair to compare this project to her own, earlier work than that of her current supergroup mates — to ask how far she’s come and whether she can make it on her own and all those lovely questions. In this she succeeds to a reasonable degree. Are You My Mother? is possessive, intimate, warm and cold by turns. It measures up to the better work she’s done with New Pornographer label/tour mates Immaculate Machine. It offers hope that she’s not doomed to be “the girl in the New Pornographers who isn’t Neko Case”, at least not forever.
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Photograph by David Black
There’s something about the summer that makes me moody. For that reason, I’ve been listening to a lot of “deep” music lately, or at least music that attempts to be deep. Eventually, it gets tiresome to hear affected poets grasping at straws to make their longwinded similes function with musical backing. Sometimes, pop music is too complicated for its own good, or capabilities.
In contrast, Bethany Cosentino of Best Coast doesn’t write deep lyrics. She pens one-sided conversations about heartbreak, happiness, and laziness in straightforward American youth prose. A sample from ‘Bratty B’: “I wanna see you, but I know I can’t / ‘cause you’re not home, you’re never home / I can’t remember why you left and why you took back all your stuff.” No extended metaphors, no literary devices, no choruses with more than 20 words in total, no rhymes in this example, even. And that’s what makes it so great.
The feminist in me wants to deride the simplicity of the lyrics; surely, us females think about more complex topics than how boys make us unhappy sometimes and happy at others. Also, there is repetitive use of crazy/lazy and friend/end to rhyme. But on ‘Goodbye’, Cosentino sums up adolescent confusion and dependent love: “My highs are high / my lows are low / and I don’t know which way to go / I don’t love you / and I don’t hate you / I don’t know how I feel.” It may not be cleverly expressed, but her words are so blunt that they are relatable. Her simplistic words speak to the Twitter masses. Maybe that makes her the Mark Twain of Generation Y? That’s certainly taking it too far, but it just goes to show, lyricists: if you don’t have much to say, don’t try to make it flowery. Say it, then go smoke some pot and chill with your cat.
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